EPISODE 21
Big Hairy Audacious Goal
Alan Gilbert has always been interested in long, challenging bicycle rides. For Alan, the chance to ride across the United States from Pacific to Atlantic in 38 days finally presented itself in 2022, upon retiring from his job as a technology executive. The timing also coincided with the end of COVID, which had kept Alan cooped up at home and yearning to get out, meet people, and explore the country 100 miles at a time. Rather than undertake this Big Hairy Audacious Goal alone, Alan found a riding partner, Dave, and their respective spouses, Sue and Dee, became known as the Support Angels. In this episode, we will dive into Alan’s BHAG, as well as trace his love of touring to its origins (a trip in Ohio when he was seventeen) and what he’s been up to since finishing his coast-to-coast adventure (a fully supported tour of classic mountain climbs in France).
Episode Transcript
Alan: Going over the Cascades was beautiful and amazing and incredible, but when we got into the eastern part of Oregon, it was as if the United States looked at me and said, “Okay, are you really up for this? Because this is going to be hard and challenging and hot and cold and desolate and windy.”
Gabriel: You just heard Alan Gilbert recalling his thoughts when he was three days into a grueling Alan’s passion for bicycle touring began in 1980 when, as a 17-year-old, he rode across Ohio and back with a friend. Besides touring, Alan also loves road and mountain biking. Alan’s 40 years of cycling experience culminated in 2022, when he attempted his Big Hairy Audacious Goal, pronounced “bee hag,” a ride across America. Rather than do it alone, Alan found a riding partner, Dave, and their respective spouses, Sue and Dee, became known as the Support Angels. As if that weren’t enough, last year, Alan transformed himself from an endurance rider to a prolific climber to tackle the most famous mountain passes of France. There are a lot of stories to tell in this fascinating episode.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello cycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to an episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist that was inspired by another podcast. Acquired, hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, is one of my favorite podcasts. Listening to one episode while pushing the stroller through the forest, I heard Ben remark casually that he had just returned from a one-week bicycle touring trip. Curious, I did a bit of research and discovered that it was Ben’s father, Alan, who was the one really into cycling. I reached out to Alan and asked if he identified with the term “accidental bicycle tourist.” Alan replied that he didn’t feel that his touring was accidental. He always loved adventures and traveling, and doing it by bike seemed very natural to him. Nonetheless, Alan, you are here today to talk about your many adventures on two wheels.
Alan: Happy to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
Gabriel: This was a very unusual way of getting to know you, which was because I listened to your sons by now extremely surprisingly popular podcast, Acquired.
Alan: Yeah, it’s really caught fire. I mean, it’s just exceeded anything he’s imagined, I imagined. They keep polishing and polishing and getting better at the way they structure the podcast and also their delivery.
Gabriel: It’s very inspirational.
Alan: Yeah.
Gabriel: Anyway, I don’t know how to introduce you in this way. It’s a little embarrassing to say I found out about you by googling Ben.
Alan: Oh, that’s fine. I mean, you find people the way you find people. I don’t feel diminished by that at all.
Gabriel: Okay. All right. Well, Alan, thanks so much for being a guest on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Alan: Well, thank you, Gabriel. It’s great to be on your podcast. The only thing that’s more fun than riding my bike is talking about riding my bike, so I’m looking forward to it.
Gabriel: Very good. That’s well put.
Alan: I have an interesting story. It turns out, I actually did come into this accidentally the more I thought about it, so I can explain that now or I can explain it in the context of once we really get started.
Gabriel: Whenever the stories come out, they come out early or late, so I think you’ve got my interest now, so go ahead.
Alan: Okay. You said, “Most of my guests come into bicycle touring accidentally,” and I told you mine was quite deliberate, which was true in the sense that I took my first big tour when I was 17. However, I thought about it, and I was in Boy Scouts with my son. He was a scout. He was an assistant scout master, and we did a bunch of high-adventure trips backpacking, and after he graduated high school, we continued to do backpacking trips, and that was really our jam. And I thought, “Hey, as long as my son wants to spend a week with me every summer, I’m in.” Then in 2015, he blew out his knee skiing up in Whistler, and he was recovering. The doctors told him, you’re not backpacking this year, but you could probably ride a bike. And then one thing led to another, and he and my brother and I got talking, and that kicked off five or six years of big bike tours with a three of us every year. So we did actually come into it accidentally because he couldn’t backpack anymore, and once we switched to cycling, we just kinda stuck with it until he had a baby boy, and now he’s not in a position to take weeklong trips anymore. I think we did 2016 to 2021, so that’d be, I think, six years, six bicycle tours that were about a week in length each.
Gabriel: That’s great, and where did you go?
Alan: Let’s see. I’m going to try and name all six. The first one we did was in the Bay Area. We left from Vallejo, and we went up Central California to the end of the Avenue of the And then we came back down the Pacific Coast Highway through Sausalito across the Golden Gate and back into San Francisco. So that was the first one. We did a loop around Southwest Colorado through Silverton, Ouray, Telluride. We did the UP of Michigan. We did the Blue Ridge Parkway. We did Oregon. We rode around Bend and Sisters and through the Cascades, and… I knew I wasn’t going to remember all of them. It might pop into my head. There was one other one in there somewhere.
Gabriel: Right. You got five out of six. Some of our listeners are non-American, so when you say UP, you mean the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Alan: Oh, yes. Yes. I should clarify. UP is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My brother – we both like to plan, but he’s been kind of the planner for these trips – and he picked a route that was used by something called the Tour Da Yoop, Eh, and Yooper is what they call people who live in the UP of Michigan. It turns out that some of it was on gravel and some of it was unrideable. Somehow, a road race went on these things, and so we ended up having to audible a little bit. I think our second day was supposed to be 90 miles, and it ended up being 128 because we had to backtrack, and so that’s where I learned that I could ride more than a century, and that was definitely accidental.
Gabriel: Sounds like it.
Gabriel: Just to clarify, when we talk about a century ride, that’s not a ride that happens once a century, but rather a ride that is 100 miles or 161 kilometers long.
Gabriel: When you say it was unrideable, you mean the road was just in such condition that it couldn’t be done, or was the road closed?
Alan: Well, there was one gravel road that maybe I would have ridden because it’s on a mountain bike or two, but my brother is definitely not a mountain biker, so he was very uncomfortable with it. And then, there was another section, then it was like a dirt road full of ruts, and we were able to find out about that beforehand, and we asked around or called around, and we found out there was some retired guy with a pickup truck, who that’s what he did in his retirement, is he would shuttle people from the beginning of this terrible dirt road, it’s about 12 or 14 miles to a town called Grand Marais. That was what he did in his retirement, is shuttle cyclists through the bad part, and so we did arrange for him to pick us up and shuttle us across.
