The flight from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic across the United States takes about five and a half hours. Driving it sensibly takes between five and seven days. We rode bicycles from Astoria, Oregon, on the Pacific coast to Yorktown, Virginia, on the Atlantic. It took us 77 days.
Flying coast to coast means travelling more or less in a straight line for fewer than 3,000 miles. Roads, unfortunately, have other ideas. Mountains intervene. Rivers object. Lakes sit about like enormous administrative errors. Interstate highways carve ruler-straight lines across parts of the country, but cyclists cannot spend two and a half months being buffeted by articulated lorries and surviving on petrol-station burritos. We needed quieter roads, which meant detours, deviations and a much longer route. By the time we reached Virginia, we had covered 4,200 miles.
The route we followed was established in 1976 and has been maintained ever since by the Adventure Cycling Association. Based in Missoula, Montana, the organisation produces detailed cycling maps showing roads, gradients, towns, campsites, motels, grocery stores, bike shops and water stops. In much of rural America, where towns can appear separated by distances that seem personally insulting, those maps make the journey not merely easier but possible.
We always intended to ride west to east. Plenty of cyclists travel the other way, retracing the direction of European exploration and colonisation: East Coast towards West, Lewis and Clark and all that. Along the route, entire towns still celebrate this westward mythology of expansion, endurance and manifest destiny. We, however, had weather to consider. In the Rockies, the safe riding window can narrow alarmingly fast. Hoosier Pass, at 11,500 feet, does not negotiate with optimism. Snow can block the route well into summer and return earlier than seems remotely reasonable. Starting in the west before midsummer gave us the best chance of crossing the Rockies before August brought the increasing risk of snow.
We brought our own bikes from the UK and assembled them in Seattle. They had steel frames, sturdy enough to carry front and rear panniers stuffed with everything required for a transcontinental ride: tent, stove, tools, spare parts, clothes, first-aid kit and the steadily accumulating debris of life on the road. We hired a car, drove south-west to Astoria, had the bikes serviced, loaded the panniers and finally set off.
Oregon
Oregon is enormous. Crossing it took us 11 days. The coast stays cool, damp and stubbornly grey, but inland Oregon quickly turns hot and dry. At the beginning of a journey like this, the body requires negotiation. Legs complain. Shoulders sulk. Saddles become instruments of medieval jurisprudence. We started cautiously, riding shorter distances while our fitness adjusted to the loaded bikes.
The route carried us down the damp coastline through Seaside, Tillamook and Pacific City before turning inland towards Monmouth and Eugene. At McKenzie Bridge we camped in a basic US Forest Service campsite beside the river. We were the only people there. Darkness settled heavily among the trees and every sound in the forest seemed designed to suggest imminent bear activity. Perhaps bears really were nearby. Either way, they courteously declined to introduce themselves.
As we crossed the Cascade Mountains and descended towards the John Day Valley, the distances lengthened and the temperature climbed. Long days in the saddle under fierce sun created a constant need for water and calories. We carried three water bottles each and developed a committed relationship with roadside cafés, where second breakfasts became less an indulgence than a survival strategy. The combination of cycling shorts, T-shirts and helmet vents also produced deeply unfortunate tanning patterns. My arms and calves turned a healthy bronze while the vents in my helmet burned pale stripes into my scalp, as though someone had attempted to grill my head.
Between Redmond and Prineville we entered landscape that until then had existed for us mainly through Hollywood westerns: huge skies, flat-topped bluffs and distances that made Europe feel cramped and overfurnished. We learned how to manage mountain climbs properly — stopping at the foot of major passes for the night so we could tackle them on fresh legs in the morning, rationing water carefully, searching constantly for scraps of shade.
We also began meeting other cyclists riding the same route. At Ochoco Reservoir we met Evans, who was heading to Boston, and rode with him for the next ten days. Climbing out of Mitchell, we encountered Mike, travelling westbound. He gave us useful information about the road ahead and handed over a can of pepper spray he had bought in Virginia for protection against aggressive dogs. He had never needed to use it. Apparently a whistle proved more effective, which feels faintly humiliating for the dogs.
At Prairie City we stayed at Sag’s Motel, just east of town. The place had the strange, melancholy atmosphere that certain roadside motels seem to specialise in. Construction workers far from home played cards in the laundry room and queued for the payphone to call their families. Our room contained cable television and a massage chair, which felt less like motel furniture and more like evidence from a police investigation.
That evening, exhausted, we cycled downhill into town for dinner. On the ride back, the motel owner spotted us labouring up the hill, pulled over in his pick-up truck and rescued us with the brisk efficiency of a man who had seen enough suffering for one day. Oregon produced many moments of unexpected kindness. At a campsite near Oxbow Dam, a nearby store delivered cold beer to us free of charge after we had briefly stopped there earlier in the day. In the hierarchy of charitable acts, this ranks surprisingly high.
The campsite beside the water at Oxbow was our final night in Oregon. The following morning we rode along the Snake River, over the Brownlee dam, crossed the state line and entered Idaho.
