2025 Adventure Goals

Another year, another vision for travel. Maybe you can get some ideas for your own travels, or just join in the joy of planning and talking about bike travel.

My 2025 goals are shifting toward some interesting road riding, which include riding in Europe and my first domestic US century ride. Jason wants to get back to his happy place of downhill. Last year we took significant time and training focused on cross-country mountain bike fitness, so that particular discipline will move to the backburner for some fresh experiences.

Where to?

The list is as of January a little shorter this year. One tweak to our process is that we are leaving some breathing room for short term planning as opportunities come up.

Ski Trips

We live in Texas and are not blessed with snow, mountains or huge travel budgets. However, we bought an Epic pass last year with plans to up our skiing. We look forward to that in 2025.

Salt Lake City, Utah

Wasatch Crest

Gotta return to the SLC area, and I plan to procure a new model of the Pivot 429 Trail at Salt Cycles, one of the premier Pivot dealers in the US. Wasatch Crest Trail was a standout in ‘24 so we want to return. We would also really like to see St. George. Details TBD but we love visiting Utah so it’s on the list.

France!

Big and exciting goal. Head across the pond! We debated whether to plan a road or mountain bike trip and decided on road riding so that we could also spend time on cultural tourism in Paris. One of the tentative plans is to take a train to Toulouse and ride the Canal de Garonne at least partially on the way to Bordeaux. Logistics TBD. We are also interested in visiting Amsterdam and cycling there. I dug into this Lonely Planet book (Epic Bike Rides of Europe) to try to figure out a plan, and it left me realizing how much there is out there.

I borrowed the above image from this cycling guide:

Independent People: Canal de Garonne: the Cycling Guide

Downhill at Angel Fire Mountain Bike Park

Jason’s comfort food is making the 14 hour drive to Angel Fire, staying “dirtbag” style, and riding back after a couple of days of glorious downhill. So there will be a few of those. I may join him for some, or he'll go with his guy friends.

Bentonville

Since we have plans to go to France, Angel Fire and Bentonville represent where we are cutting back on costs in other parts of our year.

These are both driving distance for us, and super fun. In case you are not from Texas, everything outside of Texas is a long way. We live in Austin, so we're in the center. Bentonville is a nine hour drive and Angel Fire is a 14 hour drive, as stated earlier. Even driving to Marfa for the Marfa 100, also in Texas, is nine hours. Crazy, right? That's why for any mountains we usually get on a plane.

Northwest Arkansas has so much support and development for cycling, it's a great place to visit. I would love to go back to Fayetteville as well, and ride the trails in Centennial Park. We went over the summer last year, and I was amazed that these trails were mostly empty. If they had this in Austin it would be packed.

A Century Ride - still undetermined

This year is the year we want to take on our first century ride. We have not found one yet, but I’m putting it out there in the universe that it will come back to us.