Weekly Newsletter: April 21st-27th, 2025

This week, Keith tested out some new Tour Divide equipment, we enjoyed a mid-week date night, and we supported a local fire department. 🚒 🥞

Check out our new posts and videos 🆕 🎥 📝

Part 8: Camino Highlights: More Favorite Moments

Keith and Lindsey have many favorite memories from the Camino de Santiago. Here are a few fun moments that haven’t been included in previous posts.

Keith and LindseyLindsey Huster

Setting up Keith's new tent ⛺🛌

A few weeks ago, Keith ordered a new Durston X-Mid 1 tent to replace his nearly 8 year old Six Moon Designs Skyscape Scout tent. This week, he finally got a chance to put it together and set it up for the first time.

The tent was amazingly simple to set up. It also has an added bonus that it can be completely set up without exposing the internal tent to the outside elements (e.g. rain). This will be very important when Keith has to set up or take down his tent in the pouring rain. Keeping the internal tent dry will make his nights way more comfortable!

Mid-week date night 🥪 🍩

For date night this week, we headed to an old favorite sandwich shop of ours, Paul's Place in Pleasant Grove, UT. This restaurant is located in the shopping center behind our old townhome community. We used to walk there for lunch/dinner on occasion before we moved to Orem, UT.

Lindsey ordered the Italian sub and Keith ordered his favorite, the Spicy Frenchie (French dip). We both ordered a side of their famous Sidewinder potatoes. 😋 The sandwiches were delicious as always and it was so much fun to revisit this old favorite.

For dessert, we headed next door to the Macey's grocery store for some delicious donuts. We took the donuts home but they didn't last long. The donuts were a nice treat to cap off the night!

Keith's midweek training rides 😅 🚵‍♂️

Keith completed two strong training rides this week...

The first was an intervals/power session to work on his max and sustained power. Keith doesn't do much "structured training" as he typically focuses on steady, Zone 2 training for endurance. During this first ride, Keith completed several short hill climb efforts followed by a sustained, 4-mile climbing effort up the South Fork road climb in Provo Canyon. This nearly 50-mile (80.5 kilometer) route took it out of Keith so he needed a couple of days for recovery. 😅

Keith's second training ride of the week was focused on testing out his full cockpit setup including all of his navigation, electronics, and camera equipment. Keith also loaded his front fork cages with two 1.5 liter water bottles to simulate a heavy water carry section of the Tour Divide. The weather played a crucial role during this test as it threw in strong headwind and crosswind scenarios. This was perfect to test Keith's ability to maintain control with the heavy load.

Firefighter pancake breakfast 🚒 🥞

On Saturday, we attended the annual North Fork Firefighters Pancake Breakfast at Sundance Mountain Resort. This annual event offers up a delicious pancake breakfast that supports a local fire department.

This was also a great opportunity for us to see the progress being made on the construction of the new hotel and other various updates being made at the resort.

Of course, we couldn't leave without visiting the snack bar for some take-home desserts. Lindsey grabbed a few of her favorite suckers as well as a "mountain bun." Keith ordered a massive, and delicious, Sundance sugar cookie!

Cold soaking practice 🫙🍜

For his upcoming Tour Divide attempt, Keith has decided to forgo his camp stove kit in favor of a simpler, lighter-weight approach to meal prep; cold soaking. If you aren't familiar with the term, this means using cold/room temperature water to rehydrate meals such as oatmeal, ramen noodles, instant rice, etc.

Keith has always taken a stove kit on his prior backpacking trips so he needed to get a sense for what cold soaking was like before fully committing to it. So, one night this week, Keith "cooked" his own dinner by cold soaking a ramen packet. The entire process took right at 30 minutes to fully rehydrate the ramen noodles. After which, Keith added two packets of tuna fish to make a hearty meal. Keith was pleasantly surprised with the simplicity, taste, and ease of cold soaking.

His plan for the Tour Divide race is to prep his cold soak meals about 30-40 minutes before he plans to eat them. This way, he can allow the meals to soak while he continues riding and covering much-needed mileage. Then, he can stop prior to his planned campsite to eat his meal. This way, he doesn't have to mix eating and camping, which is a major concern while in grizzly bear country. 🐻

Finalizing the bikepacking list ✅ 📓

Since Keith didn't take on a long training ride this weekend, he decided to use that spare time to focus on finalizing his packing list. Keith had been using a Google Sheet to track everything but that approach was getting overly complicated and would be difficult to eventually share. So, Keith migrated his packing list over to the lighterpack.com site.

This free website is used by numerous backpackers and thru-hikers to define, manage, scrutinize, and compare their packing lists with others. Recent updates to the site now allow the flexibility for Keith to add all of the additional bikepacking specific items that the site previously didn't support. Keith isn't quite ready to share out his packing list yet but we have provided a sneak peek at his current totals so far.

Upcoming posts and videos 👷‍ 👷‍♀️️

Lindsey is continuing her work on the post series from our three-week adventure along the Camino De Santiago, Portuguese Route! Those posts are being published as she has time. We also have several prior trips that we haven't yet shared, so be sure to subscribe to our blog if you haven't done so already.

We hope that you are enjoying our newsletters. Spring is officially here and summer is just around the corner! Do you have any summer vacation plans coming up? Let us know in the comments section below.👇 💬