Idaho
Idaho greeted us with a six-mile climb in soaring heat, which felt unnecessarily aggressive given that we had only just arrived. We took a rest day in Cambridge to celebrate passing the 700-mile mark — less a sporting milestone by that point than proof that our knees still retained some basic functionality.
The following day we rode to New Meadows, where a complete stranger paid for our lunch. This became one of the unexpected themes of the journey. America often presents itself abroad as a place permanently on the verge of either civil war or a monster-truck rally, yet throughout the trip we repeatedly encountered startling generosity from people who owed us absolutely nothing.
The nearest campsite lay at Zim’s Hot Springs, where visitors bathe in naturally heated artesian water. We pitched the tent and I wandered back to reception, only to find a man behind the counter drinking alcohol, playing loud music and cleaning a semi-automatic rifle with the calm concentration of someone repairing a lawnmower. The situation felt objectively alarming, though the soundtrack was excellent. We decided to stay.
The next day we rode on to White Bird, a tiny settlement of fewer than 100 people that seemed quietly stranded by modernity. The old winding road through town has largely been replaced by a newer highway climbing the mountain above it, carrying traffic — and therefore money — elsewhere. White Bird now feels like a place motorists hurry past while barely noticing it exists.
We stopped at the Silver Dollar Bar, where the staff greeted us warmly and offered us a patch of ground beside the building to pitch our tent. They also advised us very firmly not to accept an alternative camping offer at a nearby RV park, which they claimed was run by a white supremacist. We took their advice on both counts. Even so, sleeping in a tent beside a busy bar leaves one with a lingering sense of being lightly observed, rather like an exhibit at a low-budget outdoor museum.
The old road climbing out of White Bird rises through a series of savage hairpin bends. Each straight section allows a cyclist briefly to believe progress is being made before the next corner tilts upward and removes all optimism. We crawled up the eight-mile climb in about two hours before descending towards Lowell later that afternoon.
From Lowell to Powell, the route follows the Lochsa River for 66 miles through deep wilderness. The road is beautiful and reasonably quiet, though “quiet” in this context mostly means “a place where your disappearance would take some time to notice”. Between the two settlements there is almost nothing: no cafés, motels or houses, only forest, river and long stretches of solitude.
During one break we spotted deer moving silently on the opposite bank. Occasionally a truck or RV would pass through the valley, briefly interrupting the stillness before disappearing again into the trees. Eleven miles south of Powell we came across the aftermath of a serious accident. A huge truck had left the road the previous night and plunged into the river, where it now lay half-submerged on its side in the fast-flowing water. Workers stood in the river passing cargo piece by piece back to the bank. Remarkably, nobody had been badly injured, which seemed difficult to reconcile with the violence the crash must have involved.
The following day we climbed Lolo Pass, crossed another state line and entered Montana, reaching Missoula by late afternoon.
Montana
We took a rest day in Missoula, partly to recover and partly to perform emergency diplomacy with our bicycles. We visited the headquarters of the Adventure Cycling Association, stocked up on supplies, bought another gas canister for cooking and handed the bikes over for much-needed mechanical attention. By this stage the drivetrains had accumulated several states’ worth of dirt and were beginning to sound like agricultural machinery. A professional cleaning and gear adjustment transformed them from grinding protest vehicles back into bicycles.
Missoula also marked the point where our routes separated from Evan’s. He continued east towards North Dakota while we turned south in the direction of Yellowstone.
We camped at Darby that night and experienced the first of several overnight thunderstorms of the journey. Sleeping in a tent while thunder detonates directly overhead and lightning flashes through the fabric is deeply educational. One learns, for example, exactly how little nylon stands between oneself and the atmosphere’s more violent opinions.
Between Darby and Wisdom the route crosses Chief Joseph Pass and passes the Big Hole National Battlefield. The landscape there carries the weight of difficult history. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce led his people away from conflict with the US Army during the 1870s, attempting to escape towards Canada. At Big Hole, American troops attacked the Nez Perce while they camped in the valley below. The place now sits peacefully among mountains and pine forests, though the history beneath it remains raw and unmistakable.
We stayed overnight in the tiny town of Wisdom and received an invitation to join the local Independence Day celebrations at six o’clock the following morning. Rural Montana does not approach patriotism half-heartedly. The event featured speeches, a flag-raising ceremony, a bugle call, a communal singing of The Star-Spangled Banner, and free blueberry pancakes with coffee. Nobody there appeared remotely embarrassed by loving their country openly and enthusiastically — something Europeans often treat with the same suspicion normally reserved for pyramid schemes.
This part of Montana is ranching country: huge valleys, fenced pastureland, rivers full of fly-fishermen and long histories shaped by Lewis and Clark, violent settlement, gold rushes and the arrival of the railroad. The past does not feel especially distant there. It lingers in the names of towns, in the preserved frontier buildings and in the slightly mythic way people talk about the land.
From Wisdom we rode on to Dillon, a larger town that acts as a base for tourists exploring the surrounding valleys and mountains. From there we continued to Virginia City, a former gold-mining settlement where many original nineteenth-century buildings still stand. Unlike some historic towns that resemble elaborate theme parks, Virginia City still feels faintly authentic, as though somebody simply stopped the clock and left.
