After about six months of biking across a good chunk of the country my partner and I are taking two months off in Dallas. This wasn’t part of our original plan, but plans are meant to be broken. As we used to say about mission plans in the Army, “The enemy gets a vote”. In our situation the “enemy” is weather, the holiday season, the environment, and our own mental and physical power.
After taking everything into consideration it made sense for us to stay in one place for a few months and ride out the holiday season, and luckily our dear friends have offered to let us stay in their spare bedroom during this time. This should give us an opportunity to get some work done to earn some money, travel to see our families for the holidays, and just mentally relax from life on the road. It’ll be really nice to be able to cook healthy meals and change up the exercise routine.
Though, the exercise routine is probably my biggest concern. It is super easy for me to get fat and lazy when exercise isn’t a necessary part of my life. I do plan on using P90X while here, which has been successful for me in the past. I had recently plateaued with my fitness from cycling and had implemented some more work outs into my day, but I think a real change of pace is needed. I’ll still get some cardio but I won’t be in the bike saddle for 4-6 hours a day anymore, though I will occasionally hit up the bike trail near the house which is 26 miles round trip (I think).
I’m really excited about the opportunity to cook. Our diets are healthy enough but they kind of lack variety. You can only do so much with “cooking” while biking without a stove or the ability to really keep things cold. We are able to stay vegan pretty easy and we get all the vitamins, minerals, and calories we need, but the meals are basically the same each day. Being in an actual home for a while will let us cook more and experiment and face some fun challenges. My friend has celiac disease so we will be cooking vegan and gluten-free. It’ll be a blast.
Anyway, we are excited to explore Dallas for a bit and change up our life. The plan now is to leave in January and head down to Houston and Austin before heading east. After that we are biking up the east coast in the spring and summer of 2016… but who knows? Maybe life will change our plans again and put us on a new adventure.
Wandering Oak 
I am always really curious about how/what people eat. What was your food routine while on the road? We follow a grain, legume & dairy-free diet and am always looking for new ideas. Hope you’ll post about your successful recipes! Perhaps a new “My Drunk Kitchen starring Peter Neiger” is in order? (Have you seen those? Love them)
🙂 I have seen those, they are hilarious.
My basic diet while on the road was this but I also snacked on unflavored almonds all day:
– Breakfast (7am) – Oatmeal, fruit, and coffee
– First Lunch (10am) – Two wraps with hummus, greens, onions, tomatoes, and faux meat (usually some type of tofurky)
– Second Lunch (2pm) – One wrap with peanut butter and honey, and a piece of fruit
– Dinner (5pm) – Some sort of canned good like lentil soup, chili beans, veggie soup, and rice.
– Late snack (7pm) – A poptart or energy bar
My caloric intake was about 3,500-4,000 kcals on the bike ride but I wasn’t gaining any weight because of how active I was. I also wasn’t losing any weight, which is fine. I don’t mind my current weight.
Now that we are stopped we will do a lot more cooking. The options are kind of endless but we generally use the cookbook Isa Does It or something similar. I am also going to try and alter the meal plans from the Blue Zones Project. If you aren’t familiar, the Blue Zones Project looked into areas of the world where people live abnormally long and healthy lives to find any commonalities. They ended up finding a nine lifestyle similarities, which included a plant based diet. We basically just try to eat fresh, unprocessed plants as much as possible.