Gabriel: Oh, wow, that’s an interesting retirement job that he had. I guess you get to meet people from all walks of life, just like on this podcast.
Alan: Yeah, and it just doesn’t aside, the interesting thing we learned up there is that a lot of people up in that neck of the woods lived in Detroit, they were in the auto industry, and then they retired and moved up to the UP to live a peaceful existence, away from civilization.
Gabriel: Yeah, and it must be beautiful up there.
Alan: Yeah, it really is. It’s not as spectacular as some of the other places I mentioned, almost every other place had mountains. No mountains up there, but it’s just very remote and very pretty, full of exotic birds. There was a red-headed crane that we saw a lot that just was very interesting. It’s not the spectacular vistas that you have, say, riding out of Telluride or through the James River Valley in Virginia, but it’s still very pretty and very interesting.
Gabriel: Yeah, that does sound interesting. Then the Blue Ridge Parkway is one that is, for me, personally interesting. I haven’t done it myself yet, but it’s on my list. Can you tell us a little bit about that one?
Alan: Yeah, that was great. Believe it or not, that might be the hardest climb on all of them. You would think Colorado might have the hardest climb going through the Rockies, but there was one climb, I think, where we started at the bottom of a valley where the James River runs, and then we went up and up and up forever.
Gabriel: The Blue Ridge Parkway runs between Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and the great Smoky Mountains National Park in adjacent North Carolina. The Parkway, which is maintained by the National Park Service, has a length of 469 miles, or 755 kilometers. Most riders, including the Gilberts, take the Parkway north to south, meaning that the starting point is near Waynesboro, Virginia, and the finish line near Cherokee, North Carolina. The Parkway runs mostly along the crests of the Blue Ridge Mountains, so there are many climbs along the route. The one Alan mentioned was Apple Orchard Mountain, a long, steady climb with an altitude gain of about 3,200 feet, or 1,000 meters, which is generally regarded as the toughest on the parkway.
Alan: What’s interesting is, of all the trips, that was actually the one where we had the hardest time finding places to stay. There’s not a lot along the parkway, so we were challenged to find hotels or Airbnbs that were available, but we managed to piece together a pretty nice trip, and we were able to do 60 to 100 miles every day, a lot of climbing, and just gorgeous. We didn’t do the whole thing, we finished in Asheville, and the grand finale was a big descent down the mountain into Asheville, just about a 40-minute downhill cruise, which was a great way to end the trip.
Gabriel: Yeah, and unfortunately, Asheville has been really affected by Hurricane Helene now.
Alan: Yeah, they really got clobbered. They were right on the French Broad River, and their French Broad River just had a historic flood.
Gabriel: They were one of the hardest hit areas, which I had heard Asheville was a really nice place, but they’ll have a lot of rebuilding to do now, unfortunately.
Alan: I think it’ll remain a nice place, and they’ll bring it back, but they’ve got a lot of work to do.
Gabriel: Yeah. I have to ask, because I have had one episode, which was called “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone,” where the guest, Christopher Briscoe, talked about riding with his son. They are quite competitive, he and his son, and since you mentioned climbs, it made me think of their episode where they were constantly battling, when Christopher was younger. The last tour he did, he was on an e-bike, so we have to discount that.
Alan: Yeah.
Gabriel: Is Ben a very competitive guy? Are you very competitive? How does it look when you’re on the climbs together?
Alan: I would say we’re not super competitive. I think I’m quietly competitive, because I didn’t like the fact that my son could outclimb me.
Gabriel: Ah, see? There you go.
Alan: Yeah. One of our later tours, we went through Oregon, and I really left him behind me on some of the climbs, and I very quietly took satisfaction in that. For him and I, it’s more just about us spending time together and enjoying the time. There’s not a strong competitive nature between us.
Gabriel: Okay. That’s good. But what did he say when you were waiting for him at the top, just like, “I’ll get you next time?” Or, “Hey, you’re so fast. You’re awesome, Dad!”
Alan: I think he said something like, “I guess I’m not in as good of a shape as I was last year.”
Gabriel: Okay. And then you just nodded and moved on.
Alan: Yeah, I took that as a quiet victory. I didn’t need to rub anything in. I just rubbed in my quiet victory.
Gabriel: Good for you. Now, let’s go back. You said that your first tour was when you were 17.
Alan: Yes.
Gabriel: So, I’d like to hear how that happened, because that sounds like an interesting event.
Alan: Yes. Yes. I was a pretty active cyclist as a kid, maybe starting early in high school. I lived on the east side of Cleveland, and there’s an area called the Chagrin Valley. It’s named for a river there, the Chagrin River. And it’s just a beautiful area. There’s probably eight different roads that drop into the valley and come up the other side. And, it’s not mountainous or anything, but it’s probably about a 350-or-so-foot drop from the top and down to the river. And if you ride along the river valley, it’s beautiful. There’s like a couple of metro parks down there. There’s something they call the Polo Grounds, which is a beautiful park. And so, my friend and I would just ride there all the time. And we started riding more and more. We ended up doing a century together called Sunday in June. When we were juniors in high school, we started talking about where we wanted to go to college. And for financial reasons, I was more or less thinking, “Well, I’m going to go to an in-state school.” And his brother went to Miami University, which is the opposite corner of the state from where we are. So we’re in northeast Ohio and Miami University is in a town called Oxford in southwest Ohio.
Gabriel: Yeah. So it’s kind of funny. The place is called Miami University. It’s in Oxford.
Alan: Yeah.
Gabriel: But it’s all Ohio. Nobody would guess.
Alan: The Miami Indian tribe was native to Ohio. There’s a river that runs through that part of the state called the Great Miami River. And I think that’s where the name of the university came from. And that name is probably hundreds of years old.
Gabriel: I see.
Alan: And we started kicking around, well, what if we did our college visitation trip on bicycles? And we came up with this idea and we pitched it to our parents. And keep in mind, this is 1980. No cell phones, no GPSs. I think we might have gotten a triptych from AAA or something. And our parents voted. We got a thumbs up, three to one. My mom voted no, but my dad and his parents voted yes. So we put this trip together. We rode from Cleveland down to Oxford and back. And along the way, we stayed either in youth hostels or universities. There were several schools, including Ohio State, where I ended up going to school and Miami, where he ended up going to school, that we visited along the way. We pulled it off. I’ve never done a tour where I carried the tent and the sleeping bags and everything. But we had the steel frame, chromoly bikes and panniers on the back that were pretty hefty. I remember the first time I rode with those, I went around a corner and I rode into a hedge because I had so much forward momentum. I wasn’t used to cornering with all that weight. I think I had it filled with magazines. And so I had to learn a ride with the panniers, which was a much different feel handling the bike.