After Virginia City we climbed into the mountains and descended towards the Madison Valley and Ennis. Viewed from above, the Madison Valley was perhaps the most astonishing landscape of the entire journey. The scale seemed almost structurally unsound. Sunlight moved across the valley floor in huge bands of gold and shadow; fields shifted through impossible colours; mountain ranges faded layer upon layer into the far distance until they looked painted rather than real. Some views impress you. Others quietly rearrange your understanding of space. This was the second kind.
The following day somehow managed to continue the theme. We watched cowboys working cattle with the sort of calm competence that cinema has spent decades unsuccessfully trying to imitate. We saw more immense scenery, passed rivers crowded with fly-fishermen and spotted a mountain lion moving through long grass beside the road — a brief reminder that, despite the gift shops and recreational vehicles, parts of the American West remain genuinely wild.
That evening we reached West Yellowstone, the busy frontier town that serves as one of the gateways to Yellowstone National Park, and pitched our tent there for the night
Wyoming
You cannot simply cycle through Yellowstone National Park as though it were an unusually scenic bypass. The place demands time and attention. We took two days off, accepted a lift with all our equipment, stayed in a hotel beside Yellowstone Lake and attempted, briefly, to behave like ordinary tourists. We visited waterfalls, geysers and bubbling mud pools, and spent hours spotting wildlife: bison, elk, black bears and mountain goats appearing at intervals like celebrity cameos.
Cycling through Yellowstone is possible, but “possible” does not necessarily mean “sensible”. The roads are narrow, traffic builds heavily during summer, and RVs the size of medium naval vessels drift round corners with alarming unpredictability. For safety — and because being flattened by a Winnebago would have felt like an undignified end to the expedition — we accepted another lift out of the park.
Beyond Yellowstone we entered Grand Teton National Park and camped at Colter Bay Village. Bear precautions dominated the evening. We stored food, toiletries and anything remotely edible-smelling inside metal bear boxes while sleeping ourselves in a thin fabric tent nearby, which felt rather like locking sandwiches in a safe before spending the night outdoors dressed as sausages.
The scenery around the Tetons is almost offensively beautiful: huge lakes reflecting sharp white mountains that look less like geography and more like the background artwork from an expensive whisky advertisement. Despite the views, we remained slightly anxious about the following day’s climb over Togwotee Pass.
It took us more than three hours to reach the summit. The descent should have been glorious but was interrupted by major roadworks, forcing us into the back of a contractor’s pickup truck for part of the journey. Being transported downhill with bicycles rattling around beside us felt faintly like cheating, though by then we had abandoned any strict moral code regarding assistance from internal combustion engines.
We stayed that night in Dubois at the Trails End Motel, largely because of the sign outside which read: “Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.” Rural America often expresses itself with a level of theatricality that Europeans would normally reserve for amateur dramatics.
Weather in Wyoming changes with unnerving speed. During dinner the sky suddenly darkened, winds rose and enormous tumbleweeds bowled down the street like extras fleeing a disaster film. Later that evening we learned that Butch Cassidyhad spent time in Dubois living off the proceeds of a Colorado bank robbery. The town still carried that slightly lawless Western atmosphere, though nowadays the danger seemed more likely to come from weather, exhaustion or motel plumbing.
The road from Dubois to Lander passes through the Wind River Reservation, home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho peoples. At Fort Washakie we shared a picnic table with two local young women who invited us to a sundown gathering later that weekend. We would gladly have stayed, but long-distance cycling imposes a strangely relentless discipline. Every extra day stopped somewhere creates another day that must eventually be ridden.
At Lander we faced a logistical problem. Between there and Rawlins stretched 126 miles with virtually no services. We discussed the situation with Bill and Jim, two cyclists heading towards Pueblo, Colorado, whom we met the following morning. In the end, all four of us made it as far as Jeffrey City, roughly halfway across.
The ride itself felt punishing. Much of the route climbed gradually uphill into fierce crosswinds that forced us at times to lean sideways just to remain upright. Before reaching Sweetwater Station we crawled up a long, strength-draining incline under fierce heat, then suddenly found the wind behind us and flew into Jeffrey City at exhilarating speed.
Jeffrey City itself felt like the remains of a vanished civilisation. During the uranium-mining boom the town held around 7,000 residents. By the time we arrived, perhaps 45 people remained, scattered among abandoned buildings and fading signs. The only accommodation available was the Top Hat Motel. Nobody appeared to be there. A handwritten sign instructed prospective guests to call a number. We did. Somebody arrived eventually, unlocked a room and gave us a bed for the night — a transaction conducted with the vague dreamlike quality that many things in Wyoming seemed to possess.
The following day brought another 68 miles to Rawlins: fierce heat, little shade and more crosswinds. By then Wyoming’s grandeur had begun to wear us down slightly. The state’s high plains desert has a stark beauty, but after days of battling wind across semi-arid landscapes at 7,000 feet elevation, subtle distinctions between one vast empty space and another become harder to appreciate.
Road choice also narrowed considerably. For part of the journey we had no option but to ride on Interstate 80 itself. Imagine cycling uphill into a headwind for hours in temperatures in the nineties, struggling to maintain nine miles an hour while enormous trucks thunder past a few feet away, and you begin to understand the mood of that day.
