What We Will Do Differently

Longboard For Love is trying to look forward to next year. However, in order to adequately plan for the future we need to look back on what we learned from the past. Let me tell you, from our recent trip, we have learned quite a lot. We did our best and got advice from a lot of people, but we were not totally prepared for the trip. After a month on the road we feel pretty confident in our knowledge.

Our "Final Map" plan. We were so excited when we
finished the plan....and we threw it out the first day!

Mapping it out
Last trip I spent months and months going over the route again and again. However, all I had at my disposal was Google Maps. I had to redo the route about eight different times. Then...after the first day we had to throw the whole map out the window. It failed. Thankfully Kenton brought his phone which had a GPS. All we were able to do was each night we planned out what we could do the next day. We only had a few days planned out at a time. I said before I had no idea where we were going, only south. That is the real truth. Next time we will make a rough but realistic plan, and definitely bring a good GPS with a great battery.

Ben Smith, who went across Utah on his longboard, had a good idea. His support drove the route in a car before he did it on a board. This showed them problem places and allowed them to plan. I think this is a good idea. However if we had done this before we might not have actually done our trip. Some of the roads were sketchy. Although maybe we would have planned a better route instead.

Rob Thompson who first
used Longboard Larry's
trailer

Self Supported
We really wanted to do our trip self-supported, meaning we carried everything with us. We can now say we did it... but we aren't sure we will do it again. The backpacks did save us money on cars and gas, but they really slowed us down. Days where someone took our backpacks for us we went about twice as fast, and we enjoyed life quite a bit more. I still suffer from chronic lower back pain as a consequence to my heavy backpack and the repetitive motion of pushing the board.

Backpacks are probably a no go. We may look into the longboard trailer idea from Longboard Larry. The best idea, in our opinion, is to have a support vehicle.

Press
Now that we have done a trip we will definitely contact the press earlier. That helped us out a ton. More people offered to let us stay a night in their yard or home. People donated more, people honked and cheered on the road which helped our moral. Getting the press earlier will really help

Enjoy the Journey
If we do another long-term trip, we will try to "stop and smell the roses" a bit more. With the backpacks we
were slowed down a lot. In order to make our goal of 650 miles we were always in a hurry. It was stressful. Our schedule was typically as follows:  7:00 wake up, hit the road by 7:45, 8:30 take a break, take a ten minute break every hour afterwards, at about 7:00 pm we would start looking for a place to stay. At nightfall hopefully we were ready to sleep, and then do it all over the next day.

On a future trip we may try to be less ambitious with our daily mileage, or more realistic, and thus be more free to take joy in the journey.

Homework
Kenton was enrolled at the BYU-I Business School during the trip. He was doing all he could online. This was stressful for Kenton. We will plan better and take a hiatus from school during the trip.

Relay Race
In the future we will probably do some form of a relay race. This divides into two trains of thought. One idea is to make it competitive. A couple of teams going 24 hours in shifts. Maybe a 250 mile race with one member of your team going at all times.