Gabriel: Right.
Alan: There were no terrible mishaps. Probably the worst thing that happened to us is we had a lot of dogs that chased us. And I had some close calls with some very, I would say, persistent and motivated dogs. But none of them ever quite got to us. At one point, we got lost. And now, if you’re lost, you pull out your phone. But in there, we just had to kind of figure it out. We had a paper map and we had to guess where we were and how to find our way back to our planned route. As I recall, it worked quite well.
Gabriel: Maybe you had to stop and talk to people and ask for directions.
Alan: We did. I won’t get into details, but we did stop at a gas station in one little town and we told him we were from Cleveland and he mentioned what a nice place it was where we were. And then he made a very racist comment about Cleveland and we were like, “Ah, OK, thank you. See you later.” We just, we wanted no part of that. We met some interesting people along the way. Ninety percent of the time, that’s a good thing, right? That’s why you go touring, is you meet interesting people.
Gabriel: Back then, of course, there were no such thing as purpose-built touring bikes. So you were basically on a…
Alan: I had a Bianchi road bike. It was blue. I don’t know much about the lineage, but I think it was sort of an entry-level Bianchi, because I was a kid in high school and just got it with the money I made scooping ice cream and cutting lawns. He had, I think it was a Motobécane.
Gabriel: Oh, wow. That’s a brand I haven’t heard for a while.
Alan: Yeah, I think it’s French.
Gabriel: I guess they might still make them. They seem to have their heyday right around that time in the ’80s.
Alan: It was a fun time for the cycling community. You still see people around who have those bikes.
Gabriel: Yeah. Did you have the old-time clips? They look like little cages for your shoes.
Alan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. They call them rat traps, I think.
Gabriel: Okay. Rat traps.
Alan: Yeah. Clipless pedals did not exist then, and I’m sure everything was heavier than everything I have now. The bike was probably, I don’t know, 24, 25 pounds, I’m guessing, and then all the gear. And bike shorts were hardly a thing back then either.
Gabriel: Right. Even the pros didn’t wear helmets. They just had these cycling caps with the little bill on them and the team name on the sides.
Alan: I know I had the one helmet you could get, which was the Bell Biker.
Gabriel: Yes, Bell made the first helmets.
Alan: Yeah, yeah.
Gabriel: How did you and your friend work together on the tour? Because we know that it’s pretty intense when you’re on a tour with somebody. I guess you were friends before and you continued to be friends after the tour? It was a success?
Alan: Yeah, I would say that we were very compatible, and boy, it was a long time ago. I mean, I’m kind of old, I’m 61 now. I don’t remember any real animosity. We were together all the time. We got along very well. We were best buddies in high school. I do remember, and this is kind of a theme for, I would say, most of my cycling career. (I don’t know if you can use the word “career” on something you don’t get paid for.) But I’ve never been a strong climber until recently, and I can get into why that is, but I remember that he would dust me going up the big climb. So that was the only time that we weren’t really together the whole time is when we hit a big hill. He would separate, just because he was a stronger climber than I was.
Gabriel: Let’s get the chronology straight. So when you were 17, you did this trip to Miami University and back, and it was good. And then it sounds like you didn’t really do much touring. You were more into the backpacking. And then because of your son’s injury, you got back into the touring with him. Is that how it went? Because that’s a big gap there.
Alan: I guess there’s another piece. When I was in my 20s, I had a couple of friends who were really into mountain biking. They convinced me to buy a mountain bike. My first mountain bike was a Marin. I forget the model, but it was black with neon green trim. I got it from a bike shop in Philadelphia. And for about 15 years, it was all about mountain biking and the place I lived, which was near Wilmington, Delaware, had great mountain biking. Delaware did, Maryland did, Philadelphia area did. And so I really switched to mountain biking. And for about six years, I went to a festival called Mountain Bike Weekend in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. It was a big festival in the Poconos that was mountain biking, and partying, and they had all kinds of exhibitions, like people doing trials and hopping up on flaming picnic benches and we played bike polo and bike ultimate frisbee.
Gabriel: But not bike quidditch at that time.
Alan: That would be scary. And then I moved to Columbus and there really wasn’t much mountain biking. And I was sitting on our front porch with my wife. The cyclist kept riding by and I remember I turned to her and I said, “You know, maybe I’ll rehab my old Bianchi and start road riding again.” And she said, “You have a nice job. Why don’t you get a nice bike?” I didn’t really pause very long on that. I took the opportunity and bought a Specialized Roubaix and that kind of got me back into road riding. I started doing long day trips, centuries. I wrote a cancer fundraiser ride for several years here in Columbus called Pelotonia. And then the story I told earlier, where my son had a knee injury and wanted to do a cycling trip, then that really ratcheted it up, and I went from day riding to touring, which was a really nice way to blend backpacking with cycling. And then that added sort of the adventure and exploration element to the bike riding.
Gabriel: What a difference though to trade in your Bianchi. It must have been just this huge jump in technology to then hop onto this modern bike.
Alan: Yeah, because the Roubaix was carbon fiber. That’s probably the biggest difference.
Gabriel: Yeah, yes.
Alan: And then just modern shifting and modern drivetrain that worked a lot smoother.
Gabriel: Right.
Alan: Then, when it was COVID? 2020, I bought a BMC Roadmachine with the electronic shifting. I will never go back from that. That’s the best.
Gabriel: Yeah, it’s pretty nice.
Alan: Once you have that, it’s really hard to go back.
Gabriel: Did the Roubaix have disc brakes already or was that before?
Alan: No, I didn’t. The funny thing about the Roubaix is you can buy one for 3,000 dollars or 12,000 dollars. It’s a whole line of bikes and so this was a notch or two above the entry level. I think it was the Shimano 105 drivetrain, so it was kind of their entry level. Nice drivetrain. Yeah.
Gabriel: Yeah, the sky’s the limit with road bikes. You can definitely get crazy and get the carbon wheels and all the latest, most expensive gruppos.
Alan: Yeah, yeah. Those make a difference when you’re riding every day. That’s worth the money.
Gabriel: Now I’m piecing it together. Long stint of mountain biking away from the road bike and then getting back into it. The road bike upgrade, that’s still a long way from deciding, “I want to ride cross-country.” So how did that come about?
