How to Use This Blog - Bicycling across the USA

 

Going to the Sun Highway - Glacier National Park.

How to Use This Blog

If you are considering a ride across the United States, or have an interest in raising money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund, I may have a few insights of value. I’ve made two trips across the USA, both times to raise donations for JDRF. I assure you, the kindness of people who donate is a reward in itself. 

As for pedaling across the country, I tell everyone that it’s easier than you think. On both trips, after the first week or ten days, I fell into a rhythm and it was no longer particularly hard. 

Okay, that one 18% grade, at the Middlebury Gap, yeah, that was hard. 

Alright, and that barren 92-mile stretch from Delta, Utah to the Border Inn Motel and Casino, which greets a cyclist or motorist right at the Nevada border – that day’s ride was a grind, and I nearly ran out of water.

Rush hour traffic: Sevier Desert, Utah.

 

(I was carrying eight bottles!) 

In any case, here is how I think you can best use this blog. And I will say, I have plans to pedal across the United States again this spring and summer, when I turn 75. 

Youth must be served. 

First, you might like to look at a set of pictures from my 2007 cross-country trip (New Jersey shore to Portland, Oregon), “Photos from a Bicycle Ride across the USA.” I was 58 years old when I started off on that jaunt.

Top of Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park.

 

I have a second set of pictures, from my ride in 2011, “Pictures from a Bicycle Ride across America in 2011.” I did cheat a little, and include photos from other, shorter rides, and of places I’ve visited by car since.  I will add a few in coming days, from a automobile trip I took in 2023.

Yosemite National Park.

Scene from the Pacific Coast Highway. 
A redwood tree can grow to 360 feet - exactly equal
to a football field, including both end zones, stood on end.

 

Puebloan ruins - Chaco Canyon - c. 1200 A.D.
I drove there; I'd pedal there if I had never been before.

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Next, if you’re interested in raising money for JDRF, before I did my first ride I interviewed a number of people with type-1 diabetes, and wrote up their stories. Most were former students, or students then attending Loveland Middle School. (I retired from teaching in 2008.) If you like you can read Sidney’s story, “Petrified Wood and Purple Pumps,” and keep hitting the tab, “Newer Post,” at the bottom left corner. That will take you to posts on Adam Kavka, “Physicist, Jazz Piano Player, Type-1 Diabetic,” “Bow Hunting with Joel McElfrish,” about one of my funnier students, and Lauren Lemon, in “A Bluffsview Elementary School Star.” I also did a post on Audrey Lake, one of my great colleagues, who had handled being diabetic for more than fifty years, and never complained. 

I even included a warning about the goose that tried to assassinate me during a practice ride: “Beware of the Goose and the Squirrel.” 

 

*

In any case, I started this blog in 2007, when I first decided to pedal cross-country, to raise money for JDRF. (My youngest daughter, Emily, developed type-1 diabetes when she was fourteen, in 2005.) I had one year left to teach, before I retired, and my students got excited and helped me raise money: $13,500 in all.  

You can read a description of that entire trip in a post called “Russian Roulette with Pedals,” if you prefer. I wrote that story for a literary group to which my wife and I belong. (It sounds pretentious, I know.) 

Or you can follow along, in a string of posts I did during that ride. I had to stop and use library and motel computers in those days. That string starts with, “Emily – June 14, 2007,” and then you can follow posts from that trip, in order, by hitting the tab at the bottom, right, labeled “Older Post.” I transferred all of these posts from an older blog. By the way, I started that first cross-country ride 25 pounds overweight, and lost all 25.

It's hard being diabetic, but Emily had twins in 2021.
(Prosper, left, Story, right.)

 

Other posts include: “Slow Progress and Suffering – June 27, 2007,” “Back on the Road – July 9, 2007,” after I pedaled home to Cincinnati, for a three-day break, posts about pedaling west in Kansas, and high winds, the thrill of seeing the mountains of Colorado, and the joys of viewing Yellowstone from the seat of a bicycle. I can assure you, “Riding in a Tutu – July 31, 2007,” is not about me. 

By the way, if you don’t know, there are only six people per square mile in Wyoming, so you don’t have to fear too many cars. In a post titled, “More Updating – August 5, 2007,” I include a number of pictures I’ve taken in Yellowstone, including one from the top of the pass, where the road in the park goes past Mt. Washburn.  At that point you hit a 14-mile, downhill glide. I finally finished my first ride at Bay City, Oregon, as explained in “Safe, Sound, and Done – August 16, 2007.”

