Adventures Biking Across The Country

I set out from Boston in mid-June with two close friends of mine from high school, after ceremoniously "anointing" our wheels in the Atlantic. The first leg of our trip took us across Massachusetts and northwest through upstate New York, and finally to Chicago, with a detour into Ontario. In Chicago we caught a Greyhound west to Denver, due to time constraints and a reluctance to ride 1,200 miles through the monotonous cornfields and fierce headwinds of the Midwest.

In the second leg of our trip we northwest from Denver, over the Rockies and through Wyoming to Yellowstone National Park. From there we traveled to Missoula, then west through Idaho along the Snake River to the Oregon border. Then it was basically a straight shot through the near desert of Eastern Oregon all the way to the Cascade Range, our last real mountain range, and from there we virtually coasted the next couple hundred miles all the way down to the Pacific Ocean.

That's the basic outline of the trip, but the real fun was in all the the mix-ups and misadventures we had along the way. Along the road we encountered bears and we encountered madmen, and all variety of vagabond eccentrics, traveling on bike, on unicycle, and on foot. We were caught in violent storms at 12,000 feet, with winds so fierce we were forced from our bikes and had to scuttle along a ridge for fear of being blown into the abyss. We were poured on, sleeted on, and hailed on. Often times we felt like we were losing our minds or having the time of our lives, and couldn't tell which.

• Tuesday September 14, 2010 at 7:30pm (Outing Club Meeting)
• Japes Lodge, Cornell University
• Everyone is invited to attend - free and open to the public.

-- MattStillerman - 13 Sep 2010