Bicycle from Sea to Shining Sea
3 Cross Country Bike Tours-USA
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I chose to bicycle with the Cross Country Challenge tour because it traveled the central tier of the U.S.. Having already bicycled across the southern route and the northern route, I wanted to join a tour that was crossing the central route. From its start at the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco, the route headed east across California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Kansas. In Missouri, it began a northeasterly direction through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and into Erie, Pennsylvania. The route continued directly east across New York, then Vermont, and to the Atlantic Ocean in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
I expected that I would show up at this ride and do just fine, since I was an experienced coast-to-coast cyclist. I disregarded the tour name and did not anticipate that this route was designed to be a challenge. For me, it never was easy. The total distance was 3,812 miles; there were only five non-cycling days. We pedaled eleven consecutive days from San Francisco before we had our first rest day. The route wiggles across the U.S. map, seemingly aiming for the most difficult terrain. I am curious why the route designer did not go through more of Pennsylvania’s Appalachian Mountains. That was the only mercy given on this challenge route.
The route through Missouri, where we rode on the roughest, chunkiest, uneven blacktop roads, made us all think of that state simply as misery. Roads that were recently resurfaced were miserably choppy with lumpy blacktop, loose gravel, wet tar, and blotchy, uneven repairs. The roads were never smooth. They do not blacktop the entire roadway. Instead they do ragged, splotched resurfacing with rough transitions between the old and new blacktop. No neat and tidy rectangular, flat patches; just blobs of chunky, granular asphalt pressed out in irregular directions. The new blacktop seems to have been hardened into clumps before it was laid down.
Missouri was also the state that gave us the memorable eighty-two miles from Chillicothe to Kirksville. That day featured continual
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