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Sam

Decompression

During our 68 nights away from Chapel Hill, we stayed in 58 unique towns and cities across 12 states.  Because most of the towns we were in had populations less than 1,000 people, it was typically a short process to get to know our way around town.  We ride into town from the east, see the gas station on the right, the park just behind it, and the diner another block away.  The next morning we ride out of the west side of town.  So when we got to true cities like Cleveland, Ohio, or Billings, Montana, it was almost overwhelming to figure out how to get from place to place.

With 50,000 plus residents and a campus swarmed with nervous first-year students and their accompanying families, Chapel Hill is a bustling metropolis along bike trip standards.  My first night back in town, within about an hour, I was driving (a car) again.  While it struck me as odd that I could go 35 miles per hour up a long hill, what really caught me off guard was navigation.  It’s not that I expected to forget how to get around the town where I’ve lived for 21 years, it’s that for more than two months I had never known a place so large, so well.

We rode eight days from Sandpoint, Idaho, to Anacortes, Washington, mostly on WA-20, the North Cascades Highway, after finally getting into our western-most state on our day out of Sandpoint.  Spirits were high and only Loup Loup Pass between Okanogan and Twisp, Washington, came close to bringing the group’s excitement down a notch.  But, then again, we rode down into Twisp, home of the famous Cinnamon Twisp Bakery, featuring nothing better than a Cinnamon Twisp pastry weighing in at about a pound.  Out of Twisp we only had three days until the end.

Climbing Washington Pass was the most beautiful pass we encountered.  Tall evergreen trees stayed close by the 20 odd miles to the top.  It got hot, but there were a number of crisp mountain streams cascading next to the road all the way up where we could stop for five minutes and cool off for a while.  No one was in a big rush to get to the top, so we were all spread out, some more than a couple hours.  After we snapped some photos at the top, we dropped down a couple miles to a wilderness campsite.  Our penultimate day we dropped about 5,000 vertical feet into Concrete, Washington.  For our final dinner together before the end we went to the only bar in town, enjoyed karaoke night, and then stayed up an extra hour or two going over everything we had encountered and experienced during the past nine and a half weeks.

After the customary multi-hour break right before the end, we rode the final miles into Washington Park in Anacortes on August 18.  We were greeted by friends, family, snacks and one big ocean to dip our tires in.  We took an hour to relish in the sight of the Pacific before setting up camp one last time in the park and heading out to a big pizza dinner in town.  The next day we were busy getting our bikes to a shop to ship them home and then driving the two hours down to Seattle.  We spent a couple hours looking around the city before going to one final trip dinner.

The two days between finishing, coupled with a cross-country flight home served as a valuable transition time.  The flight was one step closer to feeling that sense of finality that we were all in search of.  At first, the end just seems like a day, then two days and a third day off.  Not until classes resumed four days after I got back did it hit me that I wasn’t on the bike trip anymore.

Of course, it was only one bike trip.  Tomorrow morning at 3 a.m. Brian, Jonah and I are attempting a double-century ride to Wilmington.  This summer was not the final cross-country bike trip either.  There will be more.  More wind; more mountains; more riders; and certainly more miles.

Thanks for reading.

We biked it.  We liked it.  We’re itchin’ for the next one.

Wind farms: an inconvenient truth

I honestly thought I would never be able to say it, but we’re done with Montana.  In all, we spent 16 nights in the giant state, which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t sound like a whole lot.  But you should consider the fact that we were in our third state on day 16 and by day 33 of the trip we were in our seventh state.  Montana definitely lived up to its reputation, though.  We had long, windy days without a place to stop for water or food.  There were quick, drenching storms, cold mornings and hot days.

