Prologue

I've lived in New York City for a little over seven years now. On weekends, or early weekday mornings, I bike out of the City over the George Washington Bridge with other area cyclists heading north towards towns like Piermont and Nyack to take in the relative calm and solitude of the Hudson River Valley for a few hours. However, one summer ten years ago, I had the incredible fortune of spending it with a good friend, on a bicycle, usually in the middle of nowhere, plotting and plodding our way across America.

I kept a daily journal of our trip and have compiled an abridged version of those tales here with a few recollections looking back now on something that no sooner had it finished did it feel like a dream. Thanks to David for being my riding partner on this seven-week adventure.

(Left Photo: Tim, Doug and David at the Bon Voyage party in Cincinnati. Right Photo: David sorting our fifty pounds of gear.)

Driving West. Friday-Sunday, June 27-29.

David and I spent a number of weeks staring at a huge map of the United States debating the best route to bicycle across the country. In the end, we decided to begin at the Pacific Ocean on the western side of Olympic Peninsula of Washington State and bike eastward ending perhaps in Maine or at the tip of Cape Cod, MA (location to be determined en route). Our biggest challenge then was figuring out how we could get to the starting location. Luckily, some friends of ours, Rob and Remus, were excited by the thought of driving across country from Cincinnati to the Pacific Northwest.

Our road trip west began on Friday, June 27 at 7:30AM from Ft. Wayne, IN. David and I drove up from Cincinnati to Ft. Wayne the night before in order to store my car in Indiana for the duration and sort our gear. When Rob and Remus arrived that morning we loaded up the car, strapped on the bike rack and bikes and pulled out of the driveway headed for Chicago. Initially, at any movement of the car, David and I looked nervously back at the bikes; however, after we made it through downtown Chicago traffic, we were pretty confident that they wouldn’t fly off. After a brief stop in Chicago, we rolled into Wisconsin, then across the Mississippi River into Minnesota—and on and on.

The main sightseeing stops on our trip out were to be the South Dakota Badlands, Mt. Rushmore and Devil's Tower. One slight catch—we hit all of them in the middle of the night. At 1:30AM we were peering out into the Badlands through the insufficient light of the car’s headlights. With Rob’s comment, “It looks like the Grand Canyon, only upside down,” we turned around and headed back out onto I-90 again. Naively assuming that the National Parks light Mt. Rushmore 24/7, we headed to Rapid City, SD. As the four of us were standing in the parking lot staring at two mountains and describing how we could make out the Presidents’ faces in the dark, David said, “Yeah, I can see them, uh, which one is it—the mountain on the left or the one on the right?”

Following our middle-of-the-night sight-seeing adventures in South Dakota, the rest of the drive out West was pretty uneventful. We crossed into Montana as the sun was beginning to rise and illuminate the “Reasonable and Prudent” part of their speed limit signs. We crossed the 700 miles of Montana in a reasonable and prudent couple of hours.

We finally reached the Pacific Ocean in Forks, WA—way out on the Olympic Peninsula. After dinner we made a few phone calls back home to let everyone know that we had arrived safely (the trip pre-dated inexpensive cell phone calls, although we did travel with one) and then pitched our tent at a campground near the ocean for what would be the first of six weeks camping across the States.

(Photo: Tim, Remus, Rob and David crossing the Puget Sound en route to the Pacific Ocean.)

Day 1, Monday, June 30.

Mora, WA to Sequim, WA
Daily Mileage: 101 miles
Daily Time on Bike: 6 hours
Average Speed: 15 mph

It was cold, gray and the crack of dawn as rolled I out of the tent and tried to ignore the aches that come from sleeping on the hard ground. Even so, I was excited to begin the trip that we had planned and talked about for so long now. We packed up the tent and drove the little ways down to the beach. After unloading our gear from the car and fitting it onto our bikes, we walked to the water—a rocky and rough beach—for a couple photos to prove that we actually were at the Pacific Ocean. Afterwards, Rob and Remus hopped in the car and drove away. This was one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever experienced—our friends leaving us stranded on a beach, thousands of miles from home, with only our bikes to get us back there. It was at this point that I realized we were actually going to have to bicycle clear across the country in order to get home.

Breakfast in the morning consisted of our remaining Pop Tarts purchased at the Wal*Mart in Wisconsin. We both ate them in near silence while sitting on a rock staring out at the gray ocean. David and I eventually suited up for our first day on the bikes and while it began a bit rainy, the clouds soon disappeared and the sky turned into a wonderful blue. We saw some beautiful scenery as we crossed back over the peninsula and had our first run-ins with huge logging trucks spewing bark chips. We didn’t eat much food today, either because we were too excited or because we didn’t yet know how many calories it would take each day to bike so many miles. For dinner we stopped at the 101 Diner before finding our campsite with the help of Ranger Bill. One of the nice things about rolling into camp on bicycles is that you can often get a location away from the cars and RVs—our spot this evening was in a nice wooded area overlooking part of the ocean.

