Today is the day I shipped my bike and gear to the ride start. Why ship everything? Because during my initial planning, I didn’t think through the consequences of chaining this trip after another trip. No use paying double airline baggage fees…

That said, Amtrak Express is the best kept secret for shipping a bike. Of course, you have to use a destination train station which has this as a service. It’s only $49, but best of all, very little disassembly is required – just remove the pedals and the handlebars. Oh, and if you’re tall like me, then you have to lower the seat too, but that’s no big deal. But, best of all, the box is designed so that you roll the bike in from the side, then tape both ends shut! The box measures 70″ x 41″ x 8.5″ – plenty big for most bikes. Even my large touring bike with its superlong wheelbase and with fenders fit within the 70″ length.

Amtrak Express can ship packages too, but their pricing is geared towards larger shipments. So I took my 25 pound box to FedEx, it will be shipped to a FedEx location where I can pick it up upon my arrival.

This will make for an interesting first day of the trip: fly to the airport, rail to the train station, retrieve the bike, and ride over to FedEx to get the box.

And this short post does double duty: a quick test of using my iPhone and Bluetooth keyboard to write a blog post without a computer. (Though I will have to edit the post later to sneak in a photo of the iPhone/keyboard setup.) Good thing I did a test from home, otherwise I would have never found out that I need to check the “tweet automatically when content is generated by other plugins or third party applications via XML-RPC” box in order to automatically tweet from the iPhone WordPress app!

Finally, I found an Eye-Fi wireless SD card on Ebay yesterday. That will allow me to get photos from my digital camera onto my iPhone, so I can leave the phone turned off all day, yet get good quality photos in the blog posts at night. Hopefully I get it in the mail before the trip.