Bike About 2025 – Phase V Pennsylvania
February 24, 2026 § Leave a comment
When I started this adventure I wasn’t really sure I would finish it. That is kind of how I feel about documenting it as well. Ha! It takes a lot of effort to put these posts together, even when you are retired. Now here I am (or was) in Pittsburgh PA after more than 3000 miles and getting ready to start the next phase of the trip. At least this begins with friends as my friend and buddy, a brother really, committed to joining and put in the miles and effort training so that he could spend 4 days on the bike riding with me. To show my flexibility I allowed him to alter my plan to ride the GAP and PANTS rides to get to his cabin into starting on the GAP, and then heading about as East as you can go through Pennsylvania, stringing other rail trails together so that we keep the mileage in the reasonable category and get to his cabin outside of Woodward PA by Thursday. My friends Bruce, Terry, and Ed arrive on Friday to hang out with me for a weekend of zeros that still warms my heart. The format for this post will continue to be copied in logs from my Strava account that I was pretty good at keeping up-to-date. Each entry will have a link to the ride on Strava, my Insta posting for that day as well as a flyover of the route from Relive.cc. I will also embed a stitched together video from all the Live photos I took during the day and now that I have company, there should be more photos to work with as well as videos.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania
February 23, 2026 § Leave a comment
Ohio should go quickly, but Pennsylvania will be very hard, and I have 3 zero days built in so I can hang with my buddy and his family Larry Butler (Drew and Melanie) as well as any of my backpacking/camping brothers that can take time away from their own lives to share time with me. The closer I get to Pittsburgh, where I will meet Larry, the details of our journey together have started to mature. His son Drew will support us by carrying our gear so that Larry doesn’t have to 1) find gear to carry his gear on his bike and 2) worry about anything other than riding a bike with me for four days. 2) is a large enough task that I am sure Larry lost a lot of sleep worrying about as I got closer. The first day of Ragbrai I made an effort to ride with Pete for a fair part of the day and asked him to get in touch with Larry and assure him that I can ride slow enough so that we can enjoy the ride together.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana
February 23, 2026 § Leave a comment
Leaving Dubuque I cross the Mississippi River into Wisconsin of all places. Now, I have always convinced myself that way back in my college days when I and a bunch of racer friends came to Chicago for a bike race and I thought we had traveled enough North that we stayed in Wisconsin. I now believe that was false and I have never been to Wisconsin before, so that now on this day, after crossing the river, I have now checked off state 49 in my quest to visit all 50 states. Now only North Dakota remains. In addition now that I am on my own again, I have time to write my travel log again, and so I will return to reposting my notes published with Strava. The other format change I will make in these postings is that I am out of the “Big States” now, and between Wisconsin (less than a day), Illinois (3+ days) and Indiana (4 days) I am going to combine all the travel logs for those states into one posting.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – Iowa
February 21, 2026 § Leave a comment
I have made it to Iowa in time for the start of this year’s Ragbrai. It will be the 52nd edition of the ride so Ragbrai LII. I can say now as I write this installment up that there were plenty of distractions during this phase of my trip and I didn’t keep decent daily logs as each day clicked away. Some of that was due to being part of a much larger event than my little jaunt across the country. What I found out was that rather than Ragbrai returning to the format prior to edition L (One L of a time!) which was 3-4 thousand cyclists, they had no cap on registration and the number was closer to twenty thousand cyclists. I joined the same group that I rode edition L with where there were some scratches, and some new editions. The main known protagonist being Pete Toohey whom I had been texting status all summer on my ride. We were to be joined by the Texas Meyers clan consisting of Robert, his son (name escapes me again) and daughter-in-law Amber and then the UVA clan (Amber is also UVA clan) that owes its Ragbrai attachment to one UVA alum, (K)Cat Rosenthal, who managed to convince a number of her VA girlfriends to “give Ragbrai a go”. The UVA girls are Cat, Amber, Heidi, and the other women whoose names escape me sadly including a new convert. There was also Ted the Diplomat who was riding with our group, doing his first Ragbrai before being deployed by the State Department to Somalia for his first assignment.
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