Scott Swanson
Back when Jonathan Hoy was at Stephen F. Austin University in Texas, in the 1980s, he got around on a Centurian Accordo road bike.
One day a fellow student stopped him and started quizzing him about bicycling.
“He said, ‘I think I’m going to get a bike and ride to Canada.’ He had no experience, but he bought a Centurian LeMans, the next model up from the one I had, and he rode up to Canada. I went, ‘Whoa.’”
That planted a seed in Hoy’s mind.
Later, after marrying his wife Almut in Germany, having a daughter, Laura, and moving to this area, where he works at Entek as an operations manager for lithium battery separators made by the company, Hoy has mostly concentrated on distance running, recently finishing his first 50K (32 miles).
“I’ve done alpine climbing, rock climbing, skiing – a lot of leg stuff,” he said.
Then, on a trip to the coast, “one day I saw a couple outside of a bakery who were riding a tandem bike. I was thinking, ‘That looks like a lot of fun.’”
Those seeds eventually germinated, this year, into a 75-day, 4,318-mile cross-country bike trip that Hoy, 51, and a friend completed two weeks ago, riding the TransAmerica Trail from Yorktown, Va. to Florence.
The TransAmerica Trail began as the Bikecentennial, the route for a large bike tour organized for the 1976 celebration of the United States Bicentennial, from Missouri to Virginia, and was eventually expanded to reach Oregon, where cyclists can choose either Astoria or Florence as their start/finish point.
Created by the Adventure Cycling Association, the largest membership cycling organization in North America, the TransAmerica Trail was Adventure Cycling’s first route and the first-ever mapped cycling route across the U.S. It is the most popular route to cross America by bicycle, according to the organization’s website.
Hoy said once he decided to do the trip, he trained for three months, “pretty seriously.”
“Where we live, here in Sweet Home, is a good place to train,” he said. “It’s really hilly. I’d ride Marks Ridge three or four times in a day. That was really good training for the Appalachians.
“A lot of people think of the Rockies. They are big mountains – Hoosier Pass is 11,000 feet. But the really hard part is the Appalachians and Ozarks. The roads are not graded back there and you’re riding uphill at 3 mph or screaming down.”
Hoy’s bike, A Surly Longhaul Trucker, is specially built for touring. Its CroMoly steel frame is a little heavier than other bikes, but is stronger, able to bear the weight of packs and other gear, Hoy said.
It also has 27 gears, with the low end suitable for climbing tortuous hills that seem to go straight up, he said.
“It’s got kind of a wimpy high gear, but it’s great on hills,” he said.
Hoy and his riding partner, Jerry Smith of Corvallis, started May 7 by dipping their rear wheels in the Atlantic Ocean and hitting the road. Their 75-day journey included five rest days, but otherwise they kept moving west – for 4,318 miles, averaging close to 60 miles a day.
The heat and humidity were oppressive, he said, despite the fact that they actually planned their trip east to west in an attempt to stay ahead of summer. Most riders start in Oregon and go east, he said.
“Everywhere we went, it seemed like a heat wave followed us,” he said. “Missouri, Wyoming, really the western half of the U.S., we had heat the whole way. When we rode through, people said these are summer-like conditions.”
He and Smith had maps of the entire route, each with multiple “plates” that they could stick in a window on the pack in front of their handlebars.
The route includes some suggested locations where cyclists can sleep for free, and Hoy said they took advantage of that.
“We did probably 25 percent camping. Another 25 to 30 percent were churches and fire halls. Some places are on the map. Some places you just go to the church and ask if you can have shelter for the night.”
There is also a network of private homes where touring cyclists are welcome to stay, called the Warm Showers Community.
“I stayed at some hosts along the way. They’re really nice people. Usually they’ll make you dinner, give you a nice bed to sleep in. It’s really cool when you can stay at a Warm Showers host.”
The Hoys have hosted several cyclists themselves and even a pair of runners, Oregon State University students who were headed east along the TransAmerica Trail, they said.
“We’re probably the only Warm Showers host in Sweet Home,” Almut Hoy said. “A lot of people don’t know it exists. It would be good for people to find out.”
Jonathan Hoy said he and Smith used maps created by the Adventure Cycling Association, which is headquartered in Missoula, Mont., on the route.
“If you stop there, they take your picture and take down your information. You can get your bike weighed.
“Mine weighed 90 pounds, with all the gear, loaded with water. You carry a lot of water. There’s stretches where you’ll go 80 miles and have no services. You have to be prepared to spend the night, if necessary.”