Alan: Well, something that I think my brother and I started talking about and he’s four years younger than me and we never talked seriously about it. We were saying, “Well, one day, one day that would be cool.” I remember during COVID, I was working for a company in Seattle, like half the people in the company never met each other because of COVID. And then at the end of 2020, I’d had some success in my career and was getting towards riding off into the sunset, and they said, “Well, why are you working? Why are you here?” And I said, “Because I love it.” And I said, “Every day I wake up and I still want to do it.” One day, I don’t know, five, six months later, I woke up and I thought, “I’m not sure I feel that way anymore.” And I started thinking, “Well, what could I do if I retired?” And then as soon as I started to think about the prospect of riding coast to coast, I thought, I want to do that. It feels like the biggest stretch I can imagine, like an epic journey, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I had this vision, like I just knew it could be done. Of course it can be done because other people have done it. But I wanted to do it a certain way. And so I started to think about planning routes and I was going to maybe go solo. And I had some long conversations with my wife. She’s like, “Go do this, but I would definitely prefer you not go alone. I would definitely prefer that I not go with you. And I would prefer that you find an organized trip where this is all figured out.” I was surprised to find that there was nothing that really met what I was looking for. I think because COVID shut down about half the companies anyway. I put an ad that was, I think it was called… some sort of bike adventure website, and they had a forum, like looking for a partner’s forum. And so I put a notice on there saying what I wanted to do. And I heard from this guy in upstate New York who wanted to do the same thing. And he was like in the exact same position. We had a meeting, a Zoom meeting, where he and his wife met me and my wife. And they were supportive enough and we seemed compatible. And so we came up with this plan that his wife would SAG the first half of the country and my wife would SAG the second half of the country.
Gabriel: And of course, SAG is an acronym for support and gear. One of the wives would drive while you pedaled.
Alan: Yeah, exactly. That was kind of the framework for the trip.
Gabriel: Who is this man that you met once over Zoom and who agreed to ride with you across the country? What is his name?
Alan: His name is Dave.
Gabriel: Dave, okay.
Alan: Yeah, and boy, we were very different because I was a tech guy, an engineer. And he was a truck driver. So we came from very different backgrounds, but we shared a passion for cycling.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: And I’ll tell you, this guy was nuts. He wasn’t that big, but he was wire. He had probably seven percent or so body fat. And he could just go. He could go all day. He is an incredible rider.
Gabriel: And similar age as you.
Alan: Yeah, he was actually three years older than me. And when we got done and hit the coast, I went home and he drove to North Carolina and climbed Mount Mitchell. So that tells you how insane this guy is. I started to plan things out. My original route went from Florence, Oregon, which is about 70 miles west of Eugene, and it’s right on the coast, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. So we would ride through my home in Columbus and my riding partner’s home in upstate New York. My wife and I were looking at the map and she said, “I’m supporting you doing this, but if you could find a shorter route, I would really appreciate a week less.” Then I got this idea of, okay, I definitely want to ride over the Cascades because I’ve been there and it’s beautiful and it’s amazing and I want to do that again. And I want to ride over the Tetons because I’ve always heard that’s incredible. And I want to ride over the Rockies. And then, what’s the shortest route to the East Coast from there? And it turns out you go pretty far south to Georgia because the East Coast sort of, the further south you go, the further west it juts in. So I was thinking Georgia. And then I read this book called Riding with the Blue Moth. And it’s about a guy, this guy, Bill Hancock. He did a coast to coast ride to work through the grief of losing his son in a plane crash. So I read the book cover to cover and just sucked it all in. And for me, the book was inspiring both in terms of his personal journey, but also the planning and execution of his trip. And I did take a lot of advice from him in reading through his book, particularly the route where I ended up finishing Tybee Island, Georgia, just as he did.
Gabriel: How did you go about the detailed planning?
Alan: I sat down in Strava and Komoot and Google Maps. And day by day by day by day, I set up the entire route. You know, sometimes you sit down in your favorite Ride With GPS or Strava. And you say, I’m going to go for a ride today. I want to ride about 15 miles and then you plan a cool route. Well, I did that, except I did that for 38 days. For some people, it would be mind-numbing boring, but for me, it was a blast. A lot of it was driven by, well, is there a place to stay? And in some cases, it was easy. And in some cases, it was hard. For example, in Eastern Oregon, there was a stretch from Bend to the Idaho border, where there was only one town and it was a 270-mile stretch. And right in the middle, there was a town called Burns that had a couple hotels. And so we had two days that were 135 miles each.
Gabriel: Wow.
Alan: And that was completely predicated by if you want to stay at a hotel, you got to do that distance. And so it was a combination of what roads do we want to ride on? What mountains do we want to see? What parts of the country do we want to see? And where can we stay?
Gabriel: But it sounds like your final route did not include Columbus, Ohio.
Alan: It didn’t.
Gabriel: Right. You had to cut down.
Alan: Yeah.
Gabriel: Well, let’s get into it. How did the ride start?
Alan: We started on the beach. We got off to a terrible start. There’s an old saying that you never turn your back on the ocean. So we were doing the obligatory back wheel in the Pacific Ocean, and a larger-than-we-had-seen-up-to-that-point wave came in and our bikes got covered in sand. So the first hour we spent cleaning all the sand off out of our drivetrains.
Gabriel: Oh, gosh.
Alan: Once we got started, we did the first day to Eugene and then sisters and then Bend. Then the trip really opened up for us. Going over the Cascades was beautiful and amazing and incredible. But when we got into the eastern part of Oregon, it was as if the United States looked at me and said, “Okay, are you really up for this? Because this is going to be hard and challenging and hot and cold and desolate and windy.” And it’s like riding through desolate wilderness all the way from the east side of the Cascades, all the way to the Idaho border. Then we went through Boise… Idaho is beautiful. We had come out of Boise and we were riding southwest to a town called Mountain Home. And we were about 12 miles out and my riding partner, Dave, was maybe a tenth a mile ahead of me. And then all of a sudden I just see him go down for no apparent reason. You know, when you stand up and sprint on a bike, you’re sort of torquing the bike back and forth and back and forth, more than when you’re seated. And he was doing that and then his bike just folded up and he just went down. And I was like, “Oh my God!” My first thought was get him off the road. He was pretty badly scraped up. He had his helmet cracked. I pulled him over to the road. Then my second thought was, “Okay, get his bike off the road.” So we did that. And then fortunately, we had a first aid kit. So I got out alcohol wipes and cleaned them up. I got some Advil into him because I knew he was going to be hurting. And we kind of sized things up. His bike had a few issues, but we were able to get it going. It was the typical: the brake levers were bent in and the handlebar was crooked relative to the front wheel. So we got that straightened out. It was pretty scraped up and it was a brand new bike. So I felt terrible that his bike took a beating. Dave, he was not in great shape, but he made it to Mountain Home. And then his life took him back to Boise to the hospital. He was okay, no concussion. From that point, I kept calling him a tough old bastard, because he kept going.
