Joe Bowen, a very fit Kentucky cyclist, pedaled off on a 14,000-mile bicycle tour last spring to visit nearly every state in the US — a second time.
Bowen was repeating a bicycle trek he took upon his discharge from the Air Force in 1967 when he left Lompoc, California, and bicycled through 46 states before returning home to eastern Kentucky.
Now, at 63, Bowen is returning home again after following those same roads, passing through the same towns and visiting some of those same people as nearly 40 years earlier.
This time, however, more than 1,000 school children in Eastern Kentucky have been following his tour as a way to study geography, social studies, history, arts, math and science. He has filed images and dispatches from his laptop computer on both legs of his journey as he teaches school children back home about the US. They keep track of him on the website Where's Joe?
People along Bowen's route are learning about Eastern Kentucky, as well. The tour, entitled the Rediscover Bicycle America Project, was sponsored in part by the Appalachian Heritage Alliance.
Bowen did the tour in two blocks — 10,000 miles in 2005 (ending around Thanksgiving) and the final 4,000 miles beginning in March 2006. Along the way he has visited major and minor tourist attractions and talked with folks who live off the beaten path. For instance, he learned from a Hispanic woman in Oregon what it's like to grow up as a migrant laborer and visited with former President Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia.
What's the major difference in the past 38 years? He tells the Richmond (Kentucky) Register:
“The most profound change in America is … in 38 years, we’ve added 98 million more souls to this country. That is a huge number. … The towns are not even recognizable.”
In a recent dispatch from the road, Bowen decribed the lure of bicycle touring:
Seeing America at ten miles an hour from the seat of a bicycle is awesome, folks. I just know that I have been blessed. Very, very few individuals get to visit with so many of our wonderful, amazing, diverse but unified, American people and see their beautiful well-worked farms, their soaring mountains and their mighty rivers. Very few people will feel the cold rain in their face on a lonely road or see the eagle watching for a fish in the river. It is awesome, folks.
Bowen is returning home to Stanton, Kentucky, to a three-day cycling festival — Pedals and Blooms Bicycle Races — that includes a recreational ride with Bowen, and a cycling road race and criterium.
Read more:
Bicycle tour repeat: 38 years later
Bicycle classroom begins cross-country tour
Cyclist Joe Bowen makes it home for Thanksgiving
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