Looking back...

So the total trip ended up being 4456 miles by my cycling computer, and in 56 days, gives an average of right at 80 miles a day. I don't know the total climbing exactly, but another blog of the same route said they measured it somewhere around 120,000 feet of climbing over the trip. We amazingly, only had one day where it rained all day. Other than that day, we only had a few isolated storms that lasted about an hour or less. We really lucked out weather wise.

Superlatives:
- Out of everyone that we saw, we had the lightest load/least amount of gear. I think this was a huge contributor to the fun factor of the riding.
- Out of everyone that we saw, we had the fastest daily average. We may not have ridden as many miles each day as some, but we rode faster.
- Our fastest day: Breckenridge to Pueblo, CO. 140 miles at 20.5 mph average.
- Our longest day: White Hall to Yorktown, VA. 207 miles at 18.4 mph average.
- Our slowest day: Lexington to White Hall, VA. 66 miles at about 13.5 mph average.

Things I would have done differently:
- Mountain bike shoes with spd pedals instead of the road shoes and pedals I had.
- 28 width continental gatorskin tires instead of the 25's. I can't complain about the tires themselves though. With one rotation, they made it across with no problem, but the a little bit wider tire might have been nice in a few situations.
- Running triple front chainrings instead of the compact double I had. The gearing range was completely adequate, but it would have been nice to have a few more gears to choose from in the middle. Also, in some cases, I was jumping back and forth between the big and small chainring where a middle chainring on a triple would have been adequate.
- Next time I will run a 36 spoke rear wheel. I wish I had shown a little more concern for my rear wheel before starting...and maybe avoided some of the headache in West Yellowstone.

Valuable Tidbits:
- The multifuel stove capable of running auto gasoline was awesome. We never had to worry about finding fuel and it only cost about $0.35 to fill up.
- The 35 degree down bag was perfectly adequate and packed super small.
- Taking only the tent poles and rainfly saved a ton of weight and room and never let us down in the torrential downpours we had. The bugs weren't an issue either if you pitch it after its completely dark.

I'm sure there are things that I am forgetting, so post up a comment if you have a question about anything. The trip was really awesome and I can't say anything bad about it at all. I would recommend it to anyone.