Gabriel: And what was the cause for the fall?
Alan: Kind of a freak thing, I think it was a crosswind.
Gabriel: Wow.
Alan: In Victor, Idaho, we came up the backside of the Tetons. That might be the hardest climb I’ve ever done. It hit 20 percent grade at some points. We had our first layover day in Jackson, Wyoming, right on the east side of the Tetons. And we had gone, I think, 10 straight days and averaged over 100 miles a day. We were in a town called Dubois, spelled like DuBois, but it’s “du-boys,” Wyoming, on July 4th. And it turns out it’s a pretty heavy party town on July 4th. And so I didn’t sleep that well because I was sick. I didn’t sleep that well because of all the partying. And so I woke up not feeling well. And I’m sitting at breakfast with my riding partner and they brought my breakfast. And I’m like, “I got to go. Can you bring this back to my room?” So I went back to the room and that wasn’t great. And then I calmed down. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. I’m like, “Alright, I can do this. I can do this.” And then another wave. That happened several times. And then finally I said, “I can’t ride today.” And his wife was the SAG. And I said, “I’m going to ride with Dee,” his wife. The kicker for me was she went and got me a thermometer. And I had like 102 feet where I’m like, all right, I definitely can’t ride with this fever. And so I spent all day in bed until she had to move on to the next town. Then I crawled into the car, got to the next place and went back to bed. And the whole time I was thinking, “Is my trip over? I’ve already missed a day. Am I a wimp because I have a little stomach thing? I’m taking a day off and here he fell off his bike and got scraped up and he managed to keep going.” But, you know, it’s different circumstances.
Gabriel: Your idea had been you were really going to cycle every inch from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And then you were confronted with this reality. And I think that’s a big moment. And it’s one that other guests have reported. You have an idea of what you want to do, and you realize that’s not going to work out, and you need to really think about how to handle it.
Alan: Like you said, I planned to ride every inch. You know, I wanted to be the guy at the party that said, “Oh, yeah, I rode across the country every inch coast to coast.” And that was over. And so I like hinged everything on that. At some point, I considered, well, what if we just lay over? But we had all the hotel reservations booked along the way. And we would have to rebook like 20 different hotel rooms. And then his wife would have to change her flight. And my wife, who was coming in to sag the second half, she’d have to change hers. And I thought, “Well, I can’t do that to everybody.” I ended up with one day on the SAG because I just I couldn’t ride and couldn’t go more than 10 minutes without having to go back to the bathroom. But then I needed a day to recover. I drank like three quarts of Pedialyte and just ate to just sort of get my strength back. And I actually had to ride the sag for two days. And that was very hard mentally.
Gabriel: Since that’s such a key moment, can you describe a little bit more what was going through your mind?
Alan: I kind of had to rethink, well, what is winning here? What is success in the grand scheme of things? It really doesn’t matter if I rode 36 days or 38 days. I felt like, can I still say I rode coast to coast? Yeah, I think so. And it turns out I just barely exceeded 3,000 miles. I would have felt really bad if we got to the end and I hadn’t hit that milestone. So at least I got over 3,000. I thought this is such an amazing experience and everything I’m doing and experiencing, that’s the real win here. There’s a saying in technology, a vanity metric, which is paying attention to some sort of metric or number or accomplishment that actually doesn’t really matter. It just feels good. It’s not really key to your business. I decided that riding every inch was a vanity metric, and it’s just something cool, I wanted to be able to say and think, but in reality, didn’t matter that much. I did notice later that the underside of my water bottle lids were full of black mold, and so that may have everything to do with why I was having intestinal issues. And so I guess one tip for listeners is, clean your water bottles thoroughly every day. I think especially the ones where you have Gatorade or anything else with sugar in it, the mold tends to grow. And so that was a big lesson learned.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: When I think back on it, the fact that I was able to recover and get back on only missing two days. That’s not bad. That’s not bad. Especially considering I set up a trip where I had no margin at all for anything to go wrong and something did go wrong.
Gabriel: Right. And not only no margin, but I got to say, riding a century is hard. Riding ten centuries with, I don’t know, how many thousands of feet of climbing, that is really difficult.
Alan: Yeah. That was 10 centuries riding over the Cascades and several ranges in Idaho. And then the Tetons.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: That’s pretty hard.
Gabriel: We did have a previous episode about route planning, “Plan Your Own Damn Route!” with Mimi Ji. You followed a similar process, except she said, “About once a week, be sure to give yourself some slack, because it’s never going to go according to plan.”
Alan: Yeah. And I definitely did not.
Gabriel: For you to plan that many days with no slack in the schedule at all, it’s… whoa! But I totally agree with you. The accomplishment is not diminished in any way. And in fact, it showed that you persevered with this crazy bug that you got, maybe from your water bottles. That’s impressive that you did that.
Alan: Now the thing that you just said, that tickles something about riding a century every day. That was kind of a cool thing. That sounds impossible. Like, “Yeah, I can ride a century, but not every day.” And that’s basically what we did. We averaged about 94 miles a day for the whole trip. It’s like that became my job. Like, “What do you do for a living?” “Well, I get up and ride my bike 100 miles.” It just goes to show the mental barriers you have to what’s possible. And once you normalize to something and get used to it, it can be done.
Gabriel: Okay, back to your trip.
Alan: Okay. So here comes another big challenge. Yeah. So we came down through South Central Wyoming into Colorado. That was beautiful. What ended up happening there was, there was mudslides that closed the road we planned on riding. And I got ahold of the sheriff’s office in that area the night before. And they said, we just reopened the roads. So you’re okay to ride as long as there’s no more rain and there’s none in the forecast. And it turns out that Apple Maps and Google Maps were showing the road as closed. So anybody who used GPS was not routed through there. So we essentially had the road to ourselves, the entire day. And it was through the Northern Colorado Rockies. And it felt like backpacking in the wilderness, except we were on bikes on pavement. It was just wonderfully serene. It was magical. We rode into Denver and we did a swap. Dave’s wife flew home and my wife joined us and she drove the rest of the route. And then the character of the ride changed pretty dramatically. Then it got really, really hot, particularly in the middle part of the United States. It was like 112, 114 degrees Fahrenheit every day. That was really oppressive. And again, we were like, “What do we do? Do we give up?” The thing we thought of was, “Well, let’s just try and ride before the sun comes up.” We did get up every morning at four and we were rolling by five. We’d ride an hour and a half to two hours before the sun came up. And so we’d get in probably a third of our daily riding even before sunrise. So that helped a lot. We were typically done by noon or one. And then the other thing we did is we relied heavily on ice. So whenever we hit a truck stop, we had Camelbaks. We’d fill up that and all our water bottles with ice and fit, jam as much ice in as we could. And you don’t always drink it. Sometimes you just pour some of it over your head. That helped a lot too. That was a challenge we were able to overcome. There were really bad winds. So we had really bad crosswinds, especially coming across Kansas, about 20 mile hour crosswinds out of the south. Because they were crosswinds mostly, let’s say 45 degrees to our right. We ended up drafting each other, but we did it diagonally. Dave would ride in the shoulder and I’d ride just off his, sort of diagonally to the left. And we would switch every mile because it was so difficult. That’s how we ended up dealing with it, as we got into this rhythm where we would switch every single mile. Because when it was your turn, it was exhausting.
