Last Modified on 9/23/97 at 9:28:51

Day's Narrative:

INTRODUCTION

This web page describes a cross-country bicycle trip from Seattle, Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina. It began on the 24th of July in Monroe, Washington, just outside of Seattle. I began in Monroe because of the tremendous traffic in the Seattle area. Connie and I simply couldn't figure out how to get through the Seattle rush hour traffic early on a weekday morning, so we drove 10 miles out US highway 2 to Monroe, WA and spent the night there.

This was not a one of those bicycle trips where I decided I would bicycle across the United States on Monday morning and then left the following weekend. I had wanted to do this for many years, and decided in 1994 to start training for this after five years of bicycle inactivity. I set a date which coincided with my 60th birthday in July of 1997. It meant I also had to lose some weight. So, over the next three years I bicycled about 12,000 miles (19,000 km) and lost 30 lbs. (about 12 kg). I have lived in Los Alamos New Mexico at an altitude of 7500 feet (2285 m) for over 20 years, so most of this training was at a high altitude with hills, which helped a lot on those mountain passes.

As it turned out, the training really paid off. I never had knee problems, and I was able to bike long distances from the start. I learned also that I could have gotten in shape for it in two years, but I didn't know that when I started.

Connie drove our pickup the whole way with an assortment of spare bicycle equipment, even a spare bicycle. On a couple of occasions I almost had to get it out of the truck. I definitely did not want abandon this trip because of an equipment failure. Have you ever heard of someone who started bicycling across the United States and didn't make it? I haven't. But I'm sure there are some.

The cell phones were invaluable on more than one occasion, and I'm glad we had them. However, there were some places in the West where we just didn't have any signal. In other instances, it seemed like we were unable to reach each other unless we were in the same cell -- that is, using the same cell phone antenna. Those times I used a pay phone to call Connie's cell phone. That seemed to be ok.

As we traveled, we learned to always specify a place to meet at the end of the day, usually a motel in the town where we planned to spend the night. We had motel directories of all the major chains, and used those quite a bit. Several times we used the web site www.mapquest.com to determine if there were motels in a small town, but we found that the data was old. In one case the motel we found using mapquest had been out of business for many years.

To plan the trip I used the Rand McNally Road Atlas and the DeLorme CD, Streets Atlas USA. I also bought the maps of US Highway 2 from Adventure Cycling. The route I traveled where we could have used the Adventure Cycling maps was pretty simple -- one road in Montana, so we didn't use those.

When underway, we used maps by Gousha and Rand Mc Nally that you buy in convenience stores. Of these two we found that the Gousha were best. The DeLorme CD maps don't have enough detail for this kind of trip at the resolution we needed -- that is, they leave out too many roads at the size one needs on a bicycle. There are also no distances on the maps. We always bought two identical maps. One map for Connie and one for me. There's nothing worse than being on the phone trying to coordinate a meeting place, and discovering that one map has it and the other doesn't.

Getting a room in a motel was usually only a problem on Saturdays. Lots of places have events on the weekend in the Summer, and that tends to fill up the motels on Saturday night. We almost never made reservations in advance, due to the uncertainty of bicycle travel. There were real problems with getting rooms around Glacier National Park in August, the height of the tourist season there. If you don't get a room by 3 pm near East Glacier and West Glacier, Montana, you may end up sleeping in your car.

While designing the route, I had several objectives in mind. I had never seen the country in northern Montana and North Dakota, so that was a route I wanted to take. I also wanted to go through Munfordville, Kentucky where I was born and grew up. My brother-in-law, Bob van Arsdall lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina so I wanted to go through there, and I had also lived in that area for ten years. In addition, the first long bicycle trip I ever took was with Cliff (Jesse) Albergotti in 1961 from Chapel Hill, NC to Wrightsville Beach, NC, and I wanted to repeat that. However, there was lots of traffic on that route, and if I were doing it again I might chose another beach like Nags Head.

The time of year was chosen so Connie and I would be in the north during July, thereby missing most of the hot times in the US Midwest and South in August. As we cut down across Minnesota into Kentucky and then into North Carolina, we would be entering September when it should get a little cooler.

As far as the timing went, it was great. We missed rain in the Pacific Northwest. We had some really hot weather in Montana, but that was for a week or less. The weather got unseasonably cold in Minnesota, but then we were starting south towards Kentucky so we gradually rode out of that. As we left Munfordville, Ky. after Labor Day, it started to cool off as we had expected, and the thunderstorm season was ending. In North Carolina it was the middle of September there and therefore cooler, and there was less rain than in Summer. So, all in all, we hit the weather pretty well.

Just a week before starting the trip, I got nervous about not having low enough gears for the Cascades and Rocky Mountains, so I had a three ring front sprocket put on my Specialized bike. When I tried to upgrade my spare bike, a 25 year old Raleigh, the crank would not come off and it was clear that it was no longer usable, so I pronounced it dead. I bought a new Bianchi also with a low geared three ring front sprocket to replace it. This was my 60th birthday present which Connie had been asking me to choose for several weeks. I rode the new Bianchi for the entire trip.

The low gears were really the right thing to do. As it turned out the hardest hills were on the old, steep roads in the Appalachians of Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina. For the most part, the roads over the Cascades and Rockies were newer and the grades were not as steep. Looking back on it, I should have spent more time planning the route over the Appalachians in order to avoid more of the mountains. However, as Steve Maister pointed out, those mountain grades build character.

In the US West I planned to ride on US highway 2 until Minnesota, where I would start trying to ride on less used state roads because of the heavier traffic in the East. Getting onto the state roads turned out to be very important. There is a great deal of truck traffic in the Eastern US, and main roads should be avoided because of it. Riding away from traffic turned out to be a real challenge in Illinois, because of the large number of big cities, but it worked out fine with enough zig zags through the back roads.

Now that the trip is over, there are some things I want to change on the Bianchi. I want a 36 or 40 spoke wheel on the rear instead of 32 spokes for greater reliability, and because of the larger rear cassette I added, I want to put on a derailleur with a longer throw.

I will leave this web site up through November, 1997 for those that might want to see it.

The following describes the trip, an adventure I have dreamed about for many years.

Ray