I always like to do a “shakedown” trip before every bike tour. It’s a two-day ride with a night of camping in between, where the main goal is to “shake” all of our equipment to determine that it’s all ready to withstand the rigors of the road. In the past, an important secondary goal (or maybe it was actually the primary?) was to help get my body up to shape with the back-to-back long rides. 

But this year, we had been so proactive with our fitness training (doing 50+ mile rides every weekend for the whole summer, including a couple back-to-back 67 mile loaded(!) rides in July, and even hitting Rett’s first 100-mile “century” ride) that it truly was the shaking that was the primary goal of this trip. Especially given all the last-minute additions and changes I’d made to our bikes! 

When I lived way out in the suburbs, it was fairly easy to ride from my front door and reach a campground within a day’s ride. That’s much more difficult from our new home in Chicago’s Norwood Park, but luckily the Cook County Forest Preserve had added campgrounds at several of its locations in the previous year. So I would finally have a chance to cash in Rett’s awesome birthday gift to me from the last year: a ride to 3 Floyd’s Brewpub in Munster, Indiana, and an overnight at Shabbona Woods campground. 

The entirely-urban route from the far northwest side of Chicago out the far southeast side isn’t much like real bike touring, but like I said, the riding wasn’t the important part here. We went through a lot of south side neighborhoods that have seen a big spike in violence this year, but on a sunny Saturday afternoon nothing felt particularly sketchy. We rode past a whole lot of shiny, brand-new, and completely-unused Divvy bike-share stations though. 

But then near the Indiana border we hit a trail network that brought us to some nature, including a race with a bounding deer, and a causeway crossing the middle of Wolf Lake. 

Our first visit to 3 Floyd’s was a good one, where the food might have been even better than the beer. And Rett declared their Drunk Monk hefeweizen perhaps the best beer she’d ever had. There were several other groups of cyclists there who made the ride from the city, but all of them were taking the train home. 

We, on the other hand, had about 7 miles to backtrack towards our campground. And as we walked out, one of the most beautiful sunsets we’d ever seen told us we would be doing most of our ride in the dark. Luckily I’d installed Rett’s fancy new  generator light (though not yet my own), and she led the way down the Burnham Greenway trail with light enough for both of us. It was actually a lot of fun, and another element shaken down. 

We turned into the campground and as I expected, there was no longer anyone in the entrance booth, so we just rode over to a campsite with a plan to then see if we could find someone to talk to. But before we could even move, a bright flashlight came charging toward us, and the woman behind it said “What are you doing? You can’t stay here”. She claimed that we needed to have made a reservation, and that reservations needed to be made 48 hours in advance, and we would have to leave. In the black of night. On bicycles. From a nearly-empty campground! Since I had never heard of a reservation-required campground in all my years of camping, I figured we’d be able to turn her around, but she was quite adamant: we had to leave. 

Luckily, her manager came over and straightened her out. It turns out that if *no one* has reserved a site for the night they don’t staff the campground, and then obviously no walk-ups are allowed. This worker had mistakenly extrapolated that to “reservations are required for everyone”. So we were able to pay our $35(!) to spend the night. Thanks to those other campers who had reserved! Otherwise it was a nice campground with brand new facilities, and amazingly quiet and uncrowded for a pre-Labor Day Saturday night. 

The ride home the next morning was uneventful except for the extraordinary number of asshole idiot drivers. We’re ready for this thing! 

Shortly after our first bike tour together, Rett came up with the broad concept of a “Chowder Tour” that would take us down the New England coast. When it came time to attempt to implement such a thing for this year, I wondered if there was a way to combine it with our yearly visit to her dad’s in upstate New York. It would be a nice bit of symmetry to continue on from his house, which was the final destination of our first bike tour. We could take ourselves and our bikes on the Amtrak train from Chicago to Syracuse (20 miles from her dad’s in Skaneateles), then ride to the coast at Acadia National Park in Maine, and finally head south along the Atlantic Ocean to Boston, where we would put our bikes on another Amtrak to ride home on their own while we hop on an airplane. 

The obvious route to Acadia would take us northeast from the Finger Lakes region, into the Adirondack Mountains of New York, then over the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It would be lots of climbing up and down, but presumably would be great for forested views and camping, something Rett wanted to do a lot more of on this trip for my sake. 

Well, there were surprisingly fewer park and forest camping opportunities along that route than I expected, and one day I noticed that Google Maps (using bicycle directions) showed an alternate route to Maine that shot way up north into Canada, adding some distance but essentially going around many of the mountains. At first that just seemed silly, but it slowly started to make more sense. There are a lot of nice waterfront parks along the St. Lawrence River, we could visit the bike-friendly city of Montreal, get a taste of a “foreign” country in French-speaking Eastern Townships of Quebec, and still get enough forested mountains over the Appalachian range into Maine. Then we’ll still get about a week of the original “Chowder Tour” concept down the coast. 

So that set it. The plan is around 900 total miles, 17 days of riding, a day off in Montreal, two or three days off in Acadia, with around a 55-mile average riding day. Especially when considering the hills, it’s a slight distance/effort upgrade from our previous tour, but hopefully will still be easier for Rett given her greatly-improved fitness and experience compared to her first go-around.

We’re both really excited to start!