We have no other women's rides in our area. We're in Tucson, Arizona, where it is possible to ride year-round but June-mid-September require very early starts, so fall and spring are better choices.

Rebecca mentioned GABA- a bike club here that does three century rides among other things, and we wouldn't want to compete with that. We want this to be very accessible to people who might not otherwise ride, and encouraging especially to girls and young women.

We had not pictured this as a fund-raiser- more of a community service to encouraging girls and women to participate in cycling. So the idea would be more to break even than raise money.

Ame, can you send me a contact for Janae Noble? We are also going to be contacting a local hospital, which one of our group works for.

We had not considered costumes or anything like that... up to now... I might prefer to keep it simple.

I hadn't thought about painting roads. For the GABA century rides, they place stand-alone signs along the road indicating the route. I was hoping we might even be able to borrow or rent their signs.

One option would be to use the ever-expanding "Loop" around Tucson, which is a paved MUP with many miles that are lightly used by pedestrian traffic- mainly used by cyclists. This would provide a safe route that would not conflict with vehicle traffic for the short distance. Thus we we wouldn't need to consider having any traffic control. Plus, I really think we are going to start small - and hope we don't need to worry about traffic control with the number of riders we'd like to have for the first year.

We have quite a few sponsors for the team: a car dealership, bike shop, several restaurants among them, so that will hopefully help. We also are doing some volunteering for other events and maybe can get support back from those organizations for this.

This is all really , really helpful

Sharon