Gabriel: Yeah. And that’s a big benefit of having a partner instead of going solo across the country.
Alan: That wind was very difficult. And that made a big difference. Kansas was pretty miserable. It took us five days to get across Kansas and there wasn’t much there.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: We met a motorcycle gang. This is the type of person I probably normally wouldn’t interact with. Because that’s kind of a different culture than where I come from. At least for me, I’m kind of an introverted person anyway. I wouldn’t normally go and strike up a conversation. But they looked at us and we looked at them and they kind of laughed. And people would look at us and you know what they were thinking. They were thinking, “What is the deal with you guys?” These two guys in spandex with all their gear were very much a curiosity in Wyoming or Kansas. You know, places that don’t see a lot of modern cyclists. We did have our fair share of learning about culture along the way. And so we went over them and we said, “Hey, we’re riding our bikes across the United States.” And they’re like, “Really?” And one guy came over to us and he looked at our bikes and he said, “You know, it’s a lot easier if you have an engine.” They ended up giving us advice on a couple of places along our route. We actually stopped and ate breakfast at one of the places they recommended. Because we were leaving at 5 a.m. We’d have a quick breakfast in the hotel room. But then typically we’d stop around the 60, 70 mile mark at a diner and have like a real good bacon and eggs breakfast somewhere to reward ourselves for what we had done so far. We saw them about maybe 50 miles later. They rode past us and waved to us. We ended up making friends with a motorcycle gang. So then we went Kansas into Missouri. It was like, as soon as we crossed the border, the landscape completely changed. The way you picture Kansas was like Kansas.
Gabriel: Flat.
Alan: That’s how it was. It was flat. It was open. It was windy. And as soon as we hit Missouri, we got more into kind of rolling hills, which is what I’m used to in Ohio. The kind of hills where if you get enough momentum going down the hill, you can get almost all the way up the next hill without a lot of effort. And you just go up and down these beautiful green rolling hills until we hit the Mississippi River. That was a huge milestone. We said, “Holy shit, we just rode our bikes from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River.” It almost seemed like mentally it was kind of all downhill from there. It felt like once we hit the Mississippi, we knew we were going to be able to finish this thing. This is interesting. We’re at the only state border which has no bridge across the Mississippi. So going from Missouri to Kentucky, we had to take a ferry, which wasn’t reliable. Even that morning, he said, “I’m not sure if I’m running today.” He said, “I’m running now. How quick can you get here?” And we were like 90 miles away. So we just pedaled hard and got there by around noon. And then he was still running. So we got across, did a little corner of Kentucky down in the Tennessee into Alabama. And then we rode a wonderful rail-trail that went from Northern Alabama all the way into Atlanta. On the Alabama side, it’s called the Chief Ladiga Trail. And the Georgia side is called the Silver Comet Trail. And that was about 90 miles of rail-trail, which was just fantastic and beautiful and flat. The interesting thing is the Southeast was actually more comfortable weather-wise than the plains, because even though it was humid, it was like 90 and humid, not 115 and dry, which was pretty bad. I raved about the Chief Ladiga Trail in Alabama. But I would say generally speaking, Alabama is not the most friendly cycling state we went through. There are a couple things that conspired against us. One was, it seemed like nobody wanted us to be on the road. Every cyclist has experienced drivers who beep, who throw things at you, who swear at you, who gun their engine. We had one who was hauling a flatbed trailer and he swerved into me with his trailer and ran me off the road. And fortunately, off the road was into somebody’s yard and knocked on a ravine. But the other crazy thing about the roads in Alabama was in most places, there was deep rumble strips between the road and the shoulder. And so you had to be careful. If you drifted off the shoulder, you’d hit these rumble strips and they would, like, knock the light off your handlebars or it could be pretty teeth-chattering if you hit these big rumble strips. But in Alabama, the rumble strips were in the shoulder. They took up the shoulder. And so you couldn’t ride in the shoulder. So you had to ride on the road. That was unfortunate. Yeah, we don’t want to alienate any listeners in Alabama. But not my first choice. I don’t plan on going back to Alabama to ride my bike anytime soon.
Gabriel: Yeah, so just to explain, rumble strips are these lines that are cut into the pavement in short succession in case a driver maybe is falling asleep or something like that. As soon as they start to go off the road, brbrbrbr, it makes this jolting noise and they wake up.
Alan: Exactly, yeah.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s impossible to ride on, isn’t it? Just riding on the rumble strips?
Alan: Yeah, it is impossible. I mean, whenever I hit them by accident, my light would go flying off. And it got to the point where once it came off, it would chip a little piece off the mount. And it got to the point where it wouldn’t even stay on anymore. And I had to duct tape it on.
Gabriel: Ah, duct tape, good. It’s not a trip unless you’ve used duct tape to fix something.
Alan: Yes! We were in a place – now it’s spelled like Monticello, but it is “mon-ti-se-lla,” Georgia, And we were eating at a diner. It was called Martha Jane Southern Cooking. And so we’re sitting there eating breakfast. And these people are staring at us and the same thing. We’re like, “Hey, we’re riding our bike across the country.” And so we struck up a conversation. And the guy says to me, “Hey, do you know what’s special about the booth you’re sitting?” And I said, “No, what’s special about it?” And he said, “Look on the wall.” And I look on the wall and there was a picture of Joe Pesci and Marissa Tomei sitting in the booth. And it turns out that the movie My Cousin Vinny was filmed in this town. And then I rode past this convenience store called the Sac-o-Suds. If you know the movie, that is the convenience store that was robbed, supposedly by these boys who were wrongly accused. This town was like the whole setting for My Cousin Vinny. That was a cool discovery.
Gabriel: Did you go back and watch the movie again?
