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.
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.)
