Itinerant Philosopher

Before we started our bicycle ride across the US I got the idea of recording a few seconds of video from each day’s ride and blending it all into one video. It seemed like a great way to give family, friends and followers a sense of what our adventure was like. 

I configured my GoPro (which was attached to the front of my helmet) so I could start and stop filming with one touch. This was important because it made it easy for me to capture representative sections of the ride without having to pull over to turn the GoPro on/off. 

I found that having the GoPro mounted to my helmet rather than my handlebars made for a better image. Plus, when I wanted to record something off to the side of the road, I just turned my head rather than steering the bike towards the side of the road (typically not advisable because of a cliff or car traffic).

Each day I would record about half a dozen 15 second segments of video, usually turning on the GoPro when I saw something that I thought was cool, or potentially representative of that day. Every few days I’d download all the new GoPro footage to the laptop and pick a 2 second snippet to represent each day of riding. 

The final video, just over 3 minutes long, shows you 1.8 seconds from each cycling day. Look for the first day of Utah to see Joy battling the heinous wind we described in Recounting Our Scary Ride.

You may need to click the arrow button below to get the video to play.