Alan: I did. We watched it like the week we got back. Like, “There it is. There’s the restaurant where we ate! And there’s the courthouse! That’s right across from the restaurant.”
Gabriel: That’s cool.
Alan: And then through Georgia and ultimately to the beach. When we reached Tybee Island – that was only, what, 45 minutes from the end of the whole journey – I remember standing in front of a sign that said Tybee Island and just staring at it for probably five or ten minutes just soaking in what we had done. And then of course arriving at the beach in the Atlantic Ocean and dipping my wheel in the ocean and holding my bike up over my head. That was amazing and exhilarating.
Gabriel: And when you dipped your wheel in the Atlantic, there wasn’t a huge wave that messed up your bike?
Alan: No, no. And I was smart enough to keep looking over my shoulder. I got in, got my picture and got out. I have on my shelf here two little vials of water. One has an A on it and one has a P. And you can guess the P is for Pacific and A is for Atlantic. Each one has a little bit of ocean water. And the bottle with the P is all beat up because I carried it in my tool bag for 38 days. And then the A one is pristine, because that one I didn’t ride with. That was after we finished.
Gabriel: Wow. What an adventure. And what an accomplishment.
Alan: Just an incredible, incredible journey starting with the conception and then the planning, working through all the trials and tribulations, and then executing it and finishing it was just incredible.
Gabriel: We have to give credit to your wife and also Dave’s wife. It’s not the most fun thing in the world to be the SAG for people going across the country, is it? Can you tell a little bit more about her experience?
Alan: Yeah. So first of all, we did not use the word SAG. We changed it to Support Angel.
Gabriel: That sounds a lot better.
Alan: Yeah. That was much more descriptive. My wife was not much of a traveler. So, you know, I had to credit her. She was a warrior. You know, some people love traveling and like being in a new place every day. That was not the case for her. I give her a lot of credit because she did leave the comforts of home and the comfort of her own bed. We have three cats and so we had to get a cat sitter. You know, I give her all the credit in the world for being willing to make it possible for me to do this. And Dave’s wife, I would say, maybe it was similar. She did that because it was his dream and she was supportive of him. That being said, they both, I think, enjoyed the experiences. They both got a bit of a thrill out of being there for us, supporting us, bringing us lunch. Fortunately, we never had one incident where we had to call them on an emergency basis and say, come get us or come bring us supplies or first aid or something. So their routine was pretty routine.
Gabriel: Although Dave’s crash, I think he would have been justified to call the Support Angel there, but he wanted to tough it out, I guess.
Alan: He did. He’s like, “Well, I’ll make it. I’ll be all right.” The one thing that they would do that was just amazing is when we would get to the hotel, they’d be waiting. They both did this and they would each have two keys in their hands. And they say, Alan, here’s yours. Dave, here’s yours. And our luggage would be in the room and there’d be a chocolate protein shake on ice waiting for me. Dave was more of a beer guy. We had our beverage of choice on ice and they were both fantastic, and making sure that we could just go back and collapse and recover at the end of these long days.
Gabriel: Very good. You would think that you’d be satisfied having accomplished your BHAG, but you had another trick up your sleeve last summer.
Alan: Last year, for the first time in my life, I just paid money to show up and had somebody else plan the tour. I’ll give a plug here for Trek Travel. They really put together a first-class trip. I was thinking I’d like to do something in Europe, and I always wanted to go see the Alps. There’s a couple of James Bond movies that have scenes in the Alps and I’m like, “Yeah, I want to go do that on my bike.” And so they had this trip called The Classic Climbs of France and it’s all these famous Tour de France Climbs, like Alpe-d’Huez and Col du Galibier. Every day is a killer climb that they’ve done in the Tour de France. Every single day. There is no day off. There’s no flat days. Every day is huge climbing. And so I thought, well, if I’m going to do that, I really need to become a strong climber. And so I bought a book that’s called Climb! I think it’s Climb Exclamation Point.
Gabriel: Climb!
Alan: Yeah, it was a combination of a training program and a dietary program and just understanding what makes you a good climber. It was pretty simple. It’s power to weight ratio. If you lose weight, you’re a better climber, but you don’t want to lose weight at the expense of power. So it’s a program of nutrition and training, where you try and add efficient muscle mass but stay lean. And then there’s also some psychological advice in there about how to handle long, brutal climbs and how to pace yourself and that sort of thing. And so I would say that I became a serviceable climber. I was able to do everything. I definitely wasn’t at the front of the pack. This is 18 of us and there were only two people on the tour that didn’t train on mountains. And the other one was the Illinois State Cyclocross Champion.
Gabriel: Oh, wow.
Alan: I feel like if I was just able to even hang with this group, then I was a pretty good climber because they were all very accomplished.
Gabriel: It sounds like it. It sounds like a completely intense itinerary that they’d set up.
Alan: It was really amazing. And it progressed to where it kept getting better and better. We started off in the Pyrenees, which is beautiful. And then we moved into Central France, which was also very nice. And then we got into the Alps, which was just jaw-dropping. And it’s like everything you would envision about the beauty of the Alps, it was that. It was incredible.
Gabriel: Yeah, I don’t know too much about cycling in Ohio, but France is something that I do know about. And I’ve done on my own, with fully loaded touring bikes, so much, much slower than you guys did it. There’s a good reason why the Tour de France is the classic tour in Europe, among all of them. Part of it, besides the tradition, is you have this incredible natural backdrop for these epic battles. And the Pyrenees are so different than the Alps. And then, when you say Central France, I guess you’re referring to Mont Ventoux in Provence.
Alan: Yes, exactly, exactly. It’s a really interesting landscape. It’s like high desert. It’s very barren compared to the other two. Both the Pyrenees and the Alps are kind of lush. And Ventoux is just barren. But it has its own sort of desolate beauty, is the way I think of it.
Gabriel: Of course, there’s vegetation at the lower altitudes. And then there’s a moment where you go above the tree line. And I would call the landscape lunar at that point, more than just desert.
Alan: Yes, yes. I think that’s a great way to think of it.
Gabriel: There’s also this memorial to Tom Simpson, who died on the Tour de France. I’m sure you didn’t have time to stop because you were too busy climbing, but did you see it as you went by?
Alan: No, there was about 20 to 25 mile-hour sustained winds at the top. So we did not linger up there. We took a few quick pictures and then dropped back down. It was pretty uncomfortable up there.
Gabriel: Yeah, the winds can be crazy there.
Alan: The other thing about France is clearly it’s a cycling culture. So the roads are built for it. There’s these amazing banked hairpin turns when you’re descending. I saw something that blew my mind. I’m going up a twisty mountain road and there’s a street sweeper, like one of those big machines, clearing the pebbles off the road. That’s how much they care about cycling there.
