With the wind blowing steadily at their backs, four young men pedaled on through the Kansas midsummer heat. Sore and tired, aching and hungry, they were nearly halfway through the excruciating 10-week trip of a lifetime. Averaging 70 miles a day, the four friends vowed to spend the summer traveling and seeing the U.S. – by bicycle.
One sweltering July day, the group had already biked 80 miles before lunch. By the end of the day, the sweat poured as they racked up a total of 130 miles.
In warm states like Kansas, the group took advantage of refreshing ways to stay energized under the hot summer sun.
“We’d bike in the morning, take a break to swim, then ride again at night,” University senior Dustin Moore said. “It was nice because Kansas had public swimming pools that were open to cyclists.”
The next major hurdle would be getting to Boulder, Colo., the halfway mark on the trip that spanned thousands of miles from Virginia Beach, Va., to Florence, Ore. Moore, a philosophy major, said he enjoyed hearing about quirky characters to watch for along the way.
“Everyone knew about the cookie lady in Afton, Virginia,” he said. “All along the route, people would ask, ‘Are you going to see the cookie lady?’”
Moore said the woman affectionately known as the cookie lady displayed cycling memorabilia in her home from the past 32 years of bikers who had stopped by her house during their journeys.

Long before Moore arrived on the Eugene campus, husband and wife Dan and Lys Burden, avid bikers, along with Adventure Cycling cofounder Greg Siple and his wife, June, envisioned a cross-country biking tour. They quickly gathered support for their growing organization. In 1976, the Siples and Burdens succeeded in mapping out the route, and the tour is still frequently traveled and popular today. The Bikecentennial, as it’s called, commemorates the founding of America more than two centuries ago.
“The route we did honored the Bikecentennial of the U.S. originally done in 1976,” Moore said. “It was cool because people on the route had been hosting bicyclists all the way back since it started.”
“We really got to see a lot of small-town America,” he said. “A lot of the towns had less than 1,000 people. It was really interesting going through towns where everyone knew everyone. There’s a lot of history on the trail.”
University junior and fellow cycling enthusiast, Marty Emmes, particularly enjoyed the East Coast.
“I really enjoyed Virginia and coming out of the Chesapeake Bay area, where it was flat with swamplands,” Emmes said. “I had never been to the East Coast before. Once we hit the West Coast, it felt like home, but Virginia was the most beautiful. The terrains were something I hadn’t experienced before.”
Marty Emmes, who befriended the other two bikers through his younger brother Craig, said he was amazed by the population density on the East Coast.
“Out here, there’s a lot of space between towns,” Marty Emmes said. “Out there, every 10 or 15 miles you’re in a new town.”
The Emmes brothers grew up camping, so the trip was the opportunity of a lifetime for them.
“For me in particular, the hardest part was in the beginning, getting used to riding that many miles every day,” Marty Emmes said. “My knee started going out and that was rather difficult, and that was in Virginia. But as we came off the Appalachians, it started feeling better.”
Their least favorite part? Both Emmes brothers, Moore and biker Ryan Harvey unanimously agreed that Kansas proved to be as dull as expected, if not more so.
For Moore, the hardest part was the Ozark mountain range in Missouri.
“It was like a self-propelled roller coaster ride,” Moore said. “It took several days. We didn’t get any sort of rhythm going the whole time. And right before that we had done the Appalachian mountains.”
Craig Emmes emphasized the sheer difficulty of the Ozarks.
“That was definitely the most physically demanding,” he said. “But the most mentally difficult was Kansas and east Colorado, where it was windy and flat as a pancake. We had to get up super-early to avoid the wind and there was nothing interesting to look at.”
Harvey lamented that getting into proper physical shape took more adjusting that he planned for. He said that every morning for the first two weeks he was sore and felt like he “had been beat with a baseball bat.
“I didn’t do much working out to prepare for it,” Harvey said. “I wasn’t in as good a shape as I would’ve wished. But you get in shape fast.”
Though grueling at times, the journey offered wisdom and real life lessons the young men may not have gotten otherwise. Harvey said the four students met some uncharacteristic bikers, including people in their 60’s and couples with children.
After a summer spent out on the open road, Harvey said he learned more about the political climate of the country than he ever would have anticipated.
“A surprising amount of people in rural America have liberal political views, and that definitely shocked me,” Harvey said. “This guy in Kentucky ranted for a good half-an-hour how the (National Rifle Association) is so awesome, and he had all these guns. Then he told me he’s voting for Obama and wouldn’t vote for anyone else.
“I have a lot more faith in the American people than I used to,” Harvey continued. “I’m less scared to talk to people because I see they are approachable. I’m less scared of dirty people carrying around all their belongings with them, because I was one of those people.”
Indeed, throughout the 10-week expedition, the men say they never felt unsafe.
“People were a lot nicer than we thought,” Marty Emmes said. “They’d take us in and feed us dinner, let us stay in their backyards. But then at the same time, they’d be telling us to watch our backs, that there are a lot of crazy people out there. They’d all be warning us against the next people, but then we’d go down the road and the next house of people would be just as nice and say the same thing.”
He added that his experience this summer broke popular stereotypes, exceeded hi
s expectations and ultimately will stay with him forever.
“I had these views in my head from media images about people from small towns,” Marty Emmes said. “But in reality, we could find huge commonalities with almost anyone we met.”
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