We spent our final night in Riverside and crossed into Colorado the following morning.
Colorado
Crossing into Colorado felt like entering a different country. After Wyoming’s vast, dusty severity, the landscape softened: more trees, greener fields, actual flowers, signs that nature had decided to relax slightly. We stayed overnight in Waldenand left at six the following morning in an attempt to beat both the heat and the climb over Willow Creek Pass at 9,620 feet.
Long-distance cycling teaches you that “starting early” gradually shifts from healthy outdoor enthusiasm to outright tactical survival. By midday the sun at altitude could feel actively vindictive.
We reached Kremmling exhausted but triumphant, rewarded with two of civilisation’s finest inventions: air conditioning and a proper dinner.
Beyond Kremmling the route became more difficult again — constant climbs and descents, heavy traffic and roads with little or no shoulder. Riding there required complete concentration. A moment’s drift towards the traffic lane could have produced an intimate encounter with a recreational vehicle roughly the size of a suburban bungalow.
At Silverthorne we met Ian, a cyclist riding from the southern tip of Argentina all the way to Alaska. Encounters like this provided useful perspective. Up until then we had regarded ourselves as moderately adventurous; beside Ian we looked more like two people taking an unusually committed route to the garden centre.
A thunderstorm struck while we were in Silverthorne and we waited it out there before taking the excellent bike path into Breckenridge. Breckenridge in summer is one of those mountain towns that somehow manages to combine expensive outdoor clothing, artisan coffee and alarming quantities of real estate optimism. In winter it fills with skiers. In summer it fills with people who own skis and wish to discuss them.
We stayed at the Fireside Inn before tackling the biggest climb of the entire journey the following day: Hoosier Pass, at 11,542 feet.
There is only a narrow seasonal window for crossing the higher Rockies by bicycle. Snow can arrive from October onwards and linger well into late spring, leaving perhaps four reliable months to get through. By July the roads were clear, but the altitude, heat and increasingly thin air had begun to affect me noticeably. Climbing towards the summit required more frequent stops for water and breath. Even simple movements started to feel oddly theatrical, as though performed underwater.
We reached the top with just enough time for celebratory photographs before another thunderstorm swept in across the mountains. Rangers urged everyone to descend immediately, which seemed wise given that standing on an exposed summit holding metal bicycles during an electrical storm felt unlikely to feature in any serious survival handbook.
We hurried down and took shelter in the first café we encountered while hailstones hammered against the roof and windows outside.
That evening we stayed in Fairplay at the Hand Hotel. At dusk we watched a black bear running at astonishing speed across open ground as another storm rolled in over the mountains. Bears, we discovered repeatedly, possess an unsettling ability to appear both majestic and faintly comedic at the same time.
After weeks of climbing, Colorado finally rewarded us with serious descending. From Fairplay we dropped rapidly towards Hartsel before a short climb over Currant Creek Pass and then a glorious descent from roughly 10,000 feet down towards 5,000. At points we reached speeds of 35 miles per hour, flying downhill through warm air with the rare sensation that gravity had temporarily decided to become helpful.
We reached Cañon City still feeling surprisingly fresh and decided to continue on to Florence. The following morning we rode into Pueblo, officially the halfway point of the journey.
The ride from Florence to Pueblo proved comparatively easy, though it did include passing the federal Supermax prison — the facility designed to house some of America’s most dangerous criminals. There is something slightly motivational about cycling past a maximum-security prison while free to continue moving east under your own power.
In Pueblo we said goodbye to Bill and Jim and stayed for a rest day, servicing the bikes and preparing mentally for the second half of the journey.
Colorado turned out to be a state of dramatic contrasts. West of Pueblo we had crossed mountains and high passes. East of Pueblo the landscape flattened abruptly into prairie. Riding from Pueblo to Ordway, the miles suddenly became easy. We arrived before lunch, ate in the park and decided to follow up an accommodation recommendation given to us by cyclists we had met back in Wyoming.
A woman — I shall call her Marion — had developed a reputation among long-distance cyclists for opening her home to riders passing through eastern Colorado. We found the house and discovered the stories were true. Two other cyclists had already arrived. That evening Margaret cooked an excellent Chinese meal for everyone and we slept extraordinarily well, enjoying for once the strange luxury of not having to inflate our own beds or worry about bears.
Eastern Colorado struck us as remarkably empty. On some days we saw only a handful of people outside passing vehicles. The landscape stretched endlessly into sandy prairie and low rolling hills fading towards the horizon. Heat continued to dominate the ride and the wind remained stubbornly in our faces until we finally crossed the state line into Kansas between Eads and Tribune.
Kansas
As we rode deeper into Kansas, the prairie gradually gave way to farmland. The terrain flattened completely, roads stretched arrow-straight towards the horizon and grain elevators appeared in the distance like giant metallic cathedrals devoted to wheat. In that landscape, grain elevators became strangely important psychologically. Spotting one on the horizon meant another town, another water stop, another small proof that we were actually moving across this enormous state rather than remaining trapped forever inside the same hot afternoon.
