Whew! The last few anxious hundred miles were done! The adventure was complete, save for the flight home. How were we to know, 3,500+ miles ago, that we’d really pull this ride off?
Eric Dittmer and I were sitting in my drift boat last year, doing some work pertaining to the removal of Gold Ray Dam, and sometime during the day I asked if he’d seen the movie, The Bucket List. “So, what’s on your bucket list, Eric?” I’m sure many of you have asked yourselves the same question. “What DO you want to do with the time you have remaining?” Both of us came up with riding our bikes, self-supported, across the country. The seed was sown!
So, on June 25th, after what we deemed was an appropriate amount of planning, we both set out on our adventure. What could I have been thinking? Why not start out with a small 500 mile bike tour first, just to see 
if I like bike touring to begin with? No, we’ve got to ride 3,000 plus miles! The phrase “go big or go home” kept caroming through my head, and not just once!
Two hundred and seventy pounds of rolling weight (195 of which was me) was what I’d whittled my load down to. That weight would fluctuate over the course of the trip as we sent no longer needed items home, added food items for later use, and my personal weight began to drop.
Juntura is for sale? Hmmmm….I’d never given much thought to owning a 
whole town. Who would? I could proclaim myself king, or grand poobah, much the same as Judge Roy Bean if I wanted! Although Juntura is a lovely, very small eastern Oregon town, along which flows the beautiful Malheur River, and has a certain old west charm, the thought quickly vanished as drops of sweat cascaded down my nose, and we neared Idaho.
Eric and I had just left camp, and were getting ready for another wonderful day on the free and open highway leading from Fairfield, Idaho. But wait! What’s that? Another cyclist? Hmmm, she looks familiar! Vicky Brown was a lady I’d met two months earlier at a wine-tasting in Medford! I knew she was doing the trans-America tour also (east to west), but never dreamed we’d meet. Neither of us knew of each others’ route, it just happened! What an amazing and pleasant coincidence!
Idaho Falls is a lovely town, from which we’d launch our attack north to the town of West Yellowstone. Need a postcard, wooden salt and pepper shakers festooned with the likenesses of buffalos or geysers, or an ice cream cone? They, like the mosquitoes we were feeding, were everywhere!
If you’ve not visited Yellowstone, add it to your own bucket list. Nature-loving Americans should not pass from this life without witnessing the geysers, mountains, rivers, wildlife, and the smell of pine wafting on gentle breezes that make up this extraordinary natural wonder. There is something that, if you give yourself the time, takes you back to what it must have been like to be the first explorers on this continent, or to have been an early Native American. Unbelievably peaceful and calming! I’d last seen Yellowstone Park as a dozer and falling boss on the 1988 fires that almost 
charred the park for good! The park is healing quite well, illustrating the fact that trees, grass, and wildlife are indeed renewable resources.
It was here in Yellowstone that we’d meet up with a wonderful 70 year old German man named Dietrich. Beginning in San Francisco, he was biking his way to Minnesota to visit friends. On the same trajectory, we would ride together for 8 days, sharing stories, singing songs, practicing each others’ language, and staring slack-jawed at the wonders we would ride through.
Cody, Wyoming is everything the town is touted to be. A magnificent showcase and mirror of what the man, Buffalo Bill Cody, himself once was. We should have stayed longer, instead of heading into the rising sun so soon to tackle the Bighorn Mountain Range. Here is where we’d find our toughest climb. There are three passes over which you can climb before finally descending into the town of Buffalo. We chose the longer, but gentler (?) ascent that is known as Powder River Pass. Twenty-five miles of 6% gradient to the 9,666’ cloud-piercing summit was arduous, but made me glad we hadn’t chosen what locals called the tougher northern passes, being steeper yet! Settling into a rhythm and not stopping was the order of the day.
Averting freeway travel, we rode the 100-mile route from Buffalo to Gillette through the small towns of Ucross and Spotted Horse. With a population of 2, Spotted Horse could be in contention with Wagontire on a new game show entitled, “Who Wants to Become Extinct First?” That’s OK, we were on the doorstep of Devil’s Tower, our nation’s first National Park thanks to Teddy Roosevelt. What a rock! What a nice 1.3 mile circumnavigating hike around the tower with grand views of the surrounding area.
With thousands of Harleys heading for Sturgis, we made our way to Custer, S.D., and were not disappointed with the two major monuments we had traveled so far to see – Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore. We joined throngs of others camera-clicking through the gigantic works chiseled in native stone. What undertakings! Right after our tours of these two magnificent monuments, we were to bid farewell to our new-found friend Dietrich, hoping to one day reconnect to raise a beer and recall our great ride together.
The headwinds we faced in South Dakota forced that old “what could I have been thinking?” question to pop up again. The silly notions of a mid-west tailwind blowing us across the state at 30 MPH were blasted from our minds as the fierce winds in our faces and lung-searing temperatures had our legs aching for rest. Following one of these early morning blustery episodes, we stopped for coffee, and just happened to meet a wonderful couple, the wife of whom was a cowboy poet of note, who entertained us with several of her own compositions. Coffee and poetry – another jewel in the crown of our trip. All too soon, we were back on the road. Not until we pulled into the teensy-weensy Iowa town of Westfield would our sun-scorched bodies find reprieve from our self-imposed pain, only to be faced with a new menace.
