Moving From "Gotta Do Someday" to "I'm Going to Do It"

Many of those who know me, know that for two decades now the top item on my “bucket list” has been to take a bicycle trip across the country.  Having become eligible for Medicare last year, I began to realize that I’m not getting any younger!  There was always one thing or another that got in the way, but I knew that at some point  spending two months on the bicycle and pedaling 3,500+ miles might just become a bit more than my body would tolerate.  So, I began to think seriously last Fall that if I ever was going to do this, I’d better plan to do it this coming summer.  And finally last Monday, I took the plunge, putting down a deposit on a June trip from Astoria, Oregon to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

There are a number of organizations and companies that do cross country bicycle tours.  But I was able to eliminate most right off the bat.  I’m up for 80-100 miles on the bike everyday (at least I think I am!), but I want a real bed under me each night.  No way I’ll take a cross-country adventure that includes two months of camping.  So it came down to five tours from four different companies.  Most of the tours begin in May.  Unfortunately I have a family wedding that I really ought to go to Memorial Day weekend.  That precludes the May starting tours. 

There's also another reason not to do a May tour.  If you’ve known me for a long time, you know that in addition to my love of cycling, two others things are near and dear to my heart…Minnesota Twins and Washington Nationals baseball and Washington Capitals hockey.  When my late wife Dot and I moved to Maryland in 1974, Washington had just gotten a National Hockey League franchise.  We went to the first NHL exhibition game played at the then-new Capital Centre, and were hooked on the new team.  In the 42 intervening years, however, the Capitals have only made one trip to the Stanley Cup finals. And of course that was during the six years we lived in Dallas.  When we came back to Washington we said that we would do whatever it took to be there the next time they made it back to the finals.  She never got to see that, but with the Caps this year having the best record in the league during the regular season, there was no way I was going to take a May trip and possibly not be able to honor the vow that we made.  I know that she’d be throwing hockey pucks at me from above if they went to the Finals and I wasn’t there, along with my daughter who has taken over from her mom as the family hockey fanatic!  So the only real choice was the America  By Bicycle (ABB) trip that begins in Oregon on June 19 and ends August 8,  3,650 miles later at a beach in New Hampshire, a little bit north of Boston.  For details, click here.

I am not too worried about physically being able to complete the trip across the continent (I say “the continent” instead of “the country” because from Michigan to Update New York we’ll spent several days riding through Southern Ontario).  But those I’ve communicated with who have biked across, have mentioned the mental challenge as being more difficult than the physical one.  They’ve warned me that one morning a couple of weeks in, I’ll wake up and say “What am I doing? I don’t want to ride today!”.  So, while I hope to bring you a “seat of the bike shorts” travelog, I also hope to capture the emotions, the sights, the sounds, the smells (after all, we will pass farms, factories and the like), and the people from this 50-day exploration of the U.S (and a little bit of Canada).  I hope you enjoy the journey.

And I promise for those of you who are not “bicycle geeks”, that all of the heavy bicycle information (like the downloads from my Garmin each day) will be handled as links that you can elect to look at, or ignore.

As I write this, my daughters Julie and Marci, and I, are en route to Boston to spend the first two days of Passover with my cousins.  As we speed through the Northeast on Amtrak, I am envisioning rolling along on my bicycle.  But at about 105 MPH slower!