In Tribune we searched for accommodation and eventually asked for help at the small city hall. This somehow led to us renting an entire guest house for fifty dollars — a bargain so suspiciously good by British standards that it initially felt possible we had accidentally purchased the property outright.
The house also came equipped with a tornado shelter.
Until then, tornadoes had occupied roughly the same part of my imagination as sharks or avalanches: things that certainly existed, but mostly for the benefit of documentaries and disaster films. Finding a dedicated underground shelter attached to ordinary domestic accommodation delivered a more sobering message. People here did not regard tornadoes as theoretical. They regarded them as seasonal.
As we continued east, the repetitive nature of the landscape created a curious distortion of time and distance. Fields blurred together. Horizons barely changed. Progress became measurable mainly through roadside infrastructure and the slow migration of grain elevators from distant specks to looming structures and finally to places disappearing behind us.
We occasionally met cyclists travelling westbound, many of whom brought alarming stories about the Ozarks and parts of Kentucky further ahead. Back in Ordway one rider had described being forced off the road by hostile drivers somewhere in the Ozarks. The cyclists we met in Kansas seemed to confirm that the difficulties ahead might not simply involve hills and weather.
From Dighton through Larned, Hutchinson, Newton, Eureka, Chanute and eventually Pittsburg, the heat never relented. When the wind turned against us it felt exactly like cycling into an industrial hair dryer. We began buying large bags of ice from petrol stations to cool our water bottles and hydration bladders, occasionally squirting each other with freezing water in acts of desperate heat management masquerading as humour.
Between Hutchinson and Newton the corn harvest had left loose cobs scattered across the roadside, attracting turtles out from the undergrowth to feed. Margaret repeatedly stopped to rescue them from traffic and carry them to safety, turning herself briefly into a sort of mobile reptile evacuation service.
Eastern Kansas also marked the point where dogs began to feature more prominently in our thinking. Between Chanute and Pittsburg we had several close encounters. The first involved a pack of labradors charging towards us from a property beside the road. We reacted by blowing the whistles we had carried since Oregon, and somewhat remarkably this worked. The dogs slowed abruptly, looking baffled, as though somebody had violated an important procedural rule of pursuit.
The second encounter felt more unsettling. Those dogs remained perfectly silent and motionless, watching us from near a farmhouse with the fixed concentration of nightclub security staff deciding whether somebody’s evening is about to deteriorate sharply. We suspected they would attack if we came any closer.
By then we had already begun mentally preparing ourselves for Kentucky, where almost every westbound cyclist we met had warned us about aggressive dogs. Long-distance touring across America involves many forms of endurance: mountains, heat, storms, loneliness and, eventually, the growing realisation that a surprising percentage of the nation’s canine population appears deeply opposed to bicycles.
Missouri
We spent six days riding west to east across Missouri. Before arriving there, several cyclists had advised us to avoid the Ozarks altogether and take an alternative route. We ignored them and stayed on course. In retrospect, Missouri became one of the most complicated parts of the journey: remarkable kindness existing side by side with moments of genuine unease.
From the outset, the generosity stood out. In Golden City we stayed at a cyclists’ hostel where we met Fred, a veteran rider completing the route for the third time. Fred dispensed advice with the weary authority of a man who had already suffered for our benefit and preferred that others learn from it. At one point he warned us cryptically that we were heading towards “the rough stuff”. At the time we assumed he meant the hills.
In Houston we prepared for another early five o’clock departure when a violent thunderstorm erupted overhead. We retreated to the motel and waited for conditions to improve. A few hours later we tried again, only to ride four miles before lightning bolts began striking fields beside the road with unnerving proximity. We abandoned any pretence of stoicism and took shelter at the nearest farmhouse, where the family invited us onto the porch and supplied us steadily with coffee while the storm passed.
At Summersville a man at a corner store became curious about our trip and handed us free cans of soda. These moments happened repeatedly across America: people seeing two cyclists and deciding, almost instinctively, to help in whatever small way they could.
But Missouri also carried a harder edge. On the road towards Eminence I became badly rattled by a man in a pickup truck who appeared deliberately to drive towards me. Elsewhere motorists shouted from passing vehicles or leaned on their horns as they overtook. None of it became outright violence, but much of it felt hostile enough to keep us permanently tense.
Part of the tension came from the terrain itself. The endless flatness of Kansas disappeared abruptly, replaced by violent rolling hills that turned the road into a kind of asphalt roller coaster. We would grind slowly uphill in low gear, barely moving, crest the summit and suddenly find the road dropping away beneath us at terrifying speed towards a bridge or river far below. Then the entire process repeated itself again. And again. And again.
For motorists, the roads must have been frustrating. Drivers could not see over the short steep hills ahead and frequently found themselves trapped behind heavily loaded cyclists inching uphill at walking pace. None of this excuses aggressive behaviour, obviously, but it perhaps explains some of the irritation simmering behind us on those roads. Fred’s warning about “the rough stuff” now began to make more sense.
Dogs also became a serious feature of Missouri cycling. Between Marshfield and Houston, many houses seemed to come equipped with at least one highly motivated canine security system. Most dogs merely barked as we passed. Some charged into the road after us.
