4,250 MILES

71 DAYS

10 STATES

11 FLATS

and one marriage, still intact


Day 1, Saturday, June 12, 1999. Back wheel in the Pacific at Fort Stevens State Park, near Astoria. A man walking his dog took this. The water was 50-some degrees, and that's Janis laughing about it.

In the summer of 1999 we rode a bicycle built for two from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, about 4,250 miles on the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail, the route that was laid out for the Bikecentennial in 1976, when thousands of people crossed the country on it to celebrate the Bicentennial. It runs on back roads from Astoria, Oregon, to Yorktown, Virginia, through ten states, and it misses every big city on the way, which is the whole point.

Laurence is 46 and teaches biology at a high school here in Corvallis, so he gets summers. Janis is 48 and an accountant, and in March she told her clients she'd be gone all summer and they could call her in September. Most of them did. We bought our tandem used in 1995 and rode it around the Willamette Valley on weekends for four years before we got this idea, mostly on the long ride home from somebody else's idea. Our daughter Jessica house-sat and fed the cat. We camped in town parks, stayed in cheap motels when it rained, and slept on the floors of church basements that open their doors to cross-country cyclists, which is one of the nicest things we know about this country.

We dipped the back wheel in the Pacific on Saturday, June 12, and the front wheel in the York River on Saturday, August 21. Laurence was back in his classroom in time for the first bell.

STATE BY STATE
Miles are off our bike computer, wrong turns included.

OREGON 610 miles · June 12-23
Best: the first days down the coast, fog in the mornings and the ocean on our right.
Worst: log trucks on the coast highway, and the first week's sore everything.

We left the beach with our feet still sandy and learned the first lesson of the trip in about an hour: a loaded tandem is long and heavy and does not want to start on a hill. After a few days on the coast we turned inland, climbed over the Cascades, and came down into a different Oregon, the dry side, juniper and sagebrush and little towns fifty miles apart where the cafe was the only thing open and the pie was worth the fifty miles. We're Oregonians and we'd never seen most of it.

IDAHO 320 miles · June 24-28
Best: a whole day climbing along the Lochsa River to Lolo Pass, green water and cedars and almost no towns.
Worst: our first goathead, a little spiked seed that lives on road shoulders and goes through anything.

Idaho was rivers. We followed one after another, always uphill, always beautiful. The Lochsa day was about the best day of riding either of us has ever had: the road follows the river for miles and miles with nothing on it but us, a few fishermen and a lot of very big trees. We camped near the top of Lolo Pass with snow still lying in the shade under the trees, and rolled down into Montana in the morning.

MONTANA 400 miles · June 29-July 5
Best: the Bitterroot Valley, then the wide-open ranch country after it: cows, hay, and no traffic.
Worst: a cold rain on top of a pass, in July, in shorts.

We took our first day off in Missoula and ate a large pizza each. Then south up the Bitterroot with the mountains on our right, and into the biggest, emptiest country we'd seen yet. Montana is also where we had our one real argument of the trip, about a turn. Laurence has his version on the tandem page. Janis has hers. They're different. We spent the Fourth of July in a town of a few hundred people with a parade that took four minutes and went by twice.

WYOMING 380 miles · July 6-11
Best: Yellowstone and the Tetons, two days in a row.
Worst: the motor homes in Yellowstone, with their side mirrors out to here.

We rode through Yellowstone in one long day, past steam coming out of the ground on both sides of the road, and got to Old Faithful twenty minutes before it went off. The next morning we came down into Grand Teton National Park, and there they were.

Wednesday, July 7, 1999. We stood here for twenty minutes and neither of us said anything, which for us is some kind of record.

After the Tetons came Togwotee Pass and then the long, empty middle of Wyoming: wind, antelope, sagebrush to the horizon, and towns that are a gas station and a post office, sixty or seventy miles apart. We carried a gallon of extra water each and drank all of it.

COLORADO 470 miles · July 12-18
Best: Hoosier Pass, 11,542 feet, the highest point on the whole route.
Worst: the night before it. We camped at about 9,600 feet and neither of us slept.

The climb up Hoosier was slow and steady, granny gear and no talking, and it was not as bad as we'd built it up to be all spring. Snowbanks at the top in the middle of July. There's a sign up there, and every cyclist in America has a picture in front of it. We were too busy sitting down. Then the best descent of the trip, and a few days later we rolled down out of the mountains and onto the plains.

