One of the congratulatory emails I received on the anniversary of Biking Bis last week came from Doug in Cincinnati.
At the end of his short message, I followed a link to dougandryan.com, where I learned he and his 15-year-old son had ridden their bicycles 3,400 miles cross country from Oregon to Washington DC last summer.
The website includes their preparations for the bike trip, their route, photos, and separate journals of their experiences.
As the father of a teen-aged son myself, I wondered how it went. Up until last year, when he turned 14, my son and I have taken week-long bike trips; the first in Maryland, three others in Washington. He no longer wants to train for another, though.
In summing up his journal, Doug wrote:
It was still pretty incredible that we were able to spend 24/7 for such a long period of time and end up remaining friends. He got to see me deal with stress, strains, and a bad case of saddle sores. He got to see me prepare for and accomplish a goal. We got to have many chats about every topic imaginable and he certainly knows where I stand on the issues.
He will be dealing with some major decisions as he completes these last few years of high school. I feel that the timing was perfect for this trip. I have great confidence that he will choose his course in life wisely and know that he can confide in me as he does.
The big numbers: the Ryan and his Dad covered covered 3,400 miles in 56 days, which included just three rest days. They averaged 64 miles a day. Doug's hardest day was climbing the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming; for Ryan it was 110-degree heat and headwinds in South Dakota.
The small numbers aren't recorded specifically, but they may have the longest impact: the untold number of times that one helped out the other, gave each other words of encouragement, and talked about the kinds of things that only pop into your head in the afternoon after pedaling all day across the Great Plains.
Doug, 41 at the time, and Ryan began planning this cross-country journey after completing several Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure (GOBA) bike tours. They both rode Bianchi Volpe touring bikes pulling Burley Nomad Cargo trailers.
They followed portions of the Adventure Cycling Association's Lewis and Clark trail, as well as a part of the TransAmerican Trail. Then they blazed their own route eastward until Pittsburgh, where they picked up the Allegheny Trail and later the C&O Towpath. Doug later reported that the Allegheny Trail was all crushed gravel, “brutal on our tires and wreaked havoc on our trailers.”
Doug writes that one of the main things they learned is that:
“Every day is an adventure, because each day found us doing something new, meeting someone interesting, or pushing ourselves to a new level. Each morning we would speculate what adventure the day would bring and we were almost always wrong.”
Doug says that an attitude he wants them to keep for the rest of their lives.
Recent Comments