Our epic voyage West to East USA. Several years before we rode this epic route, Stef watched a documentary of a TV presenter who rode and documented his Trans America trip.
This inspired Stef to put it on his bucket list.
Of course I couldn’t let him go alone so we planned to ride it in 2020.
Then came the COVID 19 Pandemic just as we were ready to start…. We postponed until 2022 and this is the blog I wrote, mainly for my father’s benefit as he is not on social media.
18.42km. 98m ascent. 4h14 walk time DC is full of things to see and they are fairly well spaced out….. Our first job was to find 2 bike boxes to pack our bikes for the home journey. These we found at The Daily Rider who kindly gave us 2 with the original inside packaging material.…
107.14km. 993m ascent. 5h25 ride time Not a great ride. Komoot basically routes up the old highway which is not to be recommended. I find Komoot good in Europe but less so here in the USA The best part of the route was actually here in DC where the city is super bike friendly and…
115.77km. 777m ascent. 5h25 ride time The penultimate day of our epic ride in the USA. Very hot and humid but a beautiful ride with, luckily, plenty of shade, thought the beautiful Virginia countryside. It was brutally hot again and this drained our energy but we made good headway and arrived at our motel around…
38.74km. 294m ascent. 2h33 ride time Patrice offered to give us a guided cycle tour of Richmond, something Phini usually does but he had just undergone surgery and was not allowed to ride! We had a great ride around the sights of Richmond and Richmond is a city where I could live! They have the…
101.42km. 543m ascent. 4h42 ride time Our journey draws to an end as we make our way up to Washington DC to catch our flight back to Belgium. We have a whole day in Richmond, mainly because we were way too early in Yorktown and we have time to spare. Changing our ticket is prohibitively…
13.44km. 68m ascent. 3h10 walking time No ride today but a foot tour of the old colonial town, probably the world’s largest living museum! Williamsburg is beautiful and a lot of the houses are original. All commerce is kept out of the town so you have to go to the edge to get a coffee…
34.65km 131m ascent. 1h36 ride time A short ride today to bring us up to Williamsburg so we can spend the day visiting tomorrow. Not a great route through the built up areas but not bad. We had a great stay over with our Warmshowers hosts, as almost always we had plenty of common ground…
75.64km. 219m 3h46 ride time Still staying in the fantastic church hostel in Yorktown, but we didn’t want to outstay our welcome and give cyclists a bad name so we got a Warmshowers overnight in Newport News and rode down to Fort Monroe which is the biggest fort on the Atlantic coast. It looks out…
84.05km. 435m ascent 3h29 ride time Today we went back up the Colonial Parkway to Jamestown which is just below Williamsburg on the James River. This museum is huge and explains the early settlement of the British arriving in America and their interaction with the native Americans. It is really well done but the indoor…
Here is a random list of things which struck me as being ‘only in the USA’. There is no order of importance, just. things which struck me as odd or different… FriendlyAmericans are incredibly friendly! The image we (I) have in Europe of Americans: Fat, camera toting, loud, badly dressed and generally unpleasant is absolutely…