Revisiting the Past, Finding the Present, Looking Towards the Future
A Bicycle Journey
The Past
When our 25 year-old selves rolled out of North Carolina in August 1982, our panniers were chock full of state-specific bike maps that we had painstakingly obtained from nascent bicycle and pedestrian coordinators within state Department’s of Transportation.
Although familiar with Bikecentennial, and the relatively new TransAmerica Bicycle Trail, our route would be mostly self-created. As one state went by, we would, with ceremony, use the previous state’s map as kindling for our campfire. We traversed through North Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado.
Crossing the Continental Divide in New Mexico, we rode on to Tuscon where, finding ourselves without money, we obtained a job as weekend houseparents at a group home for developmentally disabled kids.
Since a requirement of employment was that the “parents” were married, we fast-forwarded our vague plans and tied the knot at the historic Tuscon City Hall dressed in our bike gear before a kindly judge and a witness we grabbed from a nearby bench.
We thoroughly enjoyed our time in Tuscon, renting a one bedroom apartment in a small complex - with a pool, which we considered quite luxurious.
Once our bank account was replenished, we finished our trip by biking through the desert and mountains of Southern California, arriving in San Diego with the satisfaction of having accomplished what we had set out to do. But we also had a vague understanding that “life” was now before us, and that our bike trip would become a touchstone event not soon to be repeated.
Forty Years Later…
Over the next 40 years, jobs, two amazing kids, and a few fairly short bike trips whizzed by. We managed a three week tour in Idaho in 2016, a four week tour of Andalusia in Southern Spain in 2017, and a four week tour of Sicily in 2018. All of a sudden though, so it seemed, we were in our mid-sixties, recently retired and thinking to ourselves: we can do it again, or more precisely, we better do it while still physically capable.
Our first post-retirement long trip (starting exactly one day post-retirement, September 1, 2019, was the ACA’s Pacific Coast Route, biking from Vancouver to Tijuana along California’s famous Routes 1 and 101. Looking to go further afield, we crossed the Pacific and biked both islands of New Zealand, southern Thailand and northern Malaysia. Alas, COVID hit in March 2020 and we had to leave Malaysia in a hurry. The plan had been to finish in Singapore.
If nothing else, COVID-time provided us with the opportunity to consider where to bike next. It was never a question of “if”; rather, it was when and where. Since 1982, we had been pining to each other about doing another cross-country trip, trying to revisit some of the same areas through which we had previously biked. We wanted to check-out the Tuscon City Hall (now on the National Historic Registry!), and add new areas of exploration to our growing list, in particular Baja California. While in Tuscon in 1982, we travelled for about two months by bus and train in Mexico as far south as Oaxaca and wanted to return, by bike, some day.
We considered the “age question” and how such a trip might be shaped differently due to the passage of 40 years. Would this be a trip defined by our age, as something to be overcome? Would health issues intervene? Would we be looked upon, by young and old alike, as two misguided boomers with no business being on the road exploring the world? We even toyed with the idea of posting “Senior Survival” bike touring guides on You Tube. As it turned out, except for taking a few more rest stops along the way, major adjustments proved unnecessary. We were very fortunate to have our health, good bikes, a nice tent, and good navigation apps. The road awaited. We decided to rent our house out for 10 months, and use that time (August 2021. - June 2022) to tour. Although our route would vary somewhat from our 1982 wedding year, parts would overlap.
Our original plan was to use the ACA’s Southern Tier Route, leaving from Florida and heading to San Diego, via Arizona. From San Diego, we would bike to the southern tip of Baja, fly back to Florida, and then bike up the Atlantic Coast Route back to our home in Maine. Due to high COVID and more than a few hurricanes, we decided to ditch the Southern Tier and leave from Washington, D.C., but left the rest of the plan in place. This blog will serve to chronicle the trip in dispatch form, with posts rolling out from time to time. We are also now planning a new tour which will take us from Amsterdam to Istanbul (we hope) in the Fall of 2022.