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Crossing the Continental Divide was one of the highlights of the long bicycle trip from Oregon to the East Coast.
Adam Tremper's grueling cross-country bicycle trip included camping, beaches and giant hamburgers along the way.
Here's the basic cross-country route that Adam Tremper followed biking from coast to coast.
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By HUGH MUIR
Early this year, Stafford County's Adam Tremper, 20, bought a one-way plane ticket from Richmond to Portland, Ore., with his parents' blessing. They knew he'd be coming back soon.
How soon depended on how fast he could pedal.
A couple of years ago Tremper, a 2007 Brooke Point High School graduate, was a medium-distance runner (5-k and shorter). He ran for the school, and at Virginia Commonwealth University. Then he tore his Achilles tendon.
During his recuperation, a friend on the university cycling team suggested that he take up the bike. Tremper was off and rolling.
After a few months of training, in February 2008 he pedaled a 70-mile round trip from the Shenandoah Valley into West Virginia. The next month he biked 71 miles from his home in Aquia to VCU. A year ago, he biked 290 miles from home to his grandmother's house, near Williamsport, Pa., for a family reunion.
"She didn't think much of the biking," he said.
That's when Tremper got the idea for a longer trip. His parents supported the idea. For a combination birthday and Christmas present last December (his birthday is Dec. 15) his mother, Annie, gave him a $1,100 Surly Long Haul Trucker 24-speed touring bike. To carry his gear, he got a BOB Yak trailer.
He went to work to pay for the trip. Most of the money, about $1,800, would go for food; $119 bought his plane ticket to Portland. Two weeks before the trip, Tremper shipped his bike, trailer and gear to a bicycle shop in Portland, arranging to pick it up when he got there May 15.
When he reached the West Coast he hopped on his bike and headed not east, but west--about 75 miles, to Arch Cape on the Pacific Ocean. This was, after all, to be a coast-to-coast pedal. On May 16 he began his trip east.
"I figured I had about 4,500 miles to go," Tremper said after arriving home. "If I could average 100 miles a day, I could make it in 45 days."
He did make it in 45, including three days off along the way. He also averaged six meals a day, including six free lunches given to him by an Idaho prison work crew cleaning up along the highway.
"I finished them all by the next morning," he recalled.
Tremper slept in city parks ("some had showers"), behind a volunteer fire department, at highway rest stops, in campgrounds (he had a tent in his trailer), in church basements ("I got warm welcomes all along the trip, except for the dogs in Kentucky") and sometimes under the open sky.
"I became a hard sleeper," he said. Outdoor night noises didn't disturb him.
He zigzagged across the Continental Divide six times, and briefly joined other cyclists who were on their own long-distance trips. He visited a high school buddy now in college in Wyoming. He was hammered by the relentless sun of the flat plains. He savored the endless sky. Occasionally it rained. He was hit by hailstones in Kansas and "suffered very tough heat and humidity in Missouri." He was laid low for a day in Kentucky after an attack of food poisoning from a fast-food restaurant sandwich. He had six punctured inner tubes and one worn-out tire.
"It was all a great adventure," he said.
He averaged 15 miles an hour over the trip, and figured that he coasted for a total of 100 miles.
He held up physically.
"I got knee pains during the 11-mile climb out of Hell's Canyon in Idaho," he said.
Tremper's parents kept track of their son by his cell phone calls ("but cell links are spotty in the Rockies") or with a GPS they had given him. At the end of each day's run he punched a button and, in Virginia, a little biking figure popped up his parents' computer screen.
He entered Virginia through Breaks Interstate Park, and in the final five days slipped through Blacksburg, Lexington and Charlottesville and over the last mountains to Richmond, where the trip ended June 29. He called his parents, who took him, and his bike, home.
Tremper didn't quite make it to the Atlantic shore, less than 100 miles beyond Richmond. But he had run out of time. On July 1, he and his family (his sister, Chloe, 16, is a Brooke Point student) drove to his grandmother's house in Pennsylvania for the annual family gathering that a year ago triggered the idea for his cross-country adventure.
"I have a new perspective on humanity," he said.
Hugh Muir: 540/735-1975
Email: hmuir@freelancestar.com