Gabriel: Yes. And then the other fun part is when you’re climbing on some famous mountain, if it turns out that the Tour de France has just been there one or two years ago, you still see all of the names and…
Alan: Yes, yes.
Gabriel: Pictures and everything painted on the road. And it’s just so amazing.
Alan: No doubt. It’s very inspiring. You can almost kind of hear the crowd echoing in your ears.
Gabriel: Yeah. So having done all of them, what do you think is the hardest one?
Alan: I would answer a different question. I would say my favorite one was Galibier. There was snow up there. And just the kind of the lushness of it and the beauty. Alpe-d’Huez, you felt like you were doing something just classic and special and just full of history. But I liked Galibier better – probably about the same amount of climbing – just because of the stunning beauty up at that peak. The descent would have been better, except I had to ride through a thunderstorm, so I kind of had to take it easy because I didn’t want to go flying off the mountain.
Gabriel: Right.
Alan: But it was just the incredible jaw-dropping beauty up there.
Gabriel: So Trek, the bicycle company, also has a guided tours division? And you have some guides who maybe set the pace or tell me a bit more about how that works. Because most of these adventures that we talk about are self-supported.
Alan: I think technically it’s a separate company. They might even license the track name.
Gabriel: Oh, OK.
Alan: It’s all-inclusive. You show up and they give you a bike. I had a Domane. Yep. It was a nice bike. It was a higher end bike. I wish I would have had mine, but I didn’t want to haul it out all the way to Europe. It was a climber. It had a one-to-one gear ratio for hill climbing. They have three tour guides. And I think there’s an implicit assumption that you show up ready. There was nobody in our group who couldn’t handle it. I don’t know what they would do if there was somebody who really wasn’t up to it. But our group, everybody was trained and capable. And there were three guides who in the morning, they would talk us through everything we’re going to do. And then they would have one guide drive the support vehicle, one guide who would kind of be at the front and one who would stay towards at the back. And they were all really strong cyclists, very knowledgeable. And they were also all capable mechanics. So maybe the nicest thing is, at the end of the day, you hand them your bike. They ask you for any issues. You’d say, oh, maybe the brakes were rubbing or the shifting was a little rough in this area. And then the next morning, the bike’s cleaned up and tuned up and ready for you to ride again, even with your water bottles filled up and in the cages. So it’s really a concierge service. They provide about half the meals, the rest you’re on your own, to go find a place locally to eat. I think the funniest line was on the first day, one of our guides was telling us, “Now remember, this is the Classic Climbs of France, not the Classic Descents of France. And I expect all of you to descend safely and with some restraint.” Of course, none of us listened. But we didn’t have any wrecks.
Gabriel: Oh, that’s good.
Alan: It was just very well choreographed, well planned. All the meals were good, took care of everything. They said the support vehicle would typically have two or three stops where they’d set up a snack table. One thing I did learn over there is, I guess, it’s okay to drink Coca-Cola as part of your riding regimen. And so, well, if this is what they’re doing, I’m gonna drink a lot of Coke. I think peanut M&Ms are a big part of their snack repertoire, too. And then finally, the big one is the stroopwafels, like real stroopwafels. That was probably the best cycling snack they had.
Gabriel: Nice. Well, it sounds amazing to get to do this.
Alan: Yeah, it’s not cheap. My first retirement present to myself was my cross-country ride, and then that was maybe my second retirement present to myself.
Gabriel: Are you comfortable giving a rough idea so people might know?
Alan: It was around 6,500 dollars for eight days.
Gabriel: Okay, plus the airfare and that sort of thing.
Alan: Yeah, so I had to get myself there. So they tell you to show up at this hotel at this time and then leave at this other hotel at another time, and they tell you what airports to use. But you’re responsible for getting yourself to the hotels. And they have different tours. Like, they have some that are more like riding the Rhine Valley. Some of them are a lot more chill than the one I went on was probably the most intense in terms of climbing.
Gabriel: Would you consider your France trip a Big Hairy Audacious Goal as well?
Alan: Well, on one hand, the France trip was hard. It was hard to do that kind of climbing and mileage every day. And there was also the difficult task of training, of training my body and my mind and changing my diet to really become a decent hill climber, a mountain climber, especially since I was training in Ohio, and there aren’t a lot of mountains in Ohio. So there was a lot of going up and down steep hills over and over and over again. But the France trip was really a vacation. And I look at it as a vacation. I mean, first of all, it was only eight days, as opposed to 38 days on the coast to coast trip, and it was just a completely different mindset. It was kind of the icing on the cake of being able to do something amazing and cool and curated.
Gabriel: In your long, unpaid 40-plus year cycling career, you’ve done unsupported tours, angel-supported tours, and fully-supported tours. Looking at these three kinds of tours, how would you compare and contrast them?
Alan: Well, first of all, they’re all great. I mean, they’re all bike tours. And what could be better than that? For me, I’d always rather travel lighter. I have that approach in both backpacking and cycling. I just think it’s more fun to be more comfortable and have less weight to carry. It lets you go farther or be stronger or just generally, when we’re another, having a more fun and better day. So, I would say that the fully-supported tour and the angel-supported tours are best because you don’t have to carry much gear. It’s just like going for a bike ride all day, like you would normally do, except that you do it for days on end, which is even better. Of course, the downside of a fully-supported tour like the Trek Travel Tour I mentioned, is the cost. But really, that’s probably the most fun option if you could pull money out of the equation because you just show up and everything is taken care of. That being said, the unsupported tours that I’ve done, primarily with my brother and my son, have also been great. You can carry a week’s worth of gear and travel pretty light, and you’re not really carrying that much. And to be honest, once I got going, I really didn’t notice that I was carrying probably 15 pounds of extra gear. You could even do a solo, which I have never done, just because I haven’t had to, but I imagined that I could. All that being said, all three are amazing, and I welcome the opportunity to do any of them again. I probably will do all of them again.
Gabriel: If you are interested in learning more about Alan’s cross-country trip, his climbs in France, and much more, you should check out his blog on Medium. There is a link in the show notes. Lastly, thank you to all of you who have suggested favorite episodes for the upcoming holiday special episode. You have until December first to send suggestions, for example, by direct message to the podcast’s Instagram account. at accidental underscore bicycle underscore tourist. It only takes a minute!
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Alan: Twenty years from now, I’ll still be riding. Maybe I’ll cave in and get an e-bike, and I’ll ride with my son and grandson on a big adventure trip. The unconquered mountain is the three-generation trip.
Show Notes
You can learn more about Alan’s adventures by reading his blog on Medium.