We made it with a few bumps...

The first 48 hours have been a little tense but still awesome. When we landed we found our bike boxes with no harm, but no totes. In the totes we had all of our camping gear, biking gear, bear boxes, personal clothes and hygiene items. We were in contact with the airport 4-5 times daily and they finally arrived yesterday, 48 hours after we landed.  In the meantime we got to hang out in downtown Juneau, meet some cool people at the hostel, saw the amazing Mendenhall Glacier, had wonderful 75 degree sunny weather, and found a couple who graciously opened their house to us. The airlines even put us up in a hotel for a night. We were so excited to get our gear, that we put all of our layers on and road in the drizzle out to Auke Bay. We took the ferry today to Haines to begin our biking journey. We saw many whales breaching during the ferry ride and came to the most beautiful small town ever! We are excited to finally get on the road, even though we already rode 45 miles around towns and getting to the ferry. The weather outlook is positive with a lot of sun!!

Preparation... 2014

As we pack for our third trip back to Alaska, we are excited and maybe over confident. It is crazy how confident and relaxed we are. We are going to do on the bike training this year, so we will see how that goes. We are excited to adventure out into new areas of Alaska (like Juneau). And we promised each other that we are going to write a Tour de Alaska book this year! Sign up to receive our blog updates! See you on the road.

We made it home

We have been home for around two weeks now and working on adjusting to "regular" life. The world seems to move very fast, there are people everywhere and the heat is untolerable. We both had altitude headaches but we feel like we are in great shape: Chels went to cross country camp and ran more miles than she ever before and Jacob exausted himself on some half-century mountain bike rides. It felt good to be back in our home, we spent a day in the garden and in the shop: Chels reaped vegetables from the garden which we ate with eggs from our chickens and Jacob built a wine/magazine rack. It is great to be back with family and freinds; playing volleyball with our freinds, watching the Olympics opening ceremonies with the Millers and traveling to Nebraska to see the Yoders.

The trip seems like it occured in another lifetime, it is a memory, and a fond one. The trip went so fast and we meet many awesome people along the way. It was a trip of a lifetime. We love that we spent 6 weeks with no tv, music, and with limited phone calls and internet. We carried everything that we needed on our bikes and let our bodies do the work. Life is simple and easy, and the real challenge is to extend everything that we learned into our "regular" lives.

We are working on our Alaska Bike Touring book- we will keep you posted on its progress

We ended up riding 1353 miles
We were out for 45 days
We took 3 rest days
We saw 17 bears, 18 moose, a lynx, many bald eagles, dall sheep, and caribou
We saw Mt McKinley 3 times in the park

Check out our pictures:

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