I’m for alternative forms of energy just as much as the next person.  Wind farms seem like they’re a good use of large windy and open spaces, which states like Montana have plenty of.  The problem comes in the inconvenience of the wind; anyone who has cycled into a 20 mile per hour headwind will tell you that it would be better to have no chance of wind, than a 50 percent chance of a tailwind.  On our way into Geyser, Montana, I stopped on the side of the road with a few other guys to read about the wind farm we were riding next to.  Think of all the coal it saves and all the energy the wind produces for the surrounding population, the signs said.  What the sign neglected to talk about, and what I couldn’t stop thinking about, was how much energy the wind in my face didn’t create for the purpose of my forward momentum.  How, if it were howling at my back, I’d be riding at least twice as fast.  But, I guess it’s a useless complaint.  We’ve made it through the windiest part of the trip and we’re moving on to the hilliest.

After Billings, we had a six-day bike trip to the town of East Glacier, just outside Glacier National Park.  All that was on our minds was the idea that we’d have three consecutive days off in one of the country’s most beautiful places.  Three days to relax, do almost nothing, and get our bikes into shape for the cascades.  As with any time off, however, we didn’t get done half the things we wanted.  Bike maintenance was put off until the evening before we left and we would get up early every day to get in as much hiking as possible.  Hiking, though tiring and time consuming, did allow our cycling muscles to take a breather.  The second and third day off, I could definitely feel those random muscles in my legs that I never knew I had starting to heal.  We even had a nice basketball court less than a hundred yards from our campsite that we never used.  A few guys shot the ball, but no games were played in the three days we were there, compared to the two hours we would play every day going through the Midwest.

We had a short trip from East Glacier to where we are now taking a day off: Sandpoint, Idaho.  It was five easy, gorgeous days through long river valleys with rolling hills and plenty of places to swim.  I was lucky enough to be biking with David and Brian when we came upon a cliff from their trip in 2007 that towered 45 feet above a deep pond.  Only five of us were there to jump the cliff and it was honestly one of the scarier things I’ve done in my life.  The following day, the whole group stopped at a 12-foot bridge over the Bull River and yesterday boasted the famous Sandpoint bridge, at about 45 feet.

Now we have an eight-day trip in front of us that will dump us into the Pacific Ocean.  In the middle of the last week we’ll have five passes to climb in five days.  It’s unreal to think that in 10 days we’ll be sleeping off our jetlag in a bed.  When the trip started, I needed seven sets of hands to count how many days left there were, now I need just one.

Thank you for all your support and for reading the website.  Make sure to follow my Twitter page and the Cycle20Ten site for daily updates.

See y’all soon.

Wind, hills, wind, hills and heat

Many miles have flown behind us since my last post.  We’ve had a number of guest riders come and go, we’ve seen a few more states, been blasted by wind, and have started the rolling hills leading up to the Rocky Mountains and Glacier National Park.  We’re currently in Matt and Tricia Jansen’s house in Billings, Montana, eating all their food, getting haircuts and doing major repairs on our bikes.

From the point of my last update in La Crescent, Minnesota, we’ve covered four states and convinced Josh to stay with us until Anacortes.  The world-renowned Lucas McLawhorn joined us for the few days to our break in Minneapolis, which meant many a game of basketball was played and even more stories from the 2003, 2005 and 2007 bike trips came out.

We spent two days off in the sanctuary of the Rice Ranch in Andover, Minnesota, just outside Minneapolis.  Dean Rice and his family stuffed us full of food, showed us around the city and didn’t get mad at how messy their house got.  But as is usual with days off there is always so much to do, I couldn’t find time to do anything more than post a few photos.

Leaving Andover was one of the harder things we’ve done this trip.  We had beautiful weather during our days off, but the morning we decided to leave the sky seemed about to open up.  We spent the next couple days getting out of Minnesota and then hit U.S. 212 and didn’t make a single turn off that until yesterday about 40 miles south of Billings, Montana.

