March to the Sea

When I last wrote a post about the cross-country bicycle trip being undertaken by my brother Ed and his girlfriend Kira, I left off with them taking some rest at a friend’s house in Wisconsin. I will now pick up from there.

From their friend’s house they continued across Wisconsin towards Minnesota. One portion of their route took them along the Elroy-Sparta trail, a bicycle trail which, like many others, was created from an abandoned railway. This is convenient as these bicycle trails can take advantage of existing structures such as bridges and tunnels that are too expensive to otherwise be available to bicyclists.

Ed and Kira then crossed the Mississippi River to enter Minnesota. While they were not able to obtain an exact count, they found the land of 10,000 lakes to be aptly named. They also found a wooden buffalo statue on a hill while camping in a park.



North Dakota was the next state they had to traverse. The two important landmarks that Ed and Kira encountered were the geographic center of the continent and a huge statue of Earl Bunyan. The geographic center of the continent is fairly self-explanatory, but many people may not be too familiar with Earl Bunyan. He was the appropriately large brother of Paul Bunyan, and a rancher by trade. He is immortalized in statue form in New Town, North Dakota.

Montana was by far the widest state Ed and Kira went across. The Rocky Mountains in the Western portion of the state also signaled an end to the flat terrain they had been riding on since Wisconsin. It was also the site of a near-disaster when the crank on Ed’s bike snapped while riding up a steep grade for several hours. This occurred close to sunset, and it seemed like Ed might be in trouble as they were miles from the nearest town. Fortunately, there was only another half mile of uphill before a stretch of over twelve miles of downhill slope. Ed’s bike was able to make it to the camp site through the powers of coasting, and with the help of some locals they were soon back on the road.

After a quick jaunt through Idaho, Ed and Kira found themselves in Eastern Washington State. Here they went through a series of mountain passes in the North Cascades. From there they moved on to Anacortes and then to Seattle, and thus their amazing cross-country journey was complete. People said that it would be a bad idea to cross the country East-to-West, as the journey would be frontloaded with rolling hills and marked by constant headwind. People also said that if someone were hell-bent on making the trip anyway, it probably would not be a good idea to use 40 year old steel ten-speed bikes. But Ed and Kira just went out and did it, and on top of that they made pretty good time. Congratulations to them!



The next step of their trip was to hop a train to San Fransisco and then to Mountain View to bring the message to Meebo. More details concerning how that went will be posted soon.