Got an Ol' Mule and Her Name is Sal...

Don't really have an old mule, but we are definitely on Lake Erie, and headed towards the Erie Canal. Today, we rode from Geneva, Ohio (near Ashtabulla) an easy 60 miles to Erie, Pennsylvania...the 11th state we've visited. After a rest day, we'll make it an even dozen states when we leave Erie and head into upstate New York! My reward to myself for the day...I get to take a bad selfie wearing my Hawaii Bicycling League jersey!

The first question we get asked whenever we stop somewhere is, "How did you get involved with this bike ride?" We each have our own stories, so I'll try to tell mine tonight, and perhaps catch you up a little on the rest of the team in tomorrow's blog. 

Barbara Moore first inspired me. I read about her in the newspaper and followed her walk every day as she walked across America. I was fourteen at the time. Barbara Moore went from San Francisco to Washington, DC, in 46 days. That is an incredible feat, and it inspired me to think about crossing under my own power. It just took a few years to get around to it!

I always did a lot of bicycling, and was fascinated by the stories of friends and relatives who had completed or attempted long bike rides, but I never had the time to actually make such a trip until after I had retired. I still dreamed of making the long journey, and this past winter, my wife Wyn said during an idle moment, "What do you want to do, if you could do anything you wanted to?" I realized that the days when I could realistically undertake a coast-to-coast bicycle ride were dwindling, so I blurted out that I still wanted to ride across the country, some day. "Then do it," she said. 

Before she changed her mind, I looked in Adventure Cycling Magazine and went through all the ads from people looking for other riders in the next few months. I found three ads looking for people going coast-to-coast during this summer. That would give me time to get half-way into shape, so I started contacting the three advertisers one at a time. The first one was an Aussie, and he e-mailed back saying that he could not make the trip this summer after all. The second one was Ron Occhiuto, the solo cyclist whom we have encountered twice so far on our trip--once in Richardton, Montana, and again in Clyde, Ohio. I spoke to him for 45 minutes one evening, but wanted to look around for a more structured ride (as if the universe wasn't good enough to structure us running into each twice, both time totally randomly). My third call was to Bryce Nurding, and the rest is history. Bryce needed a adult male rider, and preferably a veteran.

I haven't talked much about that part of my life. I was drafted in 1968, and went into the Army as a Conscientious Objector, but still had to serve, even though I was not required to carry a weapon. So I became a medic, and eventually got sent to Vietnam, where I was in the 101st Airborne Division in 1969 and 1970. The army didn't care whether I carried a weapon as long as I did my job, and they ended up giving me an Air Medal with an oak leaf cluster (that means that I acted with valor while in a helicopter that was under fire), and a Bronze Star. I was on the front lines, out in the jungles and living in villages, getting shot at, and patching up my fellow soldiers when they got wounded. I didn't think of it at first, but as I've traveled across the country meeting members of the American Legion, and meeting veterans with disabilities, but some of these wounded warriors are the same sort of people that I patched up and put onto medevac helicopters up along the back side of Hamburger Hill on the Laotian border. Raising funds to help them have a more comfortable life brings my Vietnam duties full circle, in a sense. That is why I occasionally ask people to go the Bike Trip America website and look for the "Donate" button. 100% of the nearly $14,000 we've raised goes directly to wounded veterans. There is NO overhead ... the Legionnaires are strictly volunteers. So, Bryce could tick off every box. I was a cross country rider, an adult male who could pass the Boy Scout background check, and I was a veteran, who coincidentally could patch up any injuries on the road should such a skill become a necessity. Thank heavens those skills have not been needed, knock on wood.

So anyway, that's why I'm on the bike trip. A poet, a bike aficianado, a mentor, a veteran, and still healthy enough to turn the cranks on my bicycle one long day after another. Oh, and retired, and with a wife willing to let me go on the road for the summer. However, I must say, I'm looking forward to having tomorrow as a day off. After all, I still need to have to have the strength to advise three teen-aged boys, even if one of them did just turn 17. To celebrate his birthday, Bryce went to get his hair trimmed, and came back from the barber looking stylishly chic, and more like a 16-year-old than either Ryan or Jonathan, belying his mature age (wink wink).