before the trip began

Note: I usually write a post every day but only send out the link to the first post. If you want to see subsequent posts, you need to fool around a little with the website.

One way to do it is to change the URL in the address bar to the next day (e.g., "Day 2").

Another way to do it is to use the search function (use the magnifying glass).

Or you can go to the archive and choose September 2026 or October 2026 and go from there. You may see a link that says "More Posts" at the bottom of the page. That will show you more posts too.

Good luck and thanks for reading!

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Since 2012, Mike Reagan and I have planned and gone on bike trips over the summer, usually to European destinations. Others who have joined us have been Marty Canavan, Vince Giardina, and Stu Koman. Walter Putter has been a regular for the past five or more years, and we have reduced costs by rooming together.

I have enjoyed each and every trip. Most of the trips have been to Mediterranean countries, so they doubled as warm weather vacations as well as biking. I was hoping we could try other parts of the world in the future, so Mike and Walter agreed to make Japan our destination for 2026.

Unfortunately, our preferred travel group, VBT did not have a trip to Japan in their catalog when we were doing our planning in 2025, so we chose to go with a new company, Great Explorations, a Canadian Company. Backroads, a tour group we had used before, had a trip to Japan, but it was really expensive, so we are hoping for the best with Great Explorations.

One of the reasons we like VBT is because they take care of everything: from meeting us when we get off the plane to taking us back to the airport, and everything in between. On top of that, they are typically the least expensive tour group with no compromises. (Ironically, they now have a trip to Japan.)

As a result, we had to do some travel agent work to complement the Great Explorations part of the trip. We enlisted the help of Japan Highlights to fill in the gaps. It has required a little more legwork on our part, but we are cautiously optimistic things will go smoothly.

One interesting twist brought about by choosing Japan as our destination is that summer is not the preferred time for travel. Although Japan is about the same latitude as North America, summers are very hot, so bike tour groups recommend traveling either during the spring or the fall. Spring is out because it is cherry blossom season and Japan is mobbed. So this year we traveled in October, right after the ArtRage fund-raising ride, rather than a June date. That has thrown us off a little since by September we are already starting to plan for the next year's trip.

This is probably the end of this post. I don't have pictures yet, so I am inserting another one just to keep things interesting. This is from the trip Theresa and I took to Quebec earlier this summer to ride on the P'tit Train du Nord (https://www.laurentides.com/en/member/le-ptit-train-du-nord/). It was like going to France without the plane trip!