This Time Will Be Different

                              In a big country, dreams stay with you
                              Like a lover's voice fires the mountainside
                             Stay alive.

                                   - from the song “Big Country”


When I was a younger man, though certainly not a young man, I took hold of a dream that had  formed thirty years earlier, when I first became a "serious cyclist".  That dream was to some day ride a bicycle across the US.  Now, you know that the term “serious cyclist” isn’t a formal thing...its just how I came to see myself.  Not a Category 1 Road Racer, not a Round-the-World-including-Mongolia Touring Cyclist, not a Randoneur Loving Long Distance Freak. 

But in spite of having a life that was bordered by reality (as in real job, real wife, real kids), I was ambitious enough to do an occasional 100 mile century ride, to ride a bike around Lake Tahoe or Canandaigua Lake or to spend a few days camping from a bicycle in Letchworth Park or along the Natchez Trace.  Traveling long distances over the road and being self sufficient on a bicycle captured my imagination and I dreamed of doing more.

Riding a bicycle across the US is something that many serious cyclists dream about.  It is something of a rite of passage and it adds a degree of gravitas to one’s cycling curriculum vitae.   With this accomplishment, you are "bonafide" and may claim street cred among other cyclists, next door neighbors and those in line next to you at the DMV. 

It might go like this.

Someone says, “That’s Bob.  He rode his bike across the US”.

The other responds, “Uh-huh.”


See what I mean?  Its a pretty big deal. 

In my dreams a proper cross country bicycle tour crosses dozens of summits in the biggest mountain ranges, a Great Lake on a ferry, the high deserts and great prairies, the Columbia, Missouri, Mississippi and Niagara rivers and countless small trout streams.  The route includes two lane roads, interstate highways and old railroad beds,  goes past hog farms, dairies and turkey farms for days on end, passes through a couple big cities and a hundred small towns each with a pretty white church and a downtown that long ago surrendered to the big box store’s everyday low, low prices.

It takes you through a forest fire and a thunderstorm, lets you meet a retired clown and eat ice cream every day while getting into the best shape of your life at age 57.  You feel me?

For years this dream lay dormant, but in 2006, for reasons that will not be revealed here, it surfaced and demanded to be implemented.   After a year of training, in the summer of 2007 I set off on a bicycle ride across the US and rode 3200 miles from the Oregon coast to my childhood home in upstate New York.  For 44 days I saw, felt, heard and smelled our big country in an intimate way; such is the nature of bicycle touring. 

While a plane, train or automobile isolates you from the country, a bicycle immerses you IN the country.  It charges your senses and lets you to savor the details.  My ride across America was a long, slow, delicious experience-of-a-lifetime that I reflect on almost every day.

“So what?”, you ask. 

Well, here’s the so what. 

There’s an excellent chance that during Tour the Rockies I will ride my motorcycle on some of the same roads I bicycled in 2007.  The opportunity may present itself on our way back to Denver beginning in Jackson, WY (where I overnighted in 2007).  The two days I spent riding from Idaho Falls through Victor and over Teton Pass into Jackson and then along side the Snake River and the Grand Tetons over Togwotee Pass to Riverton was the most challenging I faced all the way across the US.   Long difficult climbs, monstrous descents and long hot days....it was a stern test for this rider.  You pay a price when you ride a bicycle across the Rocky Mountains and in 2007 I took a beating when I came over these passes.  

This time it will be different.