Mosquitoes and biting flies were so thick they almost blotted out the setting sun. They wanted our blood! How were we to know when we first pulled into town that our only escape would be our small tent, where no air flowed? How were we to know we were doomed to a sleepless night, immersed in the constant buzzing of mosquito and cicada music? Argh!
In the morning, the mesh door was covered with starving, syringe-wielding insects, ready for breakfast! We packed what we could while still inside, and then, in what seemed like an instant, we were on the highway without coffee or breakfast, glad to have the wind blowing past our sweaty bodies – scraping off the last few hitchhikers. Ick!
“Oh look, another cornfield!” Never having been through the midwest, it’s exactly what I’d imagined it to look like – mile after mile of corn and soybeans, punctuated by beautifully-maintained farmhouses. In a strange Wysockiesque way, it was indeed beautiful. The expanse of lawn surrounding each home looked as though someone had mowed it not 5 minutes earlier, and everything was in its proper place. Ah, to be a riding lawnmower salesman! We were to ride through this landscape of Americana for many days to come.
RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) was an event boasting 18,000 cyclists this year, and although I’d heard of this ride years before, I never dreamed we’d actually meet up with it. What a pleasant surprise! On the penultimate day, we rode into the town of Morengo (sounds like a bad western, huh?), and spotted some other cyclists who told us they were riding ‘the RAGBRAI’. Really? We caught the ride? The next day, in the company of thousands of brightly-dressed, happy-it-was-almost-over cyclists, we headed for Davenport, the Mississippi River, and the finish line. After 112 miles, I dipped my wheels in the Mississippi, and we were off to a new-found friends’ house to splash in their pool, eat their food, drink their beer, and sleep in their wonderfully, air-conditioned home. Again, it’s the generosity, kindness, and open-armed nature of the American people we met that made this trip a joy!
Day 37 found us rolling into Illinois, wondering what points of interest we would find. Looking at our maps and pouring over whatever else we could find with information about the wonders of the midwest, we quickly realized there wasn’t much (my apologies to those from the land of Lincoln). There was, however, interesting people yet to meet. Is that a cyclist on the wrong side of the road? No, it’s someone walking! True enough, Dan Ross was a young man pushing a golf cart bag, loaded with his backpack and other essentials, across the country! Walking? We thought we were pretty tough up until then. Hope you made it Dan!
It was about this same time that thoughts of family, coupled with the weariness and soreness of body, made us think of home. Days without showers, waking up after sleeping on a leaky air mattress, and days of battling the insect kingdom had us eager to reach the east coast, and the comforts of a friend’s home. We put the hammer down and started clicking off 90-mile-a-day efforts.
It’s funny how quickly the boy-like enthusiasm of a big bike ride can vanish like the 25 pounds I’d lost. Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio took a brief 8 days to cross! It was in Ohio, however, that we were invited to stay overnight with a family we’d met in a fast food restaurant. Ken Brown was born and raised on the same piece of land his family had owned since the mid-1800’s, and although 8 miles in the wrong direction, the ride to their house was a pleasant surprise. The corn that accompanied the chicken dinner that evening was the sweetest and most tender I’d ever had (all 6 ears!). I suddenly felt a little guilty about my previous thoughts about the boring cornfields.
After Ken’s famous hotcakes the following morning, we were poised to enter Pennsylvania and find the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP). This was, according to a friend who’d previously crossed the country by bike, the best way to cross the Alleghany Mountains without much climbing. The GAP is a “rails-to-trails” project, begun decades earlier which when coupled with the C&O Towroad, connects Pittsburg with Washington D.C. With cars and trucks prohibited, we were to quietly enjoy the final 380 miles of our journey. Or so we thought!
Did you know trains are still frequently used to haul coal and other goods along the eastern seaboard? Well, they are! And we were sadly doomed to listen to the mournful wail of their horns and whistles for almost the entire trail system, day and night. Earplugs, by the way, will only slightly muffle the rumbling of their wheels on the steel rails! The only thing that came close to challenging the trains for loudness was the constant ring of the cicadas that nested in the tree canopy. Now more than a month later, I think I can still hear them!
Day 50, and we’re plying the streets of D.C., on our way to a friend’s house, two blocks away from the capital! Ahhhh, a shower not shared with flies, a bed not crawling with ants, and a cold beer in the icebox. I’ll tell you what, only when you’ve gone without some of the simpler things can you truly enjoy and appreciate them!
Bright and early the next morning, we were having coffee in the kitchen, and laying out our strategy for seeing as many monuments, museums, and memorials as we could before our flight 4 days later. What a glorious conclusion to a fantastic tour of our country. Sure, there were tough times during which I doubted my sanity, but there were more times filled with great scenery and people that cast those doubts as far as Washington throwing his silver dollar across the Potomac.
Thirty-five hundred miles in 50 days is a tall order. It really is surprising what you can do if you put your mind to it. Although we’d witnessed some spectacular thunderstorms, we never once rode in the rain. We never had any serious mechanical problems that laid us over for more than a few hours, and aside from a bout of bronchitis, and a short episode of back spasms, we never had any physical problems. And all the truckers we encountered were courteous to a fault. Thank you truckers!
If you’ve ever had a dream to do something you thought you would never do, or to go where you thought you’d never be able to go, put those dreams into motion! Pick out a window of time, plan your gear, and make it happen! Don’t procrastinate one more day, and say “one day I will,” because that “one day” may never come!
Carpe diem (seize the day)!