South Dakota was better than I had hoped.  Sure, we had our fair share of bad wind.  Actually, we had more than our share, but we also had some great tailwinds, great people and one of this country’s most beautiful states.  Some days we went 60 miles and averaged 10 miles per hour, and other days we went more than 70 miles at a 17.2-mile per hour pace.  We took a day off in Newell, South Dakota, just 40 miles east of the Wyoming border.  It just so happened to be July 22: Brian’s birthday.  At about 1 a.m. a few of us spent some time wrapping plastic wrap all around Brian’s bike and panniers.  He took it well in the morning, but made the mistake of unwrapping everything, then going to breakfast.  While he and a couple other guys were at TJ’s Café, the rest of us wrapped everything in his panniers individually, then wrapped the whole bike to a picnic table.  He was a good sport about it, again, but probably regretted having his birthday on an off day when we had so much idle time.

The old saying, “All’s well that ends well,” holds quite true on a bike trip.  There is something remarkable about ending a hard day with a good tailwind or a downhill.  Yesterday, we ended up having to ride about 95 miles from Busby to Billings, Montana.  About 60 miles into the day it got into the 90s and a headwind picked up to slow us down even more.  We had a 3 or 4 mile climb just outside the city, but then a 5-mile descent into town.  A long downhill basically wipes out of your memory, all the hellish climbing, heat and wind of the previous hours turn a close to miserable day into one that is quite pleasant.  Weaving our way through town was another hard task, but as serendipity would have it, a sheriff’s deputy noticed us (we’re hard to miss, 16 blue-jerseyed bikers), and, as a fellow biker, escorted us through town, stopping traffic at all the intersections.

It feels like we’ve had an off day here in Billings, but we’ve just spent the last evening and this morning doing everything we need to do.  We’ll ride 45 miles or so north out of town and begin the 360 miles to Glacier National Park, where we’ll take 3 days off to enjoy some hiking before the final push to the coast.

As a side note, Preston the beta fish is still kickin’ it on the back of David’s bike.  Thanks for keeping up with the blog; I know it’s been a while since anything has been posted.  Check my twitter page and the Cycle20Ten website for daily mobile updates and enjoy the rest of July.

Beta fish, leeches and the mountains of Iowa

Well, as with my first post, I continue to realize how limited access to the Internet can be.  I guess I could search it out every night, but if I did that would I get to attempt double front flips at the town pool, swim across the Mississippi River to Wisconsin (or at least a random island), or let Ty and David beat Alex and me in a game of Spades?  The answer is no, but I’m sunburned and my back is red enough from those almost-double fronts that I feel satisfied enough to tear myself away from the fruits of the bike trip.

There is too much to catch up on to include all the nitty-gritty details, though we did get really gritty yesterday riding through a couple inches of rain into Harpers Ferry, Iowa.  Ty, David, Aidan, Alex and I dashed ahead to make it to town in time to watch Spain beat Germany in the World Cup.  When the game was over we found the town park, laid all our stuff out to dry since the sun was starting to poke out, and then laid down for a nap.  About 15 minutes later Alex and Aidan ran into the pavilion to wake us up so that we could get all our stuff under the roof before it all got drenched in another wave of rain.  Ty, David and I convinced ourselves that the island about 250 yards across the Mississippi was part of Wisconsin so we swam over there, battling a strong current (think infinity pool), dragons and seaweed.  We made it and were rewarded with a rainbow and I even got a pet leech on my ankle.

Coming out of Cleveland we had a couple days of pretty nasty headwinds, mixed in with some stormy weather.  On the ride from Clyde to Napoleon, Ohio, we got to stop at the Ideal Bakery in Gibsonburg, which lives up to its name.  About 6 miles out from Napoleon, the group I was riding with had to take shelter from some bad rain and lightning.  We ended up in the house of two wonderful grandparents who gave us fresh brownies, towels to dry off with, and even had a World Cup match on their big screen television; I guess you could say the afternoon turned out in our favor.

