Last July, I bought myself an electric bike to get about on, so I wouldn't have to catch buses anymore. I named her Florence and you can see pictures of her here, courtesy of her creator. I've been riding her to work and back ever since - it's seven miles each way and gently uphill in the morning, but that doesn't matter when your steel friend is doing all the work. We did that seven miles in about forty minutes.
I don't recall exactly when the idea hit me, but as soon as it did, I knew it for what it was. It was The Next Big Thing, like my year in Canada had been. I'm going to go to the US Midwest and retrace the journeys of Laura Ingalls Wilder on an electric bike, visiting all the historic sites along the way. It's going to be a few thousand miles, and it's going to take me a few months to do it all.
I got into Little House on the Prairie through the show. I caught it a couple of times on Channel 4 on days when I was home from school sick, back in the nineties. The first I ever saw of it was a snippet that I now recognise as being from The Wolves in season four. I liked the look of that girl in the treehouse in her no-nonsense dark green dress and pigtails; she looked like exactly the kind of girl I would want for a best friend. But it looked like a pretty old show, not very fast-paced, and when I found a much-loved cartoon on another channel I flicked over. Probably several months later, I caught the latter half of the episode where little "Kerry" (to my English ears) fell down the well, and I was glued to the screen for a solid half hour, but I didn't realise the show was a series - I assumed the part I'd seen before with Laura in the treehouse must have been near the beginning of "the movie".
Ten years ago, season one came out on DVD in the UK. I was an adult by then, and I spotted it in HMV, recognised the characters from "that cool movie I'd seen once" and gave it a google. I realised it had been a TV show all along, and I found out the show was loosely based on a series of children's books written by Laura herself about her childhood in the 1800s. I'd enjoyed my history A-level and this idea of the personal historical narrative of a young girl from days gone by really got my attention. I bought season one, watched it through in a week, and requested a complete box set of the books from my parents for Christmas. I devoured them all in less than a month. I've re-read them several times since, and continued to buy the DVDs up to season five. (There were nine seasons all told, but in my opinion the show jumped the shark after season four and I couldn't bring myself to keep going after season six, which I watched on YouTube back in the day when you still could.)
When I noticed IMDb being a thing in 2008 or so, I got onto the Little House message boards and started comparing thoughts and opinions with other fans. (Shout out to bill3 and danagolightly! This here piemakergirl remembers you both fondly :3) Some of the other fans were very knowledgeable and I learned a lot. It turned out that some of the early storylines in the show, ones that I assumed were complete fiction, were actually based on real events of the Ingalls family's life that Laura hadn't included in her books. That was when I started googling to find out about the real Laura. I wanted to know how much had been left out of her novels, and how much of the content she had fictionalised. I wanted to know the real story.
I found out Laura had first written an autobiography of her childhood as a single volume for adults called Pioneer Girl, which she had kept completely faithful to the truth as she remembered it, but the manuscript had been rejected by publishers. She then reworked the story of her childhood into the now famous fictionalised series for children. I discovered that a microfilm copy of her original Pioneer Girl manuscript resided at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa, and I emailed them to ask if it was possible to get some kind of copy sent to me (I was willing to pay), but nobody replied.
Last summer, I found out about the Pioneer Girl project and became unreasonably excited. My pre-ordered copy of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography arrived just before Christmas, but I'd already started planning my trip long before then.
I'm not sure quite when this passing interest exploded into a full-blown obsession, but apparently it has happened.
So I figured, I'm going to need to prepare for this. I can't just jet over to the States and jump on a bike and start zooming around in the middle of the Midwestern nowhere, with no available support network, on the assumption that everything will work out fine. I need to set a time scale for building up to this, and start training - not even so much in terms of physical endurance (I mean, see "electric bike", right) but more in terms of knowing that I've thought of everything I need in terms of food and water and clothes and storage space, or in terms of bike repair skills, or of places to stay. I need to be confident I have everything covered before I actually go.
