Day 29, Thursday, July 14

Got to Steve and Heidi’s house at around 11am today and after a little socializing and a bit of e-mail. I crashed out in their spare bed room. I was utterly exhausted, but feeling very good about my decision to replan my trip. The painful realization I’ve come to is that I’m over packed and am going to have to lose a fair amount of weight out of the trailer. I'm convinced that the excessive weight is why I burned out my clutch. About the only way to lose as much weight as I need is to ship my mountain bike and all related tools and gear back home. That's a heart breaker of a decision since I’d initially planned to get in a lot of riding on this trip. However I’ve not had the chance to use the bike yet and having it with me is making packing the trailer a real nuisance. (My battle tank of a high school grammar teacher would be rolling over in her grave seeing me start that sentence with "however"!) I’ll be disappointed to send it home but it’ll sure ease the load on the drive train of my motorcycle. I DEFINITELY don’t want to replace another clutch on this trip.