Once we hit Indiana the weather was on our side for a while.  Monroeville (our first night in the state) has a cross-country biker hostel, basketball courts and the Whippy Dip.  For those who have never happened up the town of a few hundred, the Whippy Dip possibly serves the world’s best soft-serve ice cream.

For the next few days we had a crusher tailwind so we did a few 90-mile days at an 18 mile an hour pace to put some land behind us and miles in the bank for when the winds of Montana whip us in the face.  We took a day off in Henry, Illinois on July 3 and were blessed with good people, good food, a Fourth of July fair, Bluegrass, and (for those old enough) some beer courtesy of some nice folk.  David won a pet beta fish at the fair; his name is Preston, and to our knowledge he is the only beta fish to ever make it across three states on the back rack of a bicycle.

Henry had our first town pool and now we’re starting to hit them left and right.  A few days ago we got into Dyersville, Iowa (home of the Field of Dreams) and got to enjoy a pool with a diving board and two wicked slides.  Now we’re hanging out in La Crescent, Minnesota, camping right next the pool.  With each new pool we’re upping the ante for diving board tricks.  Dives and front flips almost seem mundane next to Alex and David’s double fronts and backs, gainers, and spiral dives.  Alex actually figured out how to do a front flip and a back flip in succession.

Yesterday, some of Miles’ family met us in Harpers Ferry, Illinois, for a couple hours with plenty of snacks and a large bag for the guys of things forgotten and needed; among the items were a pair of shoes Mike forgot and a few pounds of Twizzlers for Rourke.  We also picked up two more bikers; Zach’s aunt and uncle from Wisconsin came down and are going to ride with us for another few days until Minneapolis.  While some parts of Iowa may be flat, we have definitely stumbled upon some rather large hills that run along the banks of the Mississippi River.  We’re starting to discover that there really isn’t a whole lot of truly flat land in this country, which is really quite unfortunate considering our mode of transportation.

We’ll get to Dean Rice’s house in Minneapolis on Sunday and take two days off.  Even though we’ll only have done four of 10 weeks, the city definitely is the mental halfway point.  We’ve hit more than half the states of the trip so far and just have a couple big ones to go (I’m looking at you Montana and South Dakota).

Thanks for keeping up with the website.  Make sure to check the Cycle20Ten site and my Twitter for daily updates.  There will be another post in Minneapolis when there will hopefully be time for a bigger update.

After more than a few big climbs, hot weather and nice folk: Cleveland, Ohio.

Well, we made it to our first big break.  We took a day off on day 4, but a day off here in Cleveland really makes this illusion seem like it is actually real.  It’s wonderful to be back on another bike trip with so many good guys and even more wonderful to be done with the Appalachians in Pennsylvania.  Internet access has been a lot spottier (read: non-existent) than I previously hoped, which is why it has taken me so long to post anything.

The last 11 days have been rough.  We were out of Maryland by the middle of the first day, and then had more than a week of rough Pennsylvania mountains.  We didn’t have to climb more than a handful of long passes, but we lumbered up countless 10 percent grade hills, pedal stroke by pedal stroke, only to reach the top, bomb down the other side for 10 seconds and do it all over again.  The going was not easy.

But we made it.  We took a rest day in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania on day 4 where we were able to sleep inside the local volunteer fire station and take showers.  We spent the day off playing Frisbee, basketball, watching the World Cup and tuning our bikes.

We have seen a great side of the country.  Mileage-wise we’re not even a tenth of the way done, but we have been treated wonderfully by (almost) everyone we come across.  There was the woman selling fruit on the side of the road who gave all of us free cherries and watermelon and nectarines when she learned what we were doing.  There was the man who saw our bikes, asked somebody what we were doing, and came into the restaurant where we were all eating lunch to tell us he had a daughter living in Apex, N.C., and that our meal and tip was taken care of.  There was the mother of three who took us into her house and fed us more than we could eat for breakfast.  There are the wife and husband in rural Pennsylvania who let 15 smelly bikers camp in their backyard, gave us water and an impromptu hose shower.  There are the countless people who have given us money on the road and those who have helped to raise almost 7,000 dollars so far for the UNC Lineberger Cancer Research Center.

