"Planning" is an alternate spelling for "Down Every Rabbit Hole"

Other than trivial pursuits, there is often a chasm between What and How.  That's definitely the case with a cross-country bike trip.

At this point, Susan intervenes to remind me that when she rode across in 1986, she did no planning that couldn't be managed on AAA state maps.

Let's review the opening bid:  Pacific to Atlantic.  No camping.  (In my world, wilderness camping is a hotel without a minibar.)  Six hours riding/day, at 12 mph.  Avoid interstates where practical.

That still conspicuously lacks specifics, like start and end points somewhat more precise than oceans.  

I let U-Haul decide.

Okay, that is, without risk of exaggeration, counterintuitive.  Stick with me here.  Two of the major challenges are getting bikes and gear to the start point, and back from the end.  I will not appreciate sarcastic suggestions that we ride them.  

Astoria, Oregon, has a U-Haul operation, 10 miles from the Pacific.  As does Portsmouth, NH, 15 miles from the Atlantic.  One way 10' box truck rental from here to Astoria, and back from Portsmouth.

Connect the dots, and planning sorted.  

Oh, heck no.  We are just entering the rabbit hole.

The upside to eschewing camping for hotels and B&B's is no camping.  The downside is no camping, because it offers a lot more flexibility as to places to stop.  For those who haven't spent time west of the Mississippi, the Western US is often nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles.  

Once upon a time, when the panicdemic was starting to recede, we drove from Wheeling to Boise.  Day 3 was supposed to be Council Bluffs to Ogden, 13 hours of Interstate plodding.  Got to a likely looking place in Ogden, only to learn that there were no hotels to be had in the entire Salt Lake City metroplex.  Those suffocating restrictions had started to ease, and every traveling team for every sport was converging on places where the Panic Setting had been dialed back from eleven.  The next town with available hotels was Burley, ID, two hours away.  That was bad enough news driving; disastrous on a bike.

This whole process really enables futzers.

As it turns out, one can spend eons with Google Maps looking for places to stay.  And just as much time with a route planner fiddling to go by places to stay.  And abusing Street View to see what the roads look like.  And watching Youtube vijaos taken by truckers and motorcyclists.  And more hours making reservations, many of which aren't refundable, all the while wondering how many days it would take before reality blew this whole thing up in our faces.  But mostly my face.

Here is the result.

The cyan Points of Interest (POIs) are lodging locations.  Brown Picnic tables are at ten-day intervals — except towards the end; I got tired of adjusting them.  The Beer Mug icon is where we will be pestering a squadron buddy from back in the day. We have reservations for the first 30 days, through Miller, SD.  After that, I placed POIs at approximately 75 mile intervals at places where lodging is available.  

  

The vertical scale is very distorted.  When viewing the entire route, it is something like 1700:1 — the entire route is 3500 miles, while the highest elevation is less than two miles.  Our biggest climb is on June 6:  5500' over 17.5 miles, 6500' average altitude, peaking at 9500'.  That's the super spiky thing at 1160 miles in.

No matter how young and fit I ever mighta was — for me that would have been unpossible without 500 kWh stuffed into the downtube.

Having established the route, I then broke it down into daily segments for the first 32 days and entered them into Garmin's navigation app, for export to our GPS navigator.  Backed up by those same route segments exported to our iPhones to use in RideWithGPS.

Here is our White Whale.

If we abandon, it won't be due to lack of planning.