by Winnie
I got my first road bike when I was 51. It felt so great that I signed up for an AIDS ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles that was to take place a year later. I trained hard and made it to LA, and as I held my bike overhead in celebration, I was thinking, “Well, I’ll never do that again!”
Got that wrong.
First I found myself doing another AIDS ride, this one 100 miles per day for 5 days. Yikes! Then a couple more. And some organized centuries.
Next major surprise: I decided I wanted to ride across the USA, and hoped my husband would join me. (He didn’t really want to all that much, but he agreed, so I let him choose the route. Fair trade, right?) We rode the Adventure Cycling route called Northern Tier, which is the longest of the organization’s cross country options. Anacortes, Washington to Boston. I only skipped a few spots, including the one where there was a hurricane looming off of Vermont, where we were headed. Yes, that was the one that actually caused some serious flooding right where we might have been. I rode 4200 miles in three months. This was in 2011, the year we turned 60.
By then I had figured out that I really did like touring, and fairly long distances, and I started thinking of places I might like to see by bike. We went to Europe and did some famous climbs, and some leisurely rides. We saw parts of northern Italy, Slovenia, France, England, and a bit of Spain . We were with friends in the French Pyrenees; we rode to lunch in Spain. Australia. New Zealand. And there was an infamous Costa Rica ride. I LOVE Costa Rica, but it’s not a cycling paradise if you’re not a fearless mountain biker. And Nova Scotia & St. Johns/Labrador (Newfoundland). Prince Edward Island. British Columbia. Even a very brief ride as part of our Galapagos tour, so Ecuador, I guess. And one bit at a time, I began to ride in various US states.
A few years back I realized it wouldn’t be that hard to ride in all 50 so I started keeping track. Hawaii is easy for me; we have relatives there and visit fairly frequently. Haleakala from the beach to the top – 36 miles, 10,000 feet, is not so simple, but I have done it a couple of times. We made a trip to Chicago & rode in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Kentucky. I rode the Southern Tier, and spent my 70th birthday in Suwannee state park in Florida. I was mostly on my own, and when Bruce joined me & we drove home together to California, we stopped in Arkansas and Oklahoma & rode some miles.
Last fall I acknowledged that I had not treated Iowa very well. I had only ridden across a pedestrian bridge to Iowa when I was doing some work in Omaha (Nebraska), and gone around a few blocks. So last fall we took a train to Omaha and focused most of our riding on Iowa, then went on to Des Moines & rode some more. And all the other states – we generally had a relative, or a park we dreamed of visiting, or some attraction, so they happened.
But Alaska…
I don’t love cold. My daughter-in-law’s 50th birthday approached. She planned to celebrate by taking a cruise through the Inland Passage. I figured I could rent a bike at some of the stops & get Alaska done. In the summer of 2020. That was not meant to be.
It kept nagging at me, though, and we decided this summer was the time to do it. I did some research and found AlaskaBike. It’s a father & son bicycle touring outfit that takes you to places most tours don’t go, so you get a good look at the back country of the state. It has an amazing amount of back country. We learned that the population of Anchorage, the largest city, is about 300,000. The population of the entire state is about 700,000, less than San Francisco. And the size. Alaskans like to say that if you put Texas inside its borders, then another Texas, you’d still have room for another half-Texas. So we went. A few of my cycling friends joined us, and two other women, one of whom was actually riding in her 50th state, too.
Pictures speak louder than words. I don’t have any with bikes, but I really did ride about 125 miles of Alaskan roads!:
Bio: I am a lifelong Californian. My mother and father were not born here but moved to the state as small children. I have two grown daughters and five wonderful grandchildren. I spent my working life working at, and eventually running, the family insurance business. My father had introduced many employee benefits – sabbatical starting in 1970, optional four-day work week in 1972, elimination of all official work time rules in 1974. Adults like to be treated as adults, and people tended to stay a long time, so it was a very pleasant working environment with key elements of trust and respect. I also served on a couple of independent school boards, one a strong academic school serving grades 6-12, one a school designed to start helping city kids who had suffered the ongoing effects of racism & poverty to find opportunities they might not as easily discover without support. I live at a Lifetime Care Community where I serve on the finance committee and chair the sustainability committee. I also plan to join the newly formed fitness committee. And for fun, I have ridden my bicycle across North America. Twice.
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