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Note to our
readers:
We completed the trip detailed
on this site on September 25, 2003. We are gratified to have had more than
15,000 hits on our various Web pages. Our guestbook is now full. We have
kept the rest of the site alive while we attempt to transform our story into
a book-length manuscript for publication. Although the Web site Guest Book
no longer functions, we welcome e-mail. E-mail Bobbi at
bobbidarr@aol.com or Alice at
ajhoneyw@wisc.edu. We look forward to
hearing from you. |
Retirement allows new adventures, and we are ready. Bobbi has taught English
for thirty years in Cincinnati and central Ohio, and Alice has been an editor and
publisher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for twenty years. We may be too
young to retire, but we’re technically eligible, and because we’re eager to spend
more time cycling, we’ve decided to leave our respective jobs and go on the BIG
trip. We plan to leave Astoria, Oregon, in early July and head east to Bar Harbor,
Maine.
Adventure
Cycling has the right maps, and we’ve been poring over them for months. The
new Lewis and Clark route looks intriguing, so we plan to follow it eastward as
far as Minot, North Dakota. From there we intend to pick up the Northern Tier route
to Wisconsin’s border. Because Alice is familiar with Wisconsin, she has made up
a route across that state. Just west of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, we pick up the North
Lakes route, then travel by ferry across Lake Michigan and down through Michigan
into northern Indiana. There we rejoin the Northern Tier, following it to Maine.
The whole adventure should take about three months and cover 4,000 or so miles,
allowing one or more rest days each week. We have ridden with a group of friends
on a week-long bike trip almost every summer for the last twenty years—in the Midwest,
in the mountains of the West, the Southwest, the hills and mountains of the East,
and in various parts of Canada, both east and west. We’ve both dreamed of riding
across the continent for a long time, and because we are two very stubborn women,
we think we have a pretty good chance of succeeding.
We’ll have visits from the significant men in our lives every few weeks (logistics
are complicated but manageable). We figure that a few days off the bikes to hike
or swim or explore by car will be welcome now and then. In the small towns along
the route, we hope to meet interesting people who have stories to tell. By the time
we finish, we hope to have some tales ourselves.
Alice and Bobbi have been featured in a story in the Madison,
WI
Capital Times Newspaper!
For updates on the trip, be sure to visit the
Weekly Reports page