The impetus of this trip was the opening of the Capital to Capital Trail (now called the Virginia Capital Trail) connecting Richmond, VA (or RVA to the locals) with the state's first capital in Jamestown, VA. The trail opened in September 2015 after many years of planning and was instantly successful! Since it opened, over 173,000 cyclists have been counted using the trail, making it very popular and speaking to the demand for quality bike infrastructure! See this Richmond Times-Dispatch article for more reading.

One point of interest to me is the fact that VDOT (the Virginia Department of Transportation) is responsible for trail maintenance. That is not one of their typical duties, as most multi-use trails and paths are locally owned by a municipality, for example, or by a regional authority such as the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority, which maintains the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad Regional Park (the W&OD Trail).

My other interest was more personal. Back in the mid-1990s, my firm, with me as Project Manager, was selected by VDOT to produce a study for replacing the old truss swing-span bridge over the Chickahominy River with a new, modern structure that would accommodate a bike trail. One of the criteria for being selected was our ability to manage the trail aspect of the project, a trail that would eventually connect the two capitals, Richmond and Jamestown, together.

Well, as a die-hard cyclist and tourer, that was right up my alley. In those days, there weren't many bridge engineers running around with that type of experience. And to demonstrate it in the presentation that we used for VDOT, a picture of me on one of my bike tours in Italy. That got a good chuckle out of the committee. I am pretty sure they had not seen anything like it before! Not at a professional interview . . . and we won the job (but then, we were good bridge engineers as well!).

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I was originally going to do this tour with a friend who was new to biking and wanted encouragement to not only get on his bike more but also increase his distance. So I figured 50 miles each day wouldn't kill anyone (ha!), and, at the time, it was still March . . . and he had till May to get ready!

So the idea was to do this over a weekend. Starting in Richmond, we would head down Saturday and come back Sunday (he's a poor slug that still needs to work for a living). But as I thought longer about it, I decided I needed more saddle time, so the trip, for me at least, evolved into biking from my home in Arlington, arriving in Richmond on a Friday, doing the two days with my friend, and returning to Arlington on the following Monday and Tuesday.

Long story short, he bailed (and will hence go unnamed, sort of, so read on). And there were other schedule conflicts that arose (like my tickets for the Ring Cycle in Washington, which starts Tuesday night, May 17), so I am now leaving Wednesday, May 11, and returning Monday, May 16.

I'm a fairly experienced tourer, completing my first tour through France in 1988 . . . when I did minimal prep (we were young then!). You can find at least three other blogs on here describing some tours I've done since 2015. Maybe one day I'll capture the older ones. But the ones posted have intros telling you more about me.