Thursday, July 15, 1999. The top of Hoosier Pass. Self-timer, camera balanced on a rock, which is why we're crooked. We look tired because we were.

KANSAS 480 miles · July 19-25
Best: the people, starting with Daniel and Mary Sousa.
Worst: the wind.

Everybody warned us about Kansas being flat and boring. It isn't boring and the flat is the easy part. It's the wind. It blew from the south every single day, which for two people riding east means it hit us from the side for 480 miles and leaned us across the lane like a sail. A tandem is a long bicycle with a lot of side to it. On our first day in the state we also got three flats before lunch, all goatheads.

Wednesday, July 21, 1999. Laurence holding the tandem up, because there is nothing in western Kansas to lean a bicycle on. Janis walked back up the road to take this. No cars for half an hour before or after.

On the 22nd a thunderstorm came up behind us in the afternoon, black from one side of the sky to the other, and a man in a pickup pulled alongside and said to follow him. That was Daniel Sousa. He and Mary farm wheat a few miles off the route, and they put the tandem in their machine shed, fed us fried chicken and two kinds of pie, and let us sleep on their screened porch while it poured. In the morning Mary sent us off with a sack of cinnamon rolls. We've had a card from them since. Kansas is a grain elevator every ten miles on the horizon and a cafe at the bottom of every one, and we never once went by without stopping.

MISSOURI 470 miles · July 26-August 2
Best: a swim in a cold, clear, spring-fed Ozark river on a 98-degree day.
Worst: the Ozark hills.

Nobody warned us about Missouri. The Ozark hills don't go up for long, but they never, ever stop: steep and short, up and down all day, a hundred times a day. A loaded tandem goes down a hill like a freight train and up the next one like a freight train, too. At a cafe in the middle of the state we met Amanda Mastin, 24, riding the other way all by herself, and we traded maps, warnings and an hour of stories. We told her about the Kansas wind. She told us about the Kentucky dogs. She was right and we hope we were wrong.

ILLINOIS 130 miles · August 3-4
Best: two big rivers in two days: the Mississippi going in, and the Ohio going out on a little car ferry.
Worst: nothing. Illinois was short and kind to us.

Two days across the bottom of the state. After the Ozarks it felt like a vacation.

KENTUCKY 450 miles · August 5-12
Best: the Rev. Lee Lindner's church basement, and soup beans and cornbread.
Worst: the dogs. Janis counted 37 that chased us.

Every rider we met coming the other way said the same thing about Kentucky: the dogs. They were right. Out of every other porch, across every other yard, barking and running alongside, mostly bluff and noise but you never knew which. We worked out a system. Laurence kept pedaling and steering and didn't look. Janis, in back, faced the dog, yelled NO! in her best voice, and squirted it in the face with her water bottle. It worked on 36 of the 37. The 37th liked it.

In the hills of eastern Kentucky, on a hot day, we came to a small church whose pastor, the Rev. Lee Lindner, has opened its basement to cross-country cyclists for years. There was a shower, a cot each, and a casserole left in the fridge by the ladies of the church with a note that said "for the bicycle people." We signed a guest book full of riders from all over the world. We'd like to say thank you here, too.

VIRGINIA 540 miles · August 13-21
Best: a day along the Blue Ridge, with the whole world green and blue below us on both sides.
Worst: the climbs in the mountains of western Virginia, which are steeper than anything in the Rockies. Nobody tells you that.

The Rockies are high, but the roads are built for trucks and the grades are long and gentle. The Appalachians are lower, and the roads go straight up the side of the hill like they were laid out by a goat. We walked the tandem up two of them, and we're not ashamed. Then the Blue Ridge, and then down out of the mountains into the old farm country of the middle of the state, into the heat and the tobacco barns and the history. On the last morning we rode under the trees through the colonial country toward the York River, and then it was over.

Saturday, August 21, 1999. Front wheel in the York River at Yorktown. 4,250 miles. A retired couple from Ohio on a bench took this, and then they bought us lunch.

We'd planned to say something profound at the end. Instead Janis cried, Laurence said "well," and we went and found the pie.

THE MILES

71 days, 8 of them off, so 63 riding days at an average of about 67 miles. Our longest day was 104 miles in eastern Colorado with a tailwind for once. Our shortest riding day was 22, in the rain in Montana.

Visitors since we got home:

Thinking about riding the TransAm, on one bike or two? Write to us:
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Tandem Life · Gear, Food and Flats
Last updated September 25, 1999