Staying fed was a major challenge, Hoy said. They would eat first breakfast, second breakfast and then “elevensies,” followed by lunch, dinner and a bedtime snack. And he still lost 10 pounds on the trip.
They’d rise at 4 a.m. so they could be on the road by 6 to beat the heat.
“We’d try to be done by noon,” he said.
The end-of-the-day routine was “an amazing amount of work.” They’d eat dinner, wash their clothes in the sink, if one was available, plan the next day’s route and figure out where they were going to spend the next night. They also updated their blogs. By then it was bedtime.
“We didn’t have any spare time,” Hoy said.
The trip got brutal pretty quick, he said. When they hit Kentucky and Missouri, they found hilly roads with no shoulders – and plenty of rumble strips.
“We joked that the rumble strips were on there to keep drunks on the road – and keep bikers on the road with the drunks,” Hoy said. It was “really humid and really hot.
Wyoming was tough, too. There they were greeted by swarms of mosquitoes.
“Even during the day,” Hoy said. “Normally, a cyclist looks forward to a tailwind. But these mosquitoes go the speed of the tailwind. So if you go the speed of tailwind, you’re in a cloud of mosquitoes. We’d have to go more than 15 mph, otherwise they’d eat us alive.”
Colorado, on the other hand, was one of his favorite stretches.
“It had big hills, but the grades were great. We might be climbing 15 to 20 miles to get over a hill, but on the East Coast the hills were half a mile, up and down. It was like doing Marks Ridge over and over again, all day long. Just add some heat and humidity.”
Hoy said one of his most pleasant memories is the folks he met along the way.
“You meet a lot of interesting, friendly people. Like in Guffy, Colo. It’s a little tiny, nothing town. Two blocks. But there’s a guy there that runs a hostel. He has these little miner’s cabins that you can use overnight for $10. He’s been doing it since the bike centennial. He’s one of the original people to do that.”
There were also other cyclists. Hoy said they met a champion fencer, a couple of software entrepreneurs in their “late 20s or early 30s” who were retired, and the founder of the Open Table on-line dinner reservation system.
Going through Colorado, they met the leaders of the inaugural Trans Am Bike Race, in which competitors had to ride entirely self-supported – using only services available to the general public. It started on June 6 in Astoria.
The winner finished in 18 days, Hoy said. “They were amped up. They were doing 200 miles a day.
“Our bikes were Winnebagos compared to what they were riding,” Hoy said. “They must have been staying in motels. They weren’t carrying any gear.”
They spent a good part of the trip partnering with a pair of British cyclists, both former BBC employees who had retired and were riding east to west across America. They met in a fire hall in Mineral, Va., three days out of Yorktown.
“We’d ride a week with them, then we wouldn’t see them for a week. We were suffering through the same difficulties. We got to know each other. We’ll be friends for life, probably.”
Cyclists on the TransAmerica route typically carry business cards with their contact information.
“You meet people, they want your home number, your info,” Hoy said. “You can exchange (the cards) easily. I took 30 and I think I passed out 28.”
The most frustrating experience of the trip came at the end, he said. Hoy said he and Smith were “purists.”
“We wanted to ride the entire route – continuous, consecutive pedaling. Other people take rides off and on throughout entire trip. Some get support, rides over tough spots.”
In Oregon, they reached Mitchell, where Highway 26 was closed due to a wildfire. They waited 13 hours, until ODOT employees told them they weren’t going to be able to pass.
“They said, ‘We’re taking you over the pass. Load up your bikes.’”
The British riders were on a tighter schedule and decided to take the offer.
“It was just five miles,” Hoy said. But that was too much. They returned to Mitchell and took a 100-mile detour.
“That was probably most frustrating. We were so close to finishing and, all of a sudden, we had to add a two-day, 100-mile detour that included three passes. They were pretty bad. That was a notable event.”
Their British friends finished a day ahead of them in Florence, but waited, along with Almut and Smith’s wife Sue.
“We rode the 100 miles from Sisters to Eugene in one day,” Hoy said. Then they finished, following the custom of dipping their front wheels in the Pacific to signify the end of their ride.
Despite the difficulties, they made it through with one big accomplishment: no flat tires the entire way.
The trip was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, Hoy said.
“I expected it to be hard, but it was even harder. I’m the kind of person who tends to be very prepared. I would rather overtrain and be sure. I anticipated it would be hard in the Appalachians, but it was really hard. The hills were just non-stop.”
He paused.
“I would not do this trip again.”