The pattern became so predictable that whenever we rounded a bend and spotted a farmhouse, we automatically raised whistles to our mouths in readiness. Remarkably, the whistles worked on many dogs, apparently confusing them just long enough for us to escape.
One small dog, however, refused to cooperate with the established protocol. He sprinted towards us enthusiastically, tail wagging furiously, entirely immune to whistle deterrence. We tried to avoid him and then attempted to outrun him, but he continued following us mile after mile with unwavering emotional commitment. On downhill sections we would finally lose sight of him, only for him to reappear several minutes later, still charging after us with tiny ecstatic determination. Eventually we persuaded someone to hold him while we escaped up the road. Even then I half-expected him to emerge beside us somewhere in Virginia.
Between Eminence and Ellington the hills grew steeper still. On one climb we finally surrendered and walked to the summit. By the time we reached Ellington we were exhausted and hungry, only to discover that the motel was full and nobody seemed entirely certain whether camping anywhere in town was permitted.
We found the reception at Ellington a little spooky. We ate aggressively at a local buffet before deciding to continue another fifteen miles to Centerville, where somebody suggested we might find camping near the police station.
To our surprise, we ended up pitching our tent outside the county courthouse and spent a perfectly decent night there. The local police were extraordinarily kind, allowing us access to the building’s bathrooms during the night. There is something uniquely reassuring about sleeping beside a courthouse after a day spent imagining death by pickup truck, lightning strike or territorial dog.
The following day we rode to Farmington by the shortest route available. It was our final night in Missouri and, if we were honest, we felt ready to leave. Ahead lay the Mississippi River, Illinois and, we hoped, slightly less emotional terrain.
Illinois
Crossing into Illinois felt psychologically important. After Missouri, we convinced ourselves we were entering calmer, more temperate territory — a place where motorists might overtake politely and dogs perhaps possessed hobbies beyond attempted homicide.
The first town we reached was Chester, proudly known as the home of Popeye. Chester was the birthplace of Elzie Crisler Segar, creator of the sailor with the impossible forearms and spinach dependency. The town embraces this connection enthusiastically. There are statues, a museum and an annual festival devoted to Popeye and his companions. Few places commit so completely to a single cartoon intellectual property, though in fairness Britain once built an economy around a bear in a raincoat.
In Chester we met several westbound cyclists, including Ben and Maria, and spent the evening camping together in the town park. Encounters with other riders had by then become part support group, part information exchange and part travelling mythology. News travelled east and west along the route: road closures, dangerous dogs, generous hosts, terrifying climbs and cafés with unusually large breakfasts.
Southern Illinois sits close to both the Mississippi River and the industrial traffic moving along it. Leaving Chester, we spent some uncomfortable miles sharing the road with coal trucks before finally escaping onto the levee road running beside the river. Riding there felt calmer immediately: flat roads, broad skies and the river moving silently beside us through the heat.
We reached Carbondale around lunchtime without catastrophe, which by that stage counted as an excellent day. The early arrival gave us time to visit a local bike shop and deal with the usual maintenance anxieties that accompany long-distance cycling. Every unfamiliar noise from the bike had started to sound financially threatening.
Between Carbondale and Elizabethtown we experienced several of those improbable roadside encounters that had become one of the defining features of the trip. A passing motorist stopped to tell us that her husband and son had completed the same route. Later, near Tunnel Hill, another woman pulled over because she happened to know somebody we had briefly spoken to earlier in Goreville and wanted to ask whether we might like something to eat or drink.
At that point in the journey, the answer to that question was always yes.
She invited us in, produced cold drinks and watermelon, and gave us a welcome opportunity to sit in the shade and talk. One of the pleasures of travelling slowly by bicycle is that chance encounters remain possible. Had we been driving through these places at motorway speed, none of these conversations would ever have happened. We would simply have become two more anonymous vehicles passing through.
We reached Eddyville by early afternoon and waited out another storm at a service station before continuing to Elizabethtown. By then our legs had begun protesting seriously about the constant hills. Southern Illinois resembled Missouri more than we had expected: steep rollers, humid air and roads that never seemed content to remain level for long.
Finding accommodation in Elizabethtown proved unexpectedly difficult, but eventually we secured a room at the Rose Hotel overlooking the Ohio River. The hotel possessed the faded elegance of an older America: creaking floors, high ceilings and rooms carrying the accumulated atmosphere of many decades of travellers. It was also expensive enough to remind us that charm usually arrives attached to a billing structure.
The view across the river, however, made the cost easier to accept. As evening settled over the water, the whole place acquired a quiet stillness that contrasted sharply with the tension we had often felt riding through Missouri. The terrain remained difficult, but mentally we had started to relax again.
The following morning we cycled the short distance to Cave-in-Rock, where a small ferry carried us across the Ohio River and into Kentucky.|
Kentucky
The ferry deposited us in western Kentucky, where we stopped for food at Marion and met John, a long-distance cyclist from Cincinnati. On reaching Sebree we were welcomed at the First Baptist Church, which maintains a tradition of putting up passing cyclists. The facilities were excellent, as was the generosity of Bob, the pastor, and his wife, who cooked us — along with two other cyclists staying there — the first home-cooked meal of the entire trip. We slept gratefully on mattresses in a room inside the church, which felt like an act of considerable institutional faith given the state we had arrived in.