Then there are the bad drivers: the ones that honk, yell, buzz us and flick us off.  They don’t taint the trip or make us want to stop, but help us enjoy everything else even more.

There have been a lot of firsts for a lot of the guys on the trip: First time doing laundry, first time using an ATM or going grocery shopping.  First time being away from home for so long and first time changing a spoke or flat tire.  First time camping for some and first time going without Facebook for more than a week.  And for all but a few of us, first time biking across the United States.

Now that we’re out of Pennsylvania it feels like the trip is really under way.  We’ll be out of Ohio soon and will start ticking off the flat states (until South Dakota and Montana, which will take some time).  Before we know it, we’ll be making the long haul up Washington Pass in the heat of August.

If you have already donated, thank you so much.  If you have not, please go to the Cycle20Ten website, and click on “Donate.”  Every dollar helps.  Make sure to write “Cycle20Ten” in the “In honor of” box so that we can track how much we raise.

Make sure to keep checking the Cycle20Ten website for daily and hourly updates and photos, and to check my Twitter account for updates as well.  More to come as soon as possible.

Practice ride = success

After three hot days of biking, the fifteen riders made it to Wrightsville Beach.  There were only a few minor hiccups and with a hot tub, beach, and about 20 pizzas at the end of the 200 miles, the riders were in good spirits (mostly).  You can see photos from the trip under the “Easter Weekend Ride 2010″ tab on the right-hand side of the page, or by clicking here.

We’re all excited for the mid-June start of the real thing in Havre de Grace, Maryland, though we did get a good glimpse of the heat we will be expecting in higher quantities.

Remember to keep checking here and the Cycle 20 Ten page for updates during the remaining two months before we begin and become a fan of Sam Ward Media on Twitter.

Easter weekend ride to Wilmington

Practice Run

So, as some of you may have noticed, spring is upon us and the easter bunny is hoping this way.  As such we – the group of bikers headed across the country this summer (http://www.cycle20ten.com) – are taking a practice ride this weekend.  We’ll leave bright and early Thursday morning and head south to Pittsboro, hang a Louie at the courthouse and then keep on spinning for Wilmington, which we should reach Saturday afternoon.

We’re going uber-light so I won’t have my laptop with me to do any website upkeep (i.e. posts or uploading of photos), but I will be able to update my Twitter (@samwardmedia), so if you don’t have a Twitter account, get one, and if you do, sign up to my feed.

I’ll have my camera and will be able to post photos Sunday or Monday, so if you do nothing else, keep your nose out for those.  The summer is nigh and I know I have lost more than a couple minutes of sleep thinking about it.  This weekend will prove to be demanding more than anything, but also an eye opening experience to the beauty and simplicity of a cycling lifestyle.

Gearing up for Cycle20Ten

While Punxsutawney Phil may argue with me, summer is only days away.  So, in preparation for another bicycle tour I have been collecting all the necessary equipment I’ll need (most notably, a bicycle).  But buying a bicycle is only a small portion of what needs to get done; right now I have four grant and scholarship applications lined up, but I won’t hear about those until April.

Right now I’m just getting the site ready for the abuse it will see this summer.  Make sure to become a fan of the site on Facebook and though I’m not doing anything with it right now, you’ll be able to follow me on Twitter (@samwardmedia) starting in June.

Sign up for the RSS feed or subscribe via email as well.

Be sure to keep an eye on the cycle tour’s website, Cycle20Ten Tour.

If you’d like to see my proposal that I’ve put together I’ll be posting it once my applications have been submitted.

Welcome to Sam Ward Media

Thanks for visiting Sam Ward Media.  My site is just starting so know that everything is a work in progress and changes will be frequent through the winter, so take a break from work each day to check back in.

Enjoy.