Erik Pelttari's Page

The tour is over, we biked well our last day, our longest day. It was anywhere from 140 miles to 153 miles depending on who made wrong turns. It was a long, hard day of biking and we were tired at the end but I'll tell you the truth, the last thirty miles through Delaware to the coast were the best miles of the entire tour. I'm not entirely sure how it happened but somehow thirteen of us managed to group into our own little peleton for that last thirty miles, we were only missing two riders and… Continue

Yesterday as I was riding the 98 miles from Brownfield to Snyder across the hot Texas plains, I got this song by Caedmon's Call stuck in my head. It's called Share the Well and the line I was repeating over and over to myself (when I'm biking I'll often got one thought in my mind and it'll just stay stuck there for hours sometimes, it does help the time pass, biking can be boring occasionally) as I was saying, the line is, "Share the well, share with your brother, share the well my friend" It se… Continue

Tonight we are in Carrizozo, NM after a relatively short day of biking, it was only seventy-eight miles today but that was shorter than each of our last three days. Our adventures and sights have been many in the last couple of days. One of our riders is recovering from a severe allergic reaction to something; no one seems to know what he is allergic to, not even the doctors at the hospital in Socorro where he spent about seven hours over the weekend. Another rider took a spill today and cracked… Continue

I want to write about this day because it was a day that was extremely difficult but in the end very rewarding and well worth the effort. It's like the message of the book of Hebrews, endure until the end. So let me start the story. We woke up about 5 am and started biking around 8. We starting to learn how to use that time in the morning so that it doesn't take us three hours to get going. That meant we were leaving during rush hour traffic in hilly, and that day, wet San Diego. There were a co… Continue

We just got back from our last training ride, the tour starts tomorrow! We started out the morning with a couple sessions about bike safety and using hand signals and then set out. The church we are staying at is a couple miles from the ocean so we rode down a path next to a drainage canal until we caught our first glimpse of the Pacific. This is my first time in California and I've been amazed to see so many of these things out here are real. Like Lakers' fans...we watched game 4 of the finals… Continue