The next day began on flatter roads. It was the first day back at school after the summer holidays, and the local school-bus operation caught our attention: children collected by the bus, traffic obediently halted in both directions while they boarded. It seemed a sensible system, particularly out in the countryside, where the alternative is presumably a very long walk. For the first time we saw tobacco growing in the fields, which we had not expected, and which lent the landscape a faintly illicit glamour. Temperatures remained in the upper nineties. We bought two bags of ice to keep ourselves cool and reached Falls of Rough in the mid-afternoon, securing a motel room in the nick of time. Thunder, lightning, wind and rain duly followed. We were extremely grateful to be inside a building rather than negotiating the weather’s opinions through a sheet of nylon.
The following morning the storm had left its calling card: fallen branches scattered across the road. The locals were friendly, we tried corn bread for the first time, and we reached the Lincoln memorial area by mid-afternoon. Accommodation again proved elusive, but eventually we found a place near Hodgenville where, at very short notice, we were given an evening meal and made thoroughly welcome. A splendid breakfast followed in the morning. From there we headed to Bardstown and then on to Springfield.
From Springfield the road climbed repeatedly to Harrodsburg, where we sat in the park and drank coffee beside Daniel Boone’s fort. Then came forty-five miles of ups and downs, twists and turns, before we arrived in Berea at around four o’clock, hot and tired — though not too tired to ride out again to Walmart and a nearby Chinese buffet, this being our modest way of celebrating Margaret’s birthday. We were still enjoying the journey, but the finish had begun to occupy our thoughts. It had been a long road, and we had not taken a rest day since Pueblo. The buffet was excellent. We gorged ourselves with the single-minded devotion of people who had stopped pretending to have standards.
The next morning we had barely managed three miles east of Berea, climbing a hill still damp from overnight rain, when we heard a screech behind us and then a bang. We looked back and saw nothing. A hundred yards down the hill we found a four-wheel-drive pickup wrapped around a tree at the roadside. We checked on the driver and slowed the traffic until somebody else stopped; Margaret bandaged the man’s arm while I held back the cars, and eventually he was helped out of the vehicle and taken back to Berea. Had he passed a little earlier, or had we been a fraction slower up the hill, the arithmetic of the morning would have looked very different. It unnerved us for hours. There were more climbs as the day wore on and the sun grew fiercer, and we passed several closed petrol stations that might otherwise have refreshed us, each one feeling like a small personal betrayal. We made for Booneville, intending to camp behind the Presbyterian Church, but not before the day had cooled. In the meantime we worked the supermarket, the library, and anywhere else equipped with air conditioning, until the sun finally set and the temperature relented.
The heat, and the thunderstorm that followed it, disturbed our sleep, and it was eight o’clock before we had packed and set off. The morning was cooler but the climbs unforgiving and we ended the day at the Motel 80, just outside Hindman. This was eastern Kentucky, and it felt noticeably less prosperous — smaller properties, more caravans, more front gardens decorated with the wrecked cars. The Motel 80 did little to lift the mood. The bath water ran brown, the lights either failed to work or were broken outright, the pillows reeked of cigarettes, and we were bitten in the night by some species of insect that declined to introduce itself. We left as early as we could, rode on through Pippa Passes and past vast open-cast mining operations that were flattening mountains and reached Elkhorn City in the late afternoon. We checked into a better motel which offered a discount to passing cyclists.
This was our final stop in Kentucky before we crossed the state line into Virginia.
Virginia
Entering Virginia required an immediate and rather rude climb up towards Breaks Interstate Park. Wonderful to reach Virginia, certainly, but the state chose to greet us less with southern charm than with gradients apparently designed by somebody holding a grudge against cyclists.
The afternoon introduced another brute of a climb: the ascent towards the “Big A” mountain near Honaker. By this stage of the trip we had accepted an important truth about ourselves — one major climb a day was heroic; two bordered on emotional vandalism. The Appalachian terrain delivered steep ascents and descents with relentless enthusiasm. Every day became a sequence of grinding uphill efforts followed by lung-rattling drops into valleys, then immediate punishment again on the next rise.
Weeks of this had begun to exact a cumulative toll on our legs. We rolled into towns each afternoon running mainly on fumes, electrolytes and increasingly fragile dignity.
So by the time we reached Elk Garden we were thoroughly exhausted. Fortunately, the Elk Garden United Methodist Church had spent years opening its doors to weary TransAm cyclists. Like many riders before us, we gratefully accepted hostel beds, a kitchen, showers and — perhaps most importantly of all — air conditioning.
The church offered magnificent hospitality, though rather less actual sleep. The following days settled into a familiar rhythm: early climbs, frequent stops for water and breath, desperate appreciation of tree cover during the heat of the day, and late-afternoon recovery sessions in motels. In Damascus we had both bicycles inspected after the endless climbing began interfering with the gears.
Virginia at least compensated us with scenery. Hayters Gap was beautiful, and the ride over Mount Rogers from Damascus through Troutdale proved magnificent: a punishing climb rewarded by mile after mile of glorious descending through forest on the far side.