(Left Photo: Tim and David on Rialto Beach/Pacific Ocean at the start of the bike trip; Right Photo: Tim with the bikes just prior to Remus & Rob’s departure.)

Day 2, Tuesday, July 1.

Sequim, WA to Fort Casey, WA
Daily Mileage: 30 miles

Well today was quite interesting. David’s rear tire flatted four times in the first 18 miles of our day and 12 miles from the next town, Port Townsend. After we learned that there was a bike shop there, he decided to hitchhike all the way into town while I rode in on my bike. It probably took us about 30 minutes before we were able to successfully flag down a passing pick-up truck. This was the first time that I ever tried to hitchhike, and we started by flagging only those vehicles that looked harmless (whatever that means, maybe no gun rack?). We quickly had to lower our standards in order to get people even to acknowledge us. Finally, this nice woman in a pick-up truck stopped and agreed to drive David to Port Townsend. I rolled into town about twenty minutes later, and when I couldn’t find the bike shop, began to panic a little realizing for the first time that we had no way of communicating with each other, let alone if he was abducted. Finally, after several loops through town I spotted the small oceanfront bike shop and David hanging out by the front door.

We bought another bike pump because the one we were carrying couldn’t pump to the 120 p.s.i. necessary to inflate our tires. Thinking that low tire pressure was the culprit, we pumped up the tires and headed around the corner to this hole-in-the wall pizza place for several slices. We dropped a few postcards in the mail that we wrote over dinner and then ran to meet the departing ferry. Our campsite was on the other side of the Sound, just up the way from the ferry terminal, so we didn't have to travel too far. As we rolled into camp, David got another flat tire, at which point we both sat down and brushed the inside of the tire until we found the small piece of glass that had caused all of our problems. We camped that night in a special hiker/biker area near an old fort.

(Top Photo: David by the "Welcome to Washington State" sign, taken as we were leaving Washington; Bottom Photo: David fixing one of the five flat tires we had today.)

Day 3, Wednesday, July 2.

Fort Casey, WA to Marblemount, WA
Daily Mileage: 90.04 miles
Daily Time of Bike: 5:52 hours
Average Speed: 15.3 mph
Maximum Speed: 33.6 mph

We awoke today to blue skies and sun, and amazingly, one of what turned out to be many over the next six weeks. After pressing the snooze button several times, we finally rolled out of the tent at 6:00AM. It took us an hour and a half to tear down camp, so we were on the road by 7:30AM. We took a wrong turn that brought us into the little town of Coupeville, WA for breakfast. After splitting an entire box of Grapenuts, a half gallon of milk and a bagel, we were ready to hit the road again.

The pre-lunch highlight was Deception Pass, a bridge hundreds of feet above the ocean with spectacular views (at least from what we had seen up until this point). Not long afterwards, we arrived in Anacortes, WA (the recommended starting location for the trip according to our biking maps) and made the turn onto Route 20 East. It was a foreboding sight though to look ahead at this straight road running directly into the mountains, knowing that within a day we’d be in the thick of them.

Burlington served as our lunch spot. By this time the traffic had lessened a bit and the road went from four lanes down to two. We pulled into a large fruit stand by the side of the road and ate lots of fresh fruit. Now, of course it’s not the best idea to eat a bunch of fruit on an empty stomach when you’re starving, and we paid the price for it the rest of the day.

We set out in the morning knowing that for the next couple of days the terrain was only going to get steeper and that would mean two things, great scenery and lots of biking uphill. A few miles before Marblemount we stopped at this quaint little shack surrounded by picnic tables as in a large field at the foot of the mountains. We ate some homemade raspberry ice cream and chatted up the locals for a while. One guy told us that we couldn’t miss the campground in Marblemount because of all of the rabbits, hmm.

When we arrived at the campground, we understood exactly what that man meant. There were hundreds of rabbits everywhere. We had to step around, over and sometimes part seas of them. Some were as large as dogs and were as tame as house pets. One had a stomach so big that it dragged the ground when he walked. Why did I not take a photo of all of the rabbits?! On a more logistical note, today was the first time that we showered since setting off on the trip.

(Left Photo: Look towards Canada from Deception Pass; Right Photo: Road leading into the Cascade Mountains.)

Day 4, Thursday, July 3.

