Shenandoah Trip, Spring 2009

This week, Roxanne and I will be loading up a change of clothes, books to read, and some snacks and heading off to Shenandoah, Iowa for a weekend getaway vacation.

"Shenandoah," you say? "What's in Shenandoah?"


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Well, my friend, it's not what makes us go to Shenandoah, but how we get there that makes this vacation so anticipated.

Roxanne and I will be loading up this stuff and transporting it, and us, by bicycle down the famous Wabash Trace, which runs out of Council Bluffs, Iowa, south, almost all the way to Missouri. We'll stay a couple of nights, and then pedal back to Omaha.

It's roughly 20 miles from our house to the Wabash Trace trailhead, and then another 45 miles to Shenandoah. Certainly this isn't a long ride by RAGBRAI or BRAN standards, but this will be our first cycling tour, and longest single trip mileage yet. I guess this would be a metric century ride.

We both ride hybrid bikes, with fenders and a rack, so we should be comfortable on the ride porting all of our stuff. A hotel will shelter us as we relax and rest in Iowa's Garden City. It doesn't look like there's a lot to do from a tourist perspective, but in a way, that's the point; to relax and enjoy a couple of days in a small town, surrounded by a couple of days of cycling.

We're not taking computers, but I may still blog a bit using my phone and will be taking lots of pictures with a new pocket camera. Look for more updates on the Ask Directions? blog. I may also post on Redd Shift if there's something that draws my roving cyclist's eye.