Lovely Afternoon.

This Saturday I plan on taking baby steps towards my sewing machine. I hope you enjoy your weekend!

Cheers.

Mallory

Friend from the Road

This is an email I received from another transamerican cyclist. We met him in Yellowstone on our first night in the park. We we're cooking dinner when he pulled into camp. We noticed he didn't have much food to eat besides oatmeal so we offered him to join us for spaghetti around the campfire. Steffen was around 25 and was touring from his home state of New York all the way to Washington State. We asked if his family thought he was crazy and he replied, "oh yeah."

Steffen was on the the road to enjoy his last summer before he began medical school. We exchanged information and I had totally forgotten about him until I received his email earlier this week.

Hello friends from the road!

First off, great to meet all of you and thanks for your generosity. People like you made my trip and I am grateful. At every stop along the way, every state, every town, people were welcoming and helpful to me, a total stranger.

The first attached picture is a foggy morning in New York City's Harbor from the southern tip of Manhattan, Battery Park, on the day 1 of my trip, June 14.

I took the "scenic route" from NYC, traveling about 4,000 miles through the northern US and southern Canada. New York, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington. I plodded on through cities old and new, suburbs, small towns, rural villages, the big wheat/corn/soy bean farmlands, smaller produce areas, wine regions, ranch country, frontier country, oil country, mining of every kind, national forests, national parks, the Great Lakes, Land o' Lakes, mountain ranges (that's a BIG plural), a detour to do some proper mountaineering, some high desert, and on and on, and always a stiff headwind out of the west to assure me the trip wouldn't be too easy.

Each place had a unique story to tell and those stories more often than not came when I least expected it. Meeting many of you was a testament to that.


The road going west ended in Port Renfrew, BC, Canada on August 4. The second attached picture's background is the Pacific Ocean from the rugged southwest coast of Vancouver Island. It was a real pain dragging the bike the last hundred yards to the coast but well worth it. I then made my way down to Seattle to spend a few days with old friends, finally taking a plane back east. 7 weeks out, 7 hours back. Next time I might just take the plane both ways... :)

Please pass on my greetings to those in your circles that I met, but don't have email addresses for. If any of you happen to come through my neighborhood in Manhattan, I would certainly extend whatever hospitality I could to you.


Cheers,
Steffen

Day 2 - July 7th 2010

"


I woke up ten minutes to six and took pictures of the river while everyone was sleeping. I love seeing the bikes with all the gear leaning against the giant fir trees. I spent some time in the Word, Psalms 23 took on a whole new life for me. I continue to ask God to reveal himself to me. I pray for wisdom. The rest of the group was up making breakfast around nine. Chris had a broken spoke on his bike and after he replaced the spoke, he realized he had a bigger issue he could not fix. I was thinking to myself how frustrated and angry I would have been had my bike needed repair so early in the trip. On the other hand, Chris never got upset or angry, he simply said, "it looks like I'll be hitching a ride today." God was showing me something here... patience I guess. It's funny, Mallory and I prayed that we would have opportunities to be a light to the rest of the group, but in the instance God was using one of them to teach me something I needed for that day.




The ride on the second day was one of the greatest physical achievements of my life. We climbed over 4000 ft. in 22 miles of riding. I never dreamed I would cross a mountain range on my bicycle, but today I marked the Cascades off my list. Oregon is coming alive as I creep across the landscape on my bike. We climbed for five hours, taking a break every five miles. It was hard but I've been through worse, I feel I have great potential on the bike if I only had an opportunity to compete. The view from the Mckenzie Pass was so breath taking because of the hard work we did to reach the summit. No motorist experienced what we did at the summit that day. I'll never forget the view or what it took to get to the top of that mountain.




It was an easy fifteen miles to the bottom where we stopped in the town of Sisters, Or. for the night. We showered in a park with the water faucet coming from the ground. I took full advantage of this running water because I regretted not bathing in the river the night before. We had a nice dinner in the downtown area and ended up setting our camp up right behind the chamber of commerce on a nice patch of green grass. Hooray for urban camping.

-Trey

Day One

We’re back to continue our blog after a month long hiatus, I hope you can gain perspective of our life on the road. We had the trip of a lifetime and as we begin to process through all that we learned I hope these stories inspire you to live a faith filled existence, one that can only be sustained by the Holy Spirit of God. I’ll start the first of many entries to come with the first day I wrote in the travel journal.

Enjoy!

Day 1 – July 6^th 2010

After weeks of scrambling to prepare, hours of comforting family, and an entire moving-out process, we have finally began what will surely be an amazing journey. I’ve read many inspiring stories about people biking across the country and now I’m living that story. We will go from Eugene Oregon to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Elle, Dez, Chris, Mallory, and myself will be together for the next six to eight weeks. The rest of the group will continue on from Tulsa all the way to Boston, Mass. Mallory and I have not decided if Tulsa will be our final stop with the group; we may continue on to Boston as well. The ride today was beautiful, heading East from Eugene and following along the Mckenzie River for sixty miles until we reached the Mckenzie Bridge, where we set up camp for the night.

That first day seems like a lifetime ago. We had no idea what was in front of us, how we would develop as a group of people, how Mallory and I would come together, how our bodies would adapt to eight hours of biking every day. How our minds would come to terms with the uncertain: life without air conditioning, television, computers, ipods, cell phones, clean clothes, access to showers, time alone, beds and pillows, and our safety. We knew none of these things – and that is exactly why we knew we must embark on this journey. We never planned in our time in Eugene that this is how we would journey back to Oklahoma. However, we had begun to pray that we would have opportunities to live a “faith-filled” life. Because after all - without faith it is impossible to please God.

Having said that, it does not take 35 days of life on the road to live a “faith-filled” life. However, we knew that we would be utterly helpless on this journey without the guiding hand of God. We knew that every single day, every hour, and every minute we would need God to sustain us. When you’re riding a bicycle and all you have is a mere three feet of shoulder while twenty ton trucks whiz by at sixty five miles per hour… you start to pray more frequently then you ever have in your entire life. There would not be days on this trip where we would sit down together while eating dinner and say, “I had an off day today trying to rely completely on the Lord, I just got distracted and didn’t have time to pray or do my devotion in the morning. Tomorrow will be a better day.” That discussion never took place, and we knew the moment we signed up for this trip that the conversation wouldn’t happen. So, as you can see, this trip, while foolish and dangerous and misunderstood by many, was a direct way for God to stretch us continuously without the distraction of everyday life.

- Trey