Keep on rollin' (Week 28)

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them."

I can hardly picture Ernest Hemingway on a bicycle, but if he didn't actually ride one he was at least quite passionate about the idea. Around World War I, he became an avid fan of European bicycle racing, especially in the Basque country. For my son Nic and me, the country would be 1,000 miles (1600km) of blacktop stretching from Port Angeles, Washington to San Francisco. We would discover just what it meant it be sweating up hills and coasting down them on the very steep and dramatic terrain in between.

After catching the Coho ferry from Victoria, we began our adventure of riding 19 straight days down the Pacific Coast of the United States. That meant 4 days in Washington, 7 days in Oregon and 8 days in Northern California.

We were hardly the first to cover this distance. Although some people we met were astounded when we told them, we also ran into some truly hardcore cyclists, including one who was pedalling from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile. Still, this was adventure painted large for the two us, and we soon found out what it was like to crunch out 75 miles in a day carrying 100 pounds of gear and having to get up the next day to do another long segment. Every day seemed like every other, with seemingly endless miles to conquer and a fresh set of aches and pains to ignore.

Rotten Robbie in Healdsburg

If this was a Hemingway-like trip of discovering a country, we truly learned a lot about America. Every town along the route had its distinct character, from historic charm to hardscrabble fishing or forestry influences. In Garibaldi, Oregon, we made friends in a pub with Andrew, who worked at the sawmill  next door and insisted on showing us his foot-long scars from a dune buggy accident. In Eureka, California, a pub owner came out to the street to invite us in for lunch, asking us to tell her all about our travels. In Willits, California, we arrived at a local bookstore 5 minutes after its 6pm closing. Seeing us, the owners left it open for as long as we wanted. Twenty minutes later, we emerged with a pair of books. Mine was called The American Dream. Then, on a day in Sonoma when we were sweltering in +40C heat and had sought out Clos du Bois winery partly for its air conditioning, Anna the fantastic tasting host treated us to a flight of samples and sent us on our way with more than a spring in our step. All along the way, it was people who made the journey memorable.

Nic & Ben in San Francisco

Much has been written about the joys of long-distance bike touring. Half way through our trip, Nic and I agreed this was the toughest thing we had ever done. So why do we do it? Some of the answers come to you when you're out there, with so much time to get inside your own head. Always, it comes back to the people we met along the way, like a 21-year-old guy name Ben Saccone from Rhode Island (3 months younger than Nic!) who was cycling the same route completely on his own. We had a tough time understanding what motivated a young Dartmouth engineering student to venture off solo, and because we kept bumping into each other, we discovered more about him each time. In the end, we came away from newly won friendships like that with a restored faith in humanity.

As another writer has put it, adventures like this re-awaken the childhood "wonder of things" in you. At one point, that could mean a sheer cliff face dropping off into the sea and waves crashing on a sandy shore. Further up the road, it might be 300-foot redwoods that have been alive since Caesar was in diapers. For us, it came to a thrilling conclusion with the sheer majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge, as we toasted our success with a bottle of Napa Valley pinot noir in the bridge's centrepoint. To punctuate that wondrous moment when we basked in the sun and shouted our joys over the whipping wind and thundering traffic, a heavy fog rolled in just as we finished crossing, like a curtain drawing over a final act.

It was as perfect an ending as any I have encountered in a book.

NEXT WEEK: Home at last, and discovering the joys of meditation!