Seeing America

Looking Back One memorable character I worked with during my 14 years at Hewlett Packard was Dan Bojanowski, or Bojo for short. I never quite figured out what Bojo did at HP, but somehow he always turned up when I was about to do something stupid. Bojo was like a fly on the wall, watching what was going on, then initiating an informal chat, that always started innocently enough, giving Bojo an opening to work his way to the point. I was always trying to make things better which gave Bojo lots of opportunities to chat. One memorable quote was “It is much easier to put a new process in place but nearly impossible to get rid of a useless and outdated process, so be careful what processes you create.” The other quote that stuck with me was “Don’t bother to measure something if the data will not effect any decisions”.  I did internalize Bojo’s ideas of simplicity. Before the bike adventure I was asked which software I would use to track the ride, which bike computer to track my pe...

Directions  Excuse me, do you know the way to Boston?”  I emailed my brother and asked if he wanted to bike from Seattle to Boston. He emailed back – “Sure”. This level of planning doesn’t lead to success, but it was a sufficient commitment. So we dug deeper. I wanted to ride the Trail of the Hiawatha outside Wallace Idaho and see Uncle Dave in Belgrade Montana. Jon wanted to take the ferry across Lake Michigan and work our way to the Erie canal bike path. Now we have a couple of waypoints, but still no route. Ida knew a some stretches of rails to trails we could take across Washington, which we broke up into a misdirected 6 day ride. This was the sum total of our route planning when the trip started. Since one of my mottos is “You know you are on an adventure when you have to make a U-turn”, I was setup for adventure.  The first day out it became clear we were too dependent on an online mapping program set to cycling routes. Ida works in downtown Seattle, so sh...

  Wormhole  I always thought a wormhole was from the creative mind of a science fiction writer. Turns out the formal name for a wormhole is the Einstein-Rosen bridge. Although we are not pedaling fast enough for relativity to come into play, on our trip we do have our own form of a wormhole. The wormhole first came into existence when we found the Colombia river bridge on I90 in Washington to be our only reasonable option forward. The bikes went in the sag wagon and a mile later we were at the other end of the wormhole back on our bikes riding. The other side of I90 we tired to ride state highway 243, which turned out to be a problem for two reasons. First there was no decent shoulder and the semi’s passed so rudely at one point my daughter Ida was blown off her bike. The other problem will get it's own blog post – namely the route we were taking. When we finally got to camp (after a sag wagon kept the semis at bay by following us with emergency lights flashing), a q...

Barney Moaner This is not the famous Barney Moaner; just my brother Jon The 40 year old Barney Moaner story may stray from the facts a bit, but I hope you enjoy this rendition. Biking through South Dakota, with my brother Dave and I friend I will call Barney, we ran into some road construction. Barney got that moniker because he referred to bananas as Barneys. We had strong headwinds for a couple of days and the temperature was just under 100. We were all thirsty, hot, tired, and ready to be done with South Dakota. As we make our way east, we passed a very nice paved north bound road. After another 5 miles we ran into a Bridge Out sign, with a long detour on a gravel road. Had they posted the road closed on the paved road, we would have had an easy time of it. Up ahead, past the Road Closed barriers, was a gulley with no easy way across. Barney picked up his bike, which was loaded with tent, sleeping bag, and clothes, threw his bike in the ditch, sat down, put his head in his ...

Family  Some families are like prairie dogs – they never go far from home. My family are more like moose – we stuck together when young, but went free range after that. Brother Jon (from Alabama) will do the entire trip. Daughter Ida (from Seattle) joined for the Washington state portion. Brother Dave (from California), his wife Sue, and their daughter Erica joined for a few days in Montana. Wife Karry is driving the van + trailer sag wagon. Jon’s wife Lisa is driving their Subaru with roof mounted tent. There is the magic who’s who decoder ring that should help make sense of the other blog entires.  My guess is Jon and I have already spent more time together on this trip than we have in total for the past 40 years. Jon is retired, devoting the entire summer to this adventure. It has been a joy to get to know Lisa. Karry and I have been real close – give the van interior is around 6 feet by 15 feet, but that is only when the day’s biking is done. Ida joined us for ...

Preparation  There are two options to being prepared. Being prepared and not being prepared (I learned that in boy scouts). Due to other commitments and the craziness with shipping and world wide demand for bikes, I chose a third option - there is always another option – I learned that in engineering school. Option 3: take a bunch of tools, a bunch of spare parts and a can-do attitude, and finish kitting the trailer, making final bike adjustments, fixing the RV, and creating camp widgets as we go. The RV repair place had my vehicle in stasis for 8 weeks without fixing anything, leaving me less than a week to do what I could. Brother Jon didn’t get a critical part for his new bike until he got to Seattle. Jon’s first test ride was the night before we started our journey. Daughter Ida received her new bike a couple weeks before the ride. Karry’s e-bike was 6 weeks late. Luckily my other brother Dave was able to grab the e-bike on his way through Boise as he joined up with us...

 What’s the Goal? At 2021 Rotary District 5400 Conference our keynote speaker was Ed Viesturs, a mountaineer who has summited Everest.  We have all heard great keynote speakers.  After a few weeks, I like to try remember even one thing they said.  Often nothing is recalled.  Viesturs talk was an exception.  One of his points had to do with his goal after 10 months training, spending tens of thousands of dollars, and getting a team of 10 to 20 people to work together to get one or two climbers to the summit of Mt. Everest.  Can you guess his goal?  It’s obvious – get to the top of Everest.  Only that isn’t his goal.  One time Visturs was 200 feet from a summit, and turned around.  His goal was to get back down the mountain alive. So here I am, pedaling a bike across Washington state; starting in Seattle with our back tire in the Pacific salt water of Puget Sound.  The trip ends when the front tire is in Atlantic salt water outsi...