Yesterday I biked more than “the book” suggests, including one of the bigger two or three climbs on the tour. Today, I worked a full day and barely touched my bike.

I’m twice as tired today as I was this time yesterday. May take a bit to process that!

Over the course of the week a variety of things came across my mobile desk (my iPhone mount on the handlebars). Anything I could address on water breaks or lunch breaks I handled, the rest got shunted off to Evernote in a To do file. I’ve found Evernote to be an essential companion on the trip for staying organized, whether it’s keeping my AirBnB renters in order, tasks for web edits aligned, or just staying on top of my tour itinerary. Highly recommended.

Because there was a backlog, plus two major projects, I had a full day. I was able to use LogMeIn to port my laptop in Portland to my iPad screen. Instead of lugging around a heavy laptop (not to mention risking it to theft or damage) I had a slower version of the best of both worlds. The iPad battery life is outrageously good, and with speedy wifi at the campground, I was about 90% efficient on most tasks, and 60% efficient on complicated tasks (setting up an overly fussy ecourse plus producing a podcast “deaf” – I did it all by looking at the wav forms… Not recommended!).

I found today more frustrating than the first one, mainly because it was long, but also because the consequence of my work choice meant bidding adieu to the first group of riders I became attached to. As they were preparing to attack the not-insignificant climb out of Crescent City, I was dying to join them. Still, I stuck to my guns and worked a more-than-full day. Working on tour requires more structure than I would typically like, but as I have found, life is full of compromises and choices. Working on tour means a longer tour… So be it!

More on my interactions with “the three amigos” from Mexico and the others over on an uncommonly silly blog.