View from atop Mt. Washburn.

 

I then posted for the first time, with advice for other riders, in, “How to Bicycle across America.” That story comes from a book I wrote about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, which sums up my  theory of both teaching and pedaling across a continent. In this case, I explain how my students and the community where I taught for thirty three years, helped raise money for JDRF. I have also posted, offering advice about pedaling across the USA, in “Advice before Bicycling across the USA” and again in “Need Advice for a Bicycle Ride Across America?” 

Probably any one of those three posts would suffice.

 

* 

In 2016, I began to reorganize my blog. By that time, I had pedal across the U.S. a second time, at age 62. (I still thought it was fairly easy.) That post, titled, “Clyde Barrow on a Bike,” was fun to do. 

Due to some anomaly in how Blogspot.com works, I ended up posting updates on the 2011 ride in inverse order. So you can follow along, starting with “Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cluster Training Regimen,” which describe one of my “best” getting-ready-to-ride tricks. 

As in 2007, I was going to start my second ride across the U.S. twenty-five pounds heavier than would be ideal. 

And: I would lose all that weight again! 

The story of the trip itself begins with a post, called, “The Start of a Long and Winding Road,” with my journey beginning at Acadia National Park in Maine. (I was just looking information up last night, and I see – on January 24, 2024 – that where you will need timed-entry passes for several of the best national parks this summer, if you are on a bicycle, you can enter as you wish.) 

If you’ve never been to Acadia, do yourself a favor and go! 

In this case, keep hitting the “New Post” tab at the bottom left, and you can follow my trek across New Hampshire and Vermont, both fabulous for riding, and read about less enjoyable days in “Damp Somewhere in America.” Thrill, vicariously, to the story of all that pedaling – across New York, and the Pennsylvania panhandle, into Ohio – my state has some of the very worst roads for bicycling – and on west. (As in 2007, I made a stop in Cincinnati, to spend time with my wife.) You can follow my misadventures in posts like, “CSI: Wayne County, Indiana,” and “Hot, Hotter, Hottest.”

Some parts of Kansas have fewer people than in 1890. 
Abandoned high school near Ness City.

 

Then there were the many pleasures, as noted in “Kind Acts,” about generous people. The country now was growing more beautiful. So I enjoyed Iowa and South Dakota, and seeing the Badlands and the Black Hills from the seat of a bike. As I wrote in one post: 

If anything, the real dilemma in the Black Hills is deciding what to see and what you reluctantly have to skip.  If you go south you can enter Custer State Park and see the herd of 1,500 free-roaming buffalo (I skipped that). You can ride the 1880 train from Keystone to Hill City (I pedaled up over the mountains instead). You can swim in beautiful Horsetail Lake (which I did) and you can use the Mickelson Trail if you're on a bicycle.  So I did.

 

I highly recommend using the Mickelson Trail. You’ll be glad if you do. 

Keep hitting “New Post,” if you like, and I’ll take you across Wyoming, and into Yellowstone National Park. Then I’ll point you south to Utah, in “Give Blood! For Diabetes?” As a former history teacher, I had fun seeing the Mormon sites in Salt Lake City, and it was on to Nevada – where you can pedal the “Loneliest Highway in America.” I think there are twelve mountain passes to cross on that route, but traffic is light and it’s an adventure every day. See, for example, “Into Nevada,” and “Californian almost in View.” Eventually, I hit Reno, after an aborted shortcut by way of Gabbs, Nevada (pop. 347), and then rode up Tioga Pass, a challenge for any rider, and into Yosemite, where I spent several glorious days. I ended my trip in San Francisco, near where of my brothers live. See: “San Francisco: No More Pedaling Required.”

This lucky group went off the road in Yellowstone, but missed all the trees.

 

Some of my posts get repetitious, but I added a compilation of pictures from both cross-country rides, a ride that included Gettysburg, and more, “Pedaling for JDRF: The Big Payoff.” 

If any of this helps other riders, that’s my reward. If you need advice, feel free to send me an email at vilejjv@yahoo.com. 

Or call: 513-479-4988.

The blogger, right, with his son Seth, at the Super Bowl.
For 58 minutes, it looked like the Bengals would win.