Marblemount, WA to Mazama, WA
Daily Mileage: 82.24 miles
Total Mileage: 302.3 miles
Daily Time on Bike: 7:30 hours
Average Speed: 10.9 mph
Maximum Speed: 36.8 mph

Today was the first of our many days spent in the mountains. We left the rabbit-infested campsite nestled in the foothills of the Cascades and proceeded up into the mountains for a day of agonizingly slow travel. It took seemingly forever to climb, especially after we’d breezed along for the first three days. It was a situation where just five extra pounds meant a noticeable reduction in climbing capacity, and we were carrying an additional 25 pounds of gear. We quickly exhausted our bike’s twenty-one gears and for hours on end my speedometer display alternated between 0 mph–2 mph–0 mph, as we trudged slowly uphill. It was one of those instances where if you slowed too much you were likely to topple over, and it took a great deal of effort to get going again. There were many times during the trip that I got a song stuck in my head for days or weeks on end, and today’s tune was “The Old Gray Mare”. On the first and third beats of each slow bar I would press down the alternating pedal, each and every foot up the mountain.

We took one sightseeing detour today to Diablo Dam. The loss in altitude down to the dam was more than made up for by the beautiful view of crystal-clear green water and the surrounding mountains. Later in our journey, we’d make fewer and fewer sightseeing side-trips like this one, having to bypass such hotspots as the actual Field of Dreams in Iowa and the Pennsylvania Little Grand Canyon, neither of which I’ve ever seen to this day. However, I think we made a good choice taking in Diablo Dam.

Back on the bikes, and just when we thought that we were approaching Washington Pass, we’d turn a corner and be forced to descend several hundred feet only to then turn another corner and bike upwards again. After six hours of ascending, we finally made it to Washington Pass (5,477 ft) and the view was worth it. We took a few photos and then suited up in our raingear for the chilly ride down the other side of the mountain. It started with a large hairpin turn, quite scary at 30 mph and in the frigid temperatures. We eventually coasted at speeds approaching 40 mph for 16 miles!!! David actually let loose and hit 40 mph a few times while I rode my breaks in many spots along the way. Growing up in Indiana, this was the type of coasting that you never could even imagine. We had to stop several times because our arms and legs were shaking uncontrollably from staying in a crouched position for so long after having spent the previous hours straining to get up over the mountain. David described it as a really great amusement park ride that went on way too long.

When we finally rolled into camp­—our first with vault toilets (wonderful smelling things)—we put up the tent and unloaded our gear before biking a mile or so to the only restaurant in the area at a lodge nearby. Now, usually we wouldn’t just drop our gear and bike away, but we were tired of carrying it all day and had faith in the people staying next to us that they’d keep an eye on it (which they did, whoever they were).

(Left Photo: Tim at Diablo Dam; Right Photo: Tim by Washington Pass sign)

Day 5, Friday, July 4.

Mazama, WA to Omak, WA
Daily Mileage: 62.27 miles
Total Mileage: 364.6 miles
Daily Time on Bike: 4:53 hours
Average Speed: 12.7 mph
Maximum Speed: 38.8 mph

We stopped for breakfast in Mazama, WA at a little country store & café by the side of the road. David and I both ate a pound of Grapenuts (which actually takes a while to do), a quart of milk, and half gallon of orange juice. From there we biked to Winthrop, a place made up to resemble a little frontier town, but really just a tourist trap selling the general wares ones sees at any place like it—taffy, fake rubber snakes, and replicas of the Declaration of Independence that smell like vinegar. In the spirit of July 4th, we purchased two small American flags to hang off of the back of our packs. (Postscript: David made it clear across the country with his, while mine disappeared somewhere in the middle of Montana).

From there it was on to Louploup Pass (4,080 ft). The climb was steeper than Washington Pass, but not nearly as long. Our descent down the backside of the mountain was more exciting than the day before and had a number of curves. It lasted over seven miles, and we held it at around 37 mph the entire way down. When our bikes finally started to slow down we found ourselves flying into the little town of Okanogan. We stopped at a little fruit stand to have some cold cherry cider and met three guys biking to Canada—one of a handful of run-ins out West with people biking somewhere. By the time we reached North Dakota though, where there are a few more roads to choose from, we stopped meeting people biking any great distance.

Our campground, or parking lot with some grass, was located right next to the Omak Stampede, “Home of the World Famous Suicide Race”—always the second weekend in August. We pitched our little tent on a small plot between two huge RVs, and at the recommendation of our neighbor, road off to have dinner at The Breadline (voted one of the best restaurants in the Northwest). When we arrived back “home,” we climbed in the tent and than lay awake as some kids nearby set off fireworks for most of the night.

(Photo: Miles of exciting coasting through the Cascades.)