We started this trip by simply recording our GPS coordinates every night and maintaining a budget in excel. Over the last six months we've added all sorts of features to our website that we didn't originally plan for: saving our daily gps tracks, linking photos and journals to our map markers, publishing our exact route with elevation profiles, accepting donations, etc.

It has been apparent to me for a few months now that the wealth of information we have been collecting could also provide valuable planning assistance for other world-cycle-tourers-to-be. When organizing our trip, for example, we would have loved to know the actual daily costs incurred by other cycle tourers to help with our saving and budgeting goals. A lot of information is out there but none of it is incredibly easy to sift through. Until recently, our data wasn't much better.

Enter the new link which is shown in the upper right corner of both our journal and our website: "behind the scenes". For the last week Tara and I have been working to compile all of the data we've tracked so far into a publicly accessible database. Thankfully, this is essentially what my day job is; I had all of the requisite tools ready at hand. Even more thankfully, tracking everything is now a breeze (almost all of it happens automatically)!

Soon we will be able to use the information in our database to provide a pretty clear picture of what it takes (financially via our expenses, physically via our daily routes/elevation profiles, emotionally via our journals) to do a world tour by bicycle. Until we actually link all of this information to our website via a pretty interface, you can poke around the raw data by clicking the "behind the scenes" link at the top of the page!