One week! One week! And our great adventure begins.  A couple more days at work trying to button everything up and we can finally go. We are both very excited!

Last night, our friends and kids put together a very nice party for us.  We all gather at our favorite brewery for beers and food and great conversations about what is ahead for us.  They had this awesome poster made for us that they all signed.  We are blessed to have such great friends!

Such a nice gift! Thank you all!

We’ve been busy trying to think of all the things we still have to do before we leave.  I made a checklist and we try to check off a few items every day but it seems for each item we check off, we add one more.  Following our shakedown experience from the last weekend, David thinks we should shed about 10 pounds off the bike.  The question is, do we just relocate 10 pounds to the trailer or are we able to live without that 10 pounds of stuff and still have a comfortable trip?  This Sunday, we plan to repack everything and we may have tough decisions to make.

On the route planning front, the North Cascade Highway opened this week which is great news for us.  WSDOT had originally predicted a very late opening this year (mid-June) which was going to force us to use a different way over the Cascades.  It would have been less safe and less scenic than SR20 so we pretty excited about the prospect of being able to follow our original plan.  After realizing we'll be leaving on Memorial Day weekend, I had decided to make campground and motel reservations last month in the hope we would be using that route.  So, now we’re good.  We know which route we're taking and have places to camp/stay along the way.  Here's a preview of what the first weekend looks like.  

I think there's a mountain range before Winthrop! 

Speaking of the route, I thought I’d share our planned itinerary here for people who are interested to see more details.  Also, if you have suggestions of things we should see in or around these towns, please comment below or message us.