Sea to Sea - A Bicycling Adventure

On April 21st, 2021, a much-anticipated adventure of a lifetime will begin for me.

Twenty-five years ago, Doyle High, who owned a drug store in Haskell at the time, inspired Don Mathews, Mike Lukert, and me to start riding bicycles. Doyle had recently completed a bike ride with two friends, riding from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. Since that time, I have enjoyed taking week-long bike rides each year with four to eight friends, typically riding about 500 miles.

About 8 months ago, I asked the group if anyone would be interested in attempting to ride from coast to coast in the spring of 2021. Doyle, who now lives in Austin, and his friend, Steve Vandigriff said they were in for the full ride. Joe Norton said he could join for a few days at the beginning and Mike Lukert said he would join in Oregon after recovering from shoulder surgery.

Since we felt like it would be too cold to ride in the northwest in April and too hot to ride in the south in the summer, we devised a plan to make the 3,500 mile coast to coast ride starting in Wichita, KS and ending in Wichita, KS about 65 days later.

We will ride from Wichita to Wilmington, North Carolina and then box up our bikes and fly to the west coast and continue our ride from Florence, Oregon back to Wichita.

Our plan is to have 56 riding days, averaging 63 miles per day along with eight or nine rest and/or bad weather days. We will be crossing the Rocky Mountains in the west and the Appalachians in the east and our total elevation gain is expected to be a little over 140,000 feet.

We will be staying mostly is small communities across America and like all of our other rides, this one will be less about the miles we ride and more about the people we meet along the way.

I am grateful to my wife Marilyn for always being supportive and for allowing this old guy to pursue his boyish adventures.