Category Archives: Pre-departure

Rumor has it that Goat managed to get all his gear together and make his flight. I know that he wasn’t even able to get his frame until this morning. Just a few hours before he got on a plane in San Francisco.

It has proven extremely difficult fitting everything into boxes. The Xtracycle and bike do not fit well in such close quarters. As if it were a Rubik’s Cube, after rearranging the bike pieces enough, it managed to fit.

Unfortunately, I decided to weigh my luggage and discovered the depressing reality that I will have at least 50 pounds of food/gear, on top of a bike that will weigh about the same.It is now 2 AM and I’m pretending to be able to finish preparing for this trip.

I am hoping Sean is able to get everything together smoothly. I look forward to flying from Seattle to Fairbanks with him.

An odd arrangements of flights we have. After Sean and I arrive in Fairbanks, I fly down to Anchorage and he flies up to Barrow, and then all three of us will hopefully converge in Prudhoe Bay.

Wish us luck and look for future updates.

my new xtracycle arrived yesterday!!!

incredibly fast

they sent new mounting hardware too, and a kick stand which is sweet

l’m not going to set it up until l get the final version of my frame from Spencer, and my fork arrives from the nether-regions of ebay and the interweb

for now l am riding the old one, l welded it back together (did a pretty good job too) and added gussets at the failure point

my plan for it at this point is to set up with a custom lumber rack / chainsaw holder for my friend Tom’s off-the-grid cabin/commune/sustanble organic subsistence farm

it would be too selfish to just box it up as a spare
here is a picture of it all shiny and new, and a picture of the broken one and my repair

     Life has been an exciting digital smorgasbord. Endless lines of html code that I ultimately do not understand. My muscles have shriveled up as I sit on the computer in a coma-like state moving the mouse millimeters at a time and typing on the keyboard with ever-increasing frequency. When we are not preparing this website, we’ve been busy fixing up our bikes. Hundreds of dollars later we have some semblence of an adventure-mobile and two problems.

    1: The Shimano XT front skewer exploded before we even got to ride the bike. After a few moments of sadness and disbelief, we learned that the skewer had been voluntarily recalled by Shimano. Very good to discover this prior to finding ourselves in the artic tundra of Alaska, hundreds of miles from any legitimate replacement skewer. And so replacements are on their way.

     2: Goat’s xtracycle decided to crack in half. We noticed this as we were eagerly gearing up his prototype frame that was personally delivered by the builder. We are putting an insane amount of trust in these extendabikes and it is disheartening to not see them through the rosy colored glasses we’d like to. A flawed piece of equipment. Thankfully xtracycle has amazing customer service and has already sent us a replacement. Though, I can’t say that necessarily eases my fear of future failures when we are not just a quick, convenient telephone call away from a replacement.

    Other than that, we have been attempting to gather together our gear. It seems we’ve already spent way too much money on our bikes and are really going to have to scrounge to get appropriate attire/etc. for this epic journey.