Home Page
The Trip
Why bother & selling the idea
The Route
Why East to West
Some Highlights
The Trike
The Trice Explorer
Why a Recumbent Trike
How it Behaved
Tyres and Punctures
Fitting the sunshade
Logistics
Luggage
Getting There & Back
Trip Log
Links:
FARM Africa
Adventure Cycling (Maps etc)
ICE (The trike manufacturers)
Larry Black (recumbent dealer)
The trip, on a brand new Trice Explorer, was across the southern part of the USA and I reckon that the 3,100 miles almost doubled my lifetime mileage. The experience was fantastic - met some great people, saw some wonderful country and had the requisite number of interesting experiences! That said, I was more than delighted to be back with my wife and family after the 8 weeks.
Why bother? (And selling the idea to the family!)
The usual reasons apply – always wanted to do something of this sort and my retirement at the end of 2001 made it possible. The choice of the US revolved around the desire to do a coast-to-coast in a country where I could speak the language (I was on my own, so conversation with strangers was going to be important), and the fact that it is a country I am very fond of, having lived there in the 70s.
The deal with my family was simple – we’ll support you if you support a charity. And the choice of FARM-Africa was easy. In my 20s I spent a year hitching around Africa including a six month stay on my uncle and aunt’s farm in Ethiopia. The charity (which my aunt is heavily involved in) gives poor rural farmers a leg up – helps them to help themselves. Something that is clearly very necessary as 70% of farmers in Africa can only support themselves and their immediate families. Contrast that with the USA where the average farmer feeds 130 people, 30 of them in the rest of the world.
And FARM Africa was about to launch a fund raising campaign in the USA so the timing of a make-FARM-Africa-famous-in-the-USA campaign was spot on. Prior to leaving we gave a fund raising party in Soho, London and during the trip I contacted a number of media to help get the charity famous. By good fortune I managed to get on national TV (albeit at 6:00 in the morning on the farming channel on a Sunday!), as well as into a number of papers. You can find them on FARM Africa
The Route
I guess most cyclists are familiar with the touring maps produced by Adventure Cycling. They now cover most of the USA and the quality of the maps is excellent – places to stay and places to eat, the profile of the mountains, and wonderfully precise directions.
I chose the route from St Augustine to San Diego due to the time of year (which turned out to be a fortuitously good call, as the weather was mostly OK where I was, despite the tornadoes and heavy storms elsewhere), and because at 3,100 miles it is the shortest route from coast to coast. The route goes through 8 states and the main cities include Tallahassee, Pensacola, Navasota, Del Rio, El Paso, and Phoenix. It includes three mountain ranges and two deserts (although I bypassed one of the mountain ranges) and has a mix of very quite roads through to the occasional interstate. Varied and never boring!
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Why East to West
There seems to be a lot of debate about the best direction to travel, with the majority electing to travel in an easterly direction because the wind is supposed to be favourable. Although the weather patterns typically move from west to east, the wind on the ground is very much determined by local issues such as the mountains, temperature, time of year, and luck! Of course we cyclists don’t acknowledge tail winds – we either have a headwind or we’re in very good shape today. That said, I think that on my trip the wind was about 50% in my favour. My worst day – a wind in my face that was whipping up sand clouds and allowing a speed of no more than 6mph – was along a dead flat stretch of US90 when I bypassed the Davies mountains; and yet the day before I had met a cyclist travelling in the opposite direction who had been on the same piece of road and had had exactly the same problem. I guess we both lucked out on that occasion.
Anyway, I chose to go west for reasons of fitness – the mountains are in the west so by the time I got there I was more likely to be fit. (I don’t subscribe to the idea of spending weeks prior to a tour getting fit – a quick shake down run is fine by me!)
Before climbing this mountain (8,200 feet) I stayed in an excellent B&B in the tiny hamlet of Kingston, 2500 feet from the summit, so the ride up was done by 11:00, by which time the temperature had moved up from freezing to pleasant, so the run down was great. This particular pass is relatively unknown and I had the roads pretty much to myself, with a picnic lunch amongst the pine trees.
An additional benefit of going from east to west is that you meet the cyclists going east; in all I met up with 14 such cyclists and had the benefit of their experience and advice.
April and Meg, pictured here in Cold Spring the day before the mid term elections, were on their way east; April, on the left, was doing the whole of the Southern Tier, while Meg had joined her for the Texas portion.
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