According to Katherine: Day 46 Recap

It was a picture perfect rest day! We woke up at 6:15 and had coffee in bed until 8:00. Marge walked on the beach while I showered and dressed.

Four of us walked about a mile down the island to a restaurant at the golf club for breakfast. I had an omelet and grits. They were Alabama good!

We walked back and cleaned our bikes. I almost enjoyed it, but I used more rubber gloves than most nurses use doing a sterile dressing change! I spent some time on the bed writing cards and then put on my helmet and shoes and cycled to the post office to mail them. Does everyone know on April 18 the day the post card rate went up 1 cent?

Wading in the Gulf of Mexico. We started out in the Pacific Ocean. We've ridden along the Rio Grande, taken a ferry across the Mississippi, cycled to the Gulf of Mexico, and will soon be putting our feet and the front wheel of our bikes in the Atlantic Ocean. I can scarcely take in the wonder of it all.

When I returned, we visited for awhile with some of the other cyclists and then strolled down the road at 5:00 for a salad and a cup of really good gumbo. When we got back, some of our friends were gathered in the condo. They thought ice cream from last night's birthday celebration sounded good. We each had a small bowl of some kind of tasty brickle with a cup of coffee.

The sun set on our perfect rest day in Alabama. Tomorrow we enter Florida.

We did one final load of wash, wrote some more cards, went out on the beach at 7:10 to see a breathtaking sunset, strolled on the beach, repacked our suitcases after laying out our clothes, said goodnight to the full moon from our porch, and crawled into bed, rested and rejuvenated. Tomorrow we're off to Pensacola, FL. That means we're coming ever closer to the end of this magnificent adventure.

10 days to go.

Dr. Jeter Day 46 on Polyvore.com

According to Katherine: Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

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It's practically headline-worthy: "Women Packing Less than 50 Pounds for Two Months." Yes it’s true. No over-packing going on here!

Preparing for my trek across the country required a lot of time and preparation. 50 pounds between two bags marks the weight limit of items to bring for the duration of the tour. I’d slowly removing items from my bag, but it’s difficult. The more I removed, the more I had to do to make up for the lost items. I'd already removed the hair dryer, brush and comb. This means my next few haircuts had been getting shorter and shorter to maintain more easily. 

Vacuum-sealed bags help pack more clothing at less weight. This includes my Easter outfit, although it won’t be as flashy as the Southern ladies -- and no, no Easter bonnet.

The tour requires two pairs of shoes: bike shoes and regular everyday shoes. Bike wear must be planned out carefully in order to prepare for any type of weather conditions, specifically rain. A shower cap will prevent wet hair – I don’t want to be cold! Dish-washing gloves are recommended for dry hands on a rainy day, but I didn't experiment with that; I think I would feel a little weird sporting some bright yellow rubber gloves. I will substitute newspaper bags for expensive shoe covers, which are placed between two pairs of socks, so your feet don’t get wet. As I said, I don’t want to be cold!

My husband calls me and my roommate the “bib sisters,” because we make sure to pin a handkerchief to our shirts for blowing noses or wiping sweat away.  Recently, we ordered matching skorts – pretty soon we’ll be the “skort sisters”!

Each of these items serves an essential purpose to make the ride cross country a little less bumpy.