I need to do a series of increasingly challenging trial runs.
I'm setting the big trip for the summer of 2017. That gives me two years to make ready and to save up for what it will cost me, and it's also the year of Laura Ingalls Wilder's 150th birthday, which feels appropriate. Some of the historical sites might have special celebrations going on that year, and it would be excellent to get to see them.
So next summer in 2016, I'm going to do as long a cycle trip as I can manage within my holiday allowance for work, on this side of the Atlantic, to really prepare myself. It'll be two or three weeks, and I'll cycle to either Scotland or Germany, I haven't decided yet.
This year, I have two shorter trips planned. Towards the end of the summer, I'm going to cycle from my home city of Bristol up to a friend's house in Yorkshire. I reckon it will take me about five days, cycling by day and couchsurfing or hostelling by night. And for my very first trip, as a low-risk starter project in case there's any kind of problem I've not forseen, I'm going to stay close to home. I'm going to cycle around the Westcountry for four days, from Bristol to Melksham to Salisbury to Yeovil and back to Bristol again. It'll be 32-42 miles per day, and I'm setting off in about two hours.
In preparation, I took my battery off my bike for Lent. I've been cycling my fourteen mile return commute under actual legpower for the past six weeks, and although it was horrendous at first, my thighs are like twin rocks now. I am ready for this. The battery goes back on today, on low power only because it's a long trip, and it's going to be about 50/50 battery power and thigh power. I think I can I think I can I think I can.
This is what this blog is about. I'll be writing about my daily adventures in the evenings, when I've reached my destination for the night and plugged my phone into a power supply. I have googlemaps in my pocket, I've baked hardtack for the journey and I'm ready to roll.
Catch you in the evening!
I'm not sure quite when this passing interest exploded into a full-blown obsession, but apparently it has happened.
So I figured, I'm going to need to prepare for this. I can't just jet over to the States and jump on a bike and start zooming around in the middle of the Midwestern nowhere, with no available support network, on the assumption that everything will work out fine. I need to set a time scale for building up to this, and start training - not even so much in terms of physical endurance (I mean, see "electric bike", right) but more in terms of knowing that I've thought of everything I need in terms of food and water and clothes and storage space, or in terms of bike repair skills, or of places to stay. I need to be confident I have everything covered before I actually go.
I need to do a series of increasingly challenging trial runs.
I'm setting the big trip for the summer of 2017. That gives me two years to make ready and to save up for what it will cost me, and it's also the year of Laura Ingalls Wilder's 150th birthday, which feels appropriate. Some of the historical sites might have special celebrations going on that year, and it would be excellent to get to see them.
So next summer in 2016, I'm going to do as long a cycle trip as I can manage within my holiday allowance for work, on this side of the Atlantic, to really prepare myself. It'll be two or three weeks, and I'll cycle to either Scotland or Germany, I haven't decided yet.
This year, I have two shorter trips planned. Towards the end of the summer, I'm going to cycle from my home city of Bristol up to a friend's house in Yorkshire. I reckon it will take me about five days, cycling by day and couchsurfing or hostelling by night. And for my very first trip, as a low-risk starter project in case there's any kind of problem I've not forseen, I'm going to stay close to home. I'm going to cycle around the Westcountry for four days, from Bristol to Melksham to Salisbury to Yeovil and back to Bristol again. It'll be 32-42 miles per day, and I'm setting off in about two hours.
In preparation, I took my battery off my bike for Lent. I've been cycling my fourteen mile return commute under actual legpower for the past six weeks, and although it was horrendous at first, my thighs are like twin rocks now. I am ready for this. The battery goes back on today, on low power only because it's a long trip, and it's going to be about 50/50 battery power and thigh power. I think I can I think I can I think I can.
This is what this blog is about. I'll be writing about my daily adventures in the evenings, when I've reached my destination for the night and plugged my phone into a power supply. I have googlemaps in my pocket, I've baked hardtack for the journey and I'm ready to roll.
Catch you in the evening!
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