Conditions eased somewhat towards Radford, Daleville and Lexington. Then came Vesuvius.
Among TransAm cyclists, the climb from Vesuvius up to the Blue Ridge Parkway possesses near-mythical status. Officially the gradient averages around eight percent. In reality some sections appear to abandon mathematics altogether and head directly into the realm of cruelty.
We climbed in stages: stop, breathe, stare accusingly at the mountain, continue, repeat. More than an hour later we finally reached the summit sweaty, depleted and absurdly pleased with ourselves. The Blue Ridge Parkway then carried us through much of the remaining day with spectacular views, light traffic and glorious riding. By late afternoon we rolled into Afton to stay with the legendary Cookie Lady.
Long-distance cycling leaves surprisingly little time for sightseeing. Most days become dominated by distance, weather, climbing, eating and locating somewhere to sleep before physical collapse occurs. We did attempt to behave like proper tourists at Natural Bridge in Rockbridge County, paying to spend a morning visiting the bridge and caverns. The experience proved underwhelming. Europe, frankly, has stronger caves.
Likewise, when we reached Lexington we discovered memorials connected to Stonewall Jackson, who had once lived there, but by then we were too tired to investigate properly. Fatigue has an extraordinary ability to reduce one’s interest in even nationally significant history.
Virginia’s hospitality revealed itself repeatedly along the route. There was Elk Garden Methodist Church; the family in Radford who hosted us overnight; June Curry in Afton; and Gerty’s Country Store near the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Each place carried a deep connection to the cycling route itself. Members of the Radford family had completed the same ride. June Curry had begun years earlier by simply handing water to passing cyclists before eventually dedicating an entire building on her property to them. Over the decades riders had filled the place with souvenirs, notes and abandoned equipment as thanks. The house had become part museum, part shrine and part international lost-property office. We left our whistles there — retired after thousands of miles of canine diplomacy.
Gerty’s Country Store had developed a similar mythology among cyclists. Riders had covered tables, walls and benches with names, addresses and messages. The entire place looked cheerfully vandalised by exhausted people in Lycra. Naturally, we added our own contribution.
More generally, we found Virginians overwhelmingly kind and helpful. We regularly stopped to ask directions and almost always received assistance, though occasionally with unusual supplementary information. Near Christiansburg we asked a woman in her garden for directions. She pointed us the correct way and then casually mentioned a recent fatal shooting linked to an escaped prison inmate nearby, suggesting we “stay alert”.
This was not the most relaxing navigational advice we received during the trip.
By now, despite the excellence of the official route maps, we had started hunting for shortcuts. The scenic twists and loops that had seemed charming in Oregon now felt faintly vindictive. After Charlottesville we finally lost patience altogether. Louisa appeared to involve one unnecessary detour too many, so we abandoned the official route and made a direct run towards Yorktown along the busier Route 250 into Richmond.
We spent two nights either side of Richmond, with one long day cycling through the city itself before finally reaching Yorktown seventy-seven days after leaving Astoria.
At Yorktown we stripped the bicycles, carried the rear wheels into the Atlantic Ocean and then walked into the water ourselves. It seemed important somehow to complete the geography physically, to connect one ocean with the other using tired legs and slightly ruined bicycles.
Reflections
Looking back now, the hardships of the journey never divided us or created any serious sense of defeat. The difficult moments — aggressive drivers, storms, endless climbs, hostile dogs and brutal heat — became absorbed into the larger experience surprisingly quickly.
The dogs, in truth, turned out less catastrophic than feared, though Kentucky still contained enough unhinged canine enthusiasm to justify our paranoia.
What stayed with us most strongly was the generosity we encountered right across America. Again and again strangers helped us: offering food, shelter, directions, cold drinks, campsites, lifts, conversation or simply encouragement at exactly the moment we needed it most.
We also became fascinated by the culture surrounding the TransAmerica route itself: the stories passed between cyclists; the graffiti and memorabilia left behind; the unofficial network of churches, hostels, cafés and homes supporting riders crossing the continent under their own power.
The ride deepened our respect for long-distance cyclists everywhere, both those we met and those who had ridden before us. Crossing America by bicycle changes your relationship with scale and landscape completely. Forests, deserts and mountain ranges stop being abstract scenery and become physical realities your body must negotiate one painful mile at a time.
We had never experienced skies so vast. Nor had we expected places like the Madison Valley to affect us so profoundly. I will always remember our first sight of that valley descending from Virginia City: the scale of it, the colours, the distant mountains fading into haze.
Not every memory glows quite so warmly. Certain stretches of Missouri remain difficult to recall fondly, and roads shared with coal trucks or logging vehicles rarely produced feelings of spiritual serenity.
In the days immediately after finishing, the strangest sensation was not exhaustion but absence. The ride had governed every waking hour for more than two months. Suddenly there was nowhere we needed to reach, no weather to outwit, no motel to find and no mountain waiting somewhere ahead.
Our legs, however, seemed unconvinced. For several days afterwards they still appeared ready to climb back onto the bikes and hammer out another seventy miles before lunch.