When I first set out on the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail, I was doing it to say I’d done it. To check it off my bucket list. Meeting new people and seeing amazing sights were just perks of accomplishing a coast-to-coast bike ride.
After a brutal first week of many flat tires, rainy weather, and never ending climbing over the Appalachians, I realized I had underestimated the trip. I knew it was going to be tough, but the everyday obstacles made the end goal seem out of reach. Nonetheless, my vision of making it to Astoria, Oregon, never wavered.
Somewhere along the way, maybe when I was climbing Hayter’s Gap on my way to the Virginia-Kentucky border, I can’t recall, the trip became more than just a ride across the country. That’s when it hit me: this isn’t about a bucket list, this is about an adventure.
I’ve always considered myself adventurous, but the journey gave new meaning to the word. Waking up each day, I never knew what to expect. I mean that figuratively and literally. Weather, road conditions, and terrain were always a surprise. But that was only part of the adventure.
There’s a time and place for planning and quite honestly, this trip wasn’t the time or the place. So much could change at any given second that it was futile to plan in advance. I discovered that the trip was about adapting.
I never knew what would happen from one minute to the next. That’s why I wouldn’t look at the map until the morning of the ride. I would just pick a few places on route that stirred my curiosity. Maybe the town had an interesting name like Sisters, Oregon, or perhaps it was a place I wanted to visit again like Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
A real taste of adapting occurred when leaving Sheridan Lakes, Colorado. After riding for seven hours into a 25 mph headwind, there was no other option but to wait out the wind. Pulling off the road before noon, I found some shade and took a siesta on a picnic table. Nine hours later, when the wind dropped to a breezy 10 mph, I hopped back on the bike and rode 90 miles through the night to Pueblo, Colorado. Although the riding conditions weren’t ideal, I had to adapt in order to keep moving west.
The biggest question mark of each day was where I would spend the night.
I’d often roll into towns at 6 o’clock with no dinner plans and no place to camp. While at times I could rely on a local church or fire station to put me up for the night, I also found myself camping in city parks. When all those didn’t work out – and this is when flexibility comes into play – I relied on stealth camping. Pitching a tent after the sun went down and breaking down camp before the sun came up was the unplanned plan when all else failed. (And don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t get a good night’s sleep behind an HVAC unit next to a church in Dillon, Montana.)
I became addicted, if you will, to that feeling of not having any sort of plan when on the road. Mingling with the locals and scouting out towns became part of the daily process. How could I have planned to befriend a group of cowboys in the Ozarks of Missouri while they help me fix my bike chain? How could I have scheduled my first ever radio interview with WAXN 103.9 in Ava, Illinois, after being waved down by the talk show host of a gospel station? I thrived off of no plans.
As the trip was coming to a close, I still had a lot of thinking to do. The question that lingered was this: how could I keep this trip alive even after it was over? Good thing I had ten hours a day of thinking time on the bike.
The answer is simple: stay adventurous. Do something out of the ordinary. Do something spontaneous. It doesn’t have to be as radical as biking across the country; it can be as easy as trying out a new food or striking up a conversation with a stranger.
I didn’t expect to get as much out of this journey as I actually did. The people I met, the places I saw and the memories I made are unforgettable. Yeah, there were plenty of downs, but the ups significantly outweighed them.
Since I got off the saddle and stepped into a world that isn’t on the TransAmerica Bicycle Route, my sense of adventure lives on. I don’t have a set-in-stone job, and I have no clue where life is currently going, but I’m enjoying every minute of it. Just like my journey over the past two months, things will fall into place. In the meantime, I’ll be doing my best to live in the present and to maintain a joy for spontaneity that this ride taught me.
–A native Virginian, Carson Hogge has currently landed in Boulder, Colorado, where he works at Newton Running. He’s a 2014 graduate of VMI in Lexington, grew up camping and hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains, shredding the mountain bike trails around Richmond, and catching waves along Virginia’s coast.
