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.
Missoula to Darby 96km. 490m ascent An easy and not particularly inspiring ride today, at least until we got onto the old Darby road after ~65km of riding a tarred but rough cycle track next to Highway 93 We picnicked off the highway with provisions bought on the road At least today we had no…
Lochsa to Missoula 105km. 710m ascent Today started again with a climb this time up to 1600m so our highest peak so far Unfortunately the views were nothing to write about as everything was covered by clouds. It was cold but at least dry. After a warmup and some coffee it was downhill for the…
106km. 717m ascent Another grotty day ahead. Although it didn’t start raining immediately it did start earlier than forecast 😓 Today was 1 long ride upstream and surprisingly hard 105km with no chance to freewheel. Even though the grade was seldom greater than 2% it was a slog The biggest compensation was the fantastic rapids…
108km. 1209m ascent Our biggest climb so far. Straight out of White Bird and up the old 95 for 873m with no flat road for 2.5 hrs 😅 Rich did end up with a goat head in his tyre but after pulling it out the tube self sealed and we were quickly back to climbing…
We have been following the Little Salmon River which runs into the Salmon River These are 2 of the so called ‘free flowing’ rivers left in the State of Idaho A free flowing river is one that has no dams on it. We are also riding the Highway 95 which happens to be the only…
It has become painfully obvious that I am carrying too much weight and am too slow up the hills As the climbs here are almost always long, much longer than we are used to in Belgium, it has been slowing our progress somewhat. Luckily Rich also wanted to dump some stuff he offered to send…
Astoria to Riggins 15 days in We arrived early at Riggins which has given us time to take a look at our progress and make sure we are near our 85km/day average We have covered 1,202km with 5,536 left to go. This gives us an average of 85.7km/day which is spot on our schedule! We…
Evergreen campsite to Riggins Just a gentle climb before 70km of almost all downhill. We are making 2 short days to gather our power reserves before the BIG climb out of White Bird which takes us 980m We had 10km to to where we should be able to get breakfast. Closed except the weekend but…
Brownlee to Evergreen campground No power in my legs today, no idea why but they were not doing well Straight after an enormous breakfast burrito which even I didn’t manage to finish After the 650m / 7km climb we went back down to about the same height and then had 60km of gentle climb to…
Richland to Brownlee reservoir At last we get to cross the state line and get into Idaho. With a new time zone: Mountain time, which is 1 hour ahead of Oregon Tonight was to be our first camping night as the weather has improved, no rain forecast and above 5C at night. Unfortunately, although we…