Surprise Visit From XC08 Rider

This past week, Linda Tilley, one of the XC08 riders who I rode with often, emailed to say the she and Bill would be driving through on I80 on Friday.  She asked if it would work to stop for a visit.  Our house is only 4.5 miles of low density traffic off I80 - actually only two turns after getting off I80.  Kim was going to be out of town but I said that would be great.  We had all met at the Champlain, Ill, rest day of XC2008.

Linda and Bill arrived about 7pm on Friday and we hustled right down to the Prairie Canary for dinner.  They had been driving all day from the Detroit area, over 500 miles, so were ready to chow down.  Afterwards I showed them my daily biking trail route out to Rock Creek Lake.  We returned to home and spent the evening browsing through each other's XC08 journals.  Linda is a scrapbooker so hers is in scrapbook form.  I had had mine printed off by a blog printing business.  We stayed up until midnight reminiscing while Bill went to bed early.

Linda and Bill were up early the next morning ready to complete the 2nd half of their trip to South Dakota where they had Mt Rushmore and some biking planned.  Linda has been on numerous biking, kayaking, and sail-boating adventures since XC08 - several each year.  It was great to reminisce about XC08.

Scrap Book Poster of XC Tour

My wife is a scrapbooker.  She made a scrapbook style wall poster of my XC tour.  Here is a photo of it:

Blog Book of XC Tour

In November of 2011, I found a website to publish my XC blog into a very nice coffee table book.  I had been wanting to do this so that I would have a copy of my blog in case it should ever disappear off the blogger website.  It cost me $72 which included a pdf digital copy which I have archived on a flashdrive.  The flashdrive can be taken to a local printer if I should ever want more copies - or I can send a pdf digital copy to relatives and friends.  However the website is the best way to view the blog as one can double-click on the photos to enlarge them.  The website I used to print the blog was:

 http://blogger.sharedbook.com/pilot/enterBook.do?bookId=Blog2Print_Blogger

Here is a photo of the front cover of the book: