EPISODE 63
The TransAm Trailblazers
How do two novice cyclists with almost no overnight trip experience wind up pioneering the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail in 1974? For Jim Richardson and Linda Thorpe, the journey didn’t begin on a grueling mountain pass or in a velodrome. In September 1973, they crossed paths in a Weight Watchers class in Garden Grove, California. After Jim spotted a poster advertising Bikecentennial ’76 in a local bike shop, they decided to swap calorie-counting for a 4,252-mile journey across 11 states on a tandem bicycle. Their 93-day trek was anything but smooth. The couple folded a wheel on railroad tracks, hitchhiked with their tandem to make scheduled TV interviews, and survived mosquito swarms in Montana and Wyoming. Following a terrifying crash in Kentucky, Jim was inspired to propose, and they finally pedaled into Jamestown, Virginia, for a colonial-themed costumed wedding. Jim and Linda’s legendary test ride did more than just help map a historic route for future generations of cyclists—it proved that the road to happily ever after is best traveled on a bicycle built for two, even if it takes 120 flat tires to get there.
Episode Transcript
Jim: Here’s these two people on a tandem bicycle going cross-country in red, white, and blue. It was a couple. We were doing the back roads of America.
Gabriel: You just heard Jim Richardson. In 1974, Jim and his partner Linda Thorpe set off across the United States on a tandem bicycle to scout a route that would ultimately lay the groundwork for Bikecentennial ’76, now known as the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail. Their journey captured the public’s imagination. Local newspapers and TV stations tracked their progress, and locals gathered along the route to catch a glimpse of the couple in their custom red, white, and blue jerseys. The ride was so monumental for them that they even decided to marry on the road, holding their wedding ceremony in Coastal Virginia’s historic triangle, just as the trip concluded. Their involvement with Bikecentennial only grew from there. What had started with Jim casually spotting a Bikecentennial poster in a local bike shop had led them to becoming the organization’s third and fourth employees, serving as field directors to coordinate logistics and build relationships with communities along the trail. During our conversation, Jim suggested sharing some extra visual materials from their historic ride. You can find those on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist YouTube channel. For the first time, we have more than just a standard cover art to accompany the audio, so please head over to check it out and consider subscribing while you’re there. Now, let’s get into the episode and learn more about The TransAmerican Trailblazers.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello bicycle touring enthusiasts. Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. In today’s installment, we continue where the previous two episodes left off. Let’s listen again to what organizer Dan Burden had to say about Jim Richardson.
Dan: Jim Richardson, he and his wife Linda were Weight Watchers. They each lost over wanted to bicycle across the country with us. They did it on a tandem. Immediately after they got married. They got married at the end of the ride, and it was really well celebrated. They were just the perfect people to have out there, and they just garnered all kinds of press. When Jim got back to Missoula, he decided they wanted to work for us full time, and so they became among our very first employees.
Gabriel: That’s a lot of good material. Let’s delve right into it. Jim Richardson, thank you for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Jim: Thank you.
Gabriel: Dan Burden said that you and your wife Linda were in the Weight Watchers program. Can you give some background to your life and how it related to cycling?
Jim: Yeah, I met Linda at a Weight Watcher class in September of California, which is in Orange County, where Disneyland is located.
Gabriel: Since we have a global audience, can you just explain what Weight Watchers is?
Jim: Yeah, Weight Watchers is a club that you pay for meetings, and they have a diet program, or they did back in got talking when she joined, and then I asked her out for a date. Actually, our first date was a bicycle trip where we went to a restaurant together. I was really involved in bicycling by reading magazines and riding. She also would go to her college, Long Beach College, from Santa Ana, which was about 15 miles away, and she would ride that quite often. I mean, that’s how I knew that she was involved in bicycling.
Gabriel: Okay, so you were living in California?
Jim: We’re living in California. We then joined the Orange County Wheelman, which is a bicycling club. It’s not a bikepacking group. It’s just get together with 50 or 60 people every Sunday, and they have different rides depending on the distance and your skill. We had the hardcore racers that took off first. Linda’s bike wasn’t quite that good, so I got her a Motobecane bike. So that she could do the club rides a little bit better. Then she started to dress more like a cyclist. So we did that for quite a while. We were very happy with the club. We went on one bikepacking trip where we went to San Diego. It was an overnight trip, and then we took the train back to Santa Ana. So that was our only experience with overnighting.
Gabriel: Okay.
Jim: I carried a four-person tent on a Raleigh bicycle, which was more of a commuter. It was my bike that I used to go to work. It had a rack on the back, and so I put this four-person tent on because we went with another couple, which is not a light tent.
Gabriel: No.
Jim: So we were not experienced as bikepackers at all.
Gabriel: Right.
Jim: That’s when I saw the poster that was at the bike shop. Let me see if I can…
Gabriel: Oh, you still have it.
Jim: Yeah, I still have one. Yeah.
Gabriel: Oh, wow. That’s very cool. This would have been then designed by Greg Siple, right? He did all of the graphics.
Jim: Well, no. This was actually done by a fellow named Kessler.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Jim: He was an art person from Columbus, Ohio.
Gabriel: Is that Thomas Stevens and his high-wheeler?
Jim: It probably is, yeah. And then there’s the Hemistour group right there.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s the group photo. There they are.
Jim: Yeah, the group photo that you used. Actually, they had a grant from Huffy Bicycles. Are you familiar with Huffy Bicycles?
Gabriel: Sure. Huffy and Schwinn were the two big brands.
Jim: Two big brands, yeah. They gave a grant for $1,500 and they printed up these, and then they sent them out to as many people as they could. Actually, the route at that time that they had picked out was for Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, the tip of Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. Now, that’s not the way the tour ended up, because Missoula, Montana wasn’t on this. Before we got involved, they changed the route and put in Montana. And when we actually rode, there were 11 states in, and I’ll go into that detail a little bit later. This is what sparked my interest, and then I talked to Linda and said, “Would you like to do this?” We were just dating at that point, but she had just got back from a tour of Europe. She liked to travel, and I think she thought this would be a big adventure.
Gabriel: Absolutely.
Jim: She agreed to it, so what I did was I contacted Bikecentennial. This was some time in ’74. I called to see if they had any maps, because we were interested in riding cross-country. And I talked to Lys. I didn’t talk to Dan, but Lys said, “We don’t have any maps. Nobody’s ever ridden it,” because she did a tour by car, checking out the route and finalizing the route. She was very detailed in orientation with maps. She got a feel for it, like they did when they drove to Alaska and back to Missoula. So she rode the entire route. We settled on those 11 states. Then she said, “Would you like to be the first to ride the TransAmerica route? I didn’t know anything about cycle touring or anything, and I said, “Well, why not?”
Gabriel: Of course.
Jim: I thought that it would be fun, you know.
Gabriel: “I got a four-person tent.”
Jim: That’s right. Might need a trailer for it.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Jim: So she said, the only thing is, you know, we just got our approval as a national official bicentennial organization, which I think helped them in raising funds. But Lys said, “We can’t afford to fund you. If you want to ride, you’ll have to raise your own money.” So we approached Weight Watchers at that point and told them what we were going to do. They got very excited about it. We did appearances in Orange County to raise money for our trip. And I don’t know how much they donated, and then also 7-Eleven donated. At least we could eat while we were cycling cross-country.
Gabriel: Well, I was just thinking, it’s an interesting dichotomy because you have Weight Watchers sponsoring it, and you have 7-Eleven.
Jim: Yeah, that’s right.
Gabriel: Which is a convenience store that has maybe not the healthiest foods.
Jim: It is not the healthiest, but they have money.
Gabriel: Right. 7-Eleven sponsored a professional United States cycling team.
Jim: Oh, yeah, the cycling team.
Gabriel: That was a bit later, maybe, but not much later.
Jim: Yeah, that was probably a few years later because I remember Eric…
Gabriel: Eric Heiden.
Jim: Yeah, he was on the team, and he was also the Olympic ice skater.
Gabriel: Speed skater.
Jim: Speed skater, yeah. And actually, we named our second boy Eric after him.
Gabriel: No way.
Jim: Oh, yeah. And we got to see him twice, once in Milwaukee and once here in Arizona.
Gabriel: Wow.
Jim: He made appearances in races.
Gabriel: I used to live in Palo Alto, California.
Jim: Oh, really?
Gabriel: Yeah, and there’s a famous climb from Palo Alto over the mountains before you go down to the Pacific Coast, and it’s called Old La Honda Road. Eric Heiden had, for many, many years, the record for going up Old La Honda Road.
Jim: Was it straight uphill the whole way, or was it up and down?
Gabriel: No, that’s the amazing thing. Old La Honda has a very constant grade.
Jim: Okay, steady pull.
Gabriel: Nice and steady at 7 or 8%.
Jim: Oh, geez.
Gabriel: Yeah, okay, so getting back to it. So, money, or were you able to go to their convenience stores?
Jim: No, they didn’t do anything like that. They just provided money. And I don’t know how much they gave, because it went directly to Bikecentennial. We weren’t paid. You know, we were just doing it as volunteers. But then I saw the article that Dan and Lys and Greg and June did on their Hemistour in National Geographic. So I said, these people are serious. Dan and Lys and Greg and June, they all rode at different speeds, and so they were separated on the road. And we didn’t want that. We wanted to ride a tandem bicycle to keep us together. Now, remember that we were just dating, but we were very fond of each other, certainly. You know, a lot of people call a tandem a “divorce machine.”
Gabriel: Right.
Jim: Because you’re so close. We had a bicycle shop called Bud’s Bicycle Shop in Claremont, California, that set that up for us. And it was a Gitane 10-speed, which was not the Schwinn type of bike, which was heavy and steel. This was a butted-tube bike. So it was a little lighter and had the 10 speeds.
Gabriel: Okay.
Jim: We got the bike from Bud’s Bicycle Shop. We then went up to Missoula, and I think you have a picture of us with our jerseys. And those were with Kucharek, who was a jersey maker. So those were custom jerseys, embroidered, that we used. And we had one that was for, you know, if we were on TV or something like that. And then another one that we had on our daily ride.
Gabriel: You were prepared for all the publicity.
Jim: Well, yeah. We had a interview on the TV, and that was in Orange County, California, Channel 50, before we left. They interviewed us. Because after talking to Lys, I got the impression that this was going to be pretty significant as part of our trip. They were very well organized. Dan and Lys were fabulous, really helpful. They’d let a couple of novices come up to Missoula and get involved in that way.
Gabriel: We have to say from seeing the picture, I mean, these are very nice, red, white, and blue, with the Bikecentennial logo and the map of the United States with the route. This is eye catching.
Jim: Yes, they were both red, white, and blue jerseys. And so here’s these two people on a tandem bicycle going cross-country in red, white, and blue. It was a couple. We were doing the back roads of America. And if we would have pulled up in a California car with California plates and went to a cafe in one of the small towns, we would not have been accepted. But because it was a man and a woman riding a tandem bicycle, red, white, and blue, celebrating the centennial, we were accepted, like instantly. And people would talk and ask what we’re doing. Of course, we might as well been riding pogo sticks. They couldn’t really relate to what we were doing. Everybody would say to us, well, how can you afford to spend the time to ride across the United States by bicycle, which took us 93 days of riding. And then I would always say to them, how can I afford not to do it? Because I’m 80 years old now and I can’t do it.
Gabriel: Now, did you ever have to say that you were married? Did that ever come up?
Jim: Yeah, that came up. Some states with a bicentennial group, they said, well, you’re married. So we were married in one state and we were single in another state.
Gabriel: Right. It changed from border to border.
Jim: Yeah, that’s right, or town to town.
Gabriel: Town to town.
Jim: Bikecentennial sent out press packets to all the towns along the route that we were going. And that made a difference because we got a lot of press that way. I know we were probably in over 100 communities along the bike trail. And then we were on TV 12 times. The TV was more Weight Watchers because they would arrange for those interviews to help them, really. Here’s a couple that lost weight and they’re bicycling across the United States. They had a newsletter magazine type thing and we were featured in there quite often. Then we would go on TV for them quite a bit too. Before that, we sort of got a training in Missoula on how to talk to the press. We met with the Missoulian, which was the newspaper there. And some of the pictures that they used, the black-and-white ones that they would send out with the press kits, I think were taken by a photographer from the Missoulian. That gave us a little bit of idea of what they were going to do with us. And so Dan drove us to Reedsport and then we got a motel room there. Dan dropped us off. We were in Reedsport, which was the start of the trip. Dan was actually the first accident on the Bikecentennial trail. In helping us put our bike together, he took a crescent wrench and it broke off in his hand and he had to go to an emergency. We had an injury from our bicycle.
Gabriel: Okay, that was a literal accident.
Jim: It was.
Gabriel: Oh, poor guy.
Jim: So he left us and I remember we looked at ourselves and said, what do we do now?
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s my question. You’re basically on your own. Were you provided with at least a route with some town names or what materials were you given?
Jim: Oh, yeah. Lys had done state maps like here’s Kansas. So these were road maps that the state did and then she would just mark the route that we used. I actually still have those from 52 years ago. We would use these for each state. So we had 11 of these.
Gabriel: You’ve just been dropped off by Dan in Reedsport, Oregon. You have a map of Oregon and a yellow line.
Jim: Right, yeah.
Gabriel: And that’s it?
Jim: That’s it. And we knew the towns that were designated as where we should stop. We weren’t supported at all. No one was with us. We were just on our own. So we left that first day and we had to camp on the Smith River going into Eugene, Oregon. And I had never even put up the tent before. We’re not real hardcore campers. My idea for panniers was about the size of a credit card.
Gabriel: Credit card touring.
Jim: That’s Southern California, right? We spent the night there and then we got into Eugene, which was probably a total of 50 miles or something like that. And at that point, Linda said, “I’m going home.”
Gabriel: No. Oh boy.
Jim: She said, “I don’t want to go on. That’s it for me.” I said, “Okay. Well, let’s just take a couple of days off in Eugene and we’ll see if you can continue on.” So she did. She read, slept and a couple of days later, she said, “Okay, we’re ready to go.”
Gabriel: Oh, so what was she feeling?
Jim: Well, just a lot of anxiety, physically tired. We had never really done that other than our four-person tent for one trip. The whole thing overwhelmed her.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Jim: And so I said, “Well, we shouldn’t have any problems from this point on.”
Gabriel: “We’ve gotten so far that from now on, we should not have any problems.”
Jim: That’s right. When we pulled into Eugene, the day that we arrived from the Smith River, beautiful day, sunny, people were out sunning themselves. Then when we left for the continuation of our trip, it was pouring rain. Even though I had promised Linda that we were going to go with no other problems. I got to Springfield, which is about and I was trying to cross some railroad tracks. My rear wheel from the rain slid into the railroad track and I folded the back wheel. So that meant that we got about 10 miles. Luckily, there was a bike shop nearby. And so I took the tandem to the bike shop. And the fellow said, “Yeah, I can fix that. You know, it’s getting pretty close to closing.” And then he said, where are you going to stay?” “We don’t know.” He said, “Why don’t you come with me? You can come to my house tonight.” I went to their house, which was a hippie commune. There was a whole bunch of people, couples. We couldn’t tell whose kids were whose. So that was an interesting experience.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Jim: Yeah. So the next day we got the bike fixed and we took off. I think we went to Sisters, Oregon, and then we went on across Oregon. Prineville was one of the towns that we stayed in. That’s where we discovered the ice cream fountains in a drug store. They had pretty much phased themselves out. But in the small towns across the US that we visited, there were a lot of towns that had a drug store fountain, you know, where you would sit on the stool, order food, or, you know, ice cream sundae, or whatever you wanted. And any time we came to a town that had one of those, we would just zero right in because it was a part of Americana that we loved. I mean, the route was picked out for low-volume traffic, small towns. We would usually eat out. We didn’t camp out. We weren’t campers.
Gabriel: You had a tent.
Jim: We had a tent. We did take a tent with us.
Gabriel: Yeah, you used it the first night.
Jim: Yeah, we tried to avoid using it. So we had to put our arm warmers and leg warmers on when we were going through Central Oregon. Not because it was cold, but because of the sun. We got so sunburned, which would really surprise me that Oregon could have so much sun. But there’s a difference between the coast and the interior.
Gabriel: Right. The distances between towns are pretty big in Eastern Oregon.
Jim: Pretty big. Yeah, at least 50 miles, I would say. And then each one of the towns that Lys had picked out for us to stop in, which were going to be future bike-inns and camp sites for the riders in ’76, we would go in and sometimes we were interviewed by the papers. Sometimes they just took the press packet and put things out for us.
Gabriel: What are the bike-inns?
Jim: Bike-inns were like a gymnasium that was large and could accommodate 100 people on cots. So it was sort of like camping out, but that’s what we would arrange so that the riders who were riding cross-country, they could either go camping or they could go to the bike-inns. Some of the bike-inns were in old hotels and things like that. Dan and Lys were amazing that they could do these type of things. They were way ahead of their time, I thought. We were going across a mountain to go to Baker, Oregon, which was all the way on the east side of the state. And a car was waiting at the top of the pass that we were going over. And it was a Mrs. Morgan from Baker, Oregon. And she had heard about us, I guess, through her local paper. And she knew what day we were coming over. And so she came up, brought us some snacks and some water and said, “Where are you spending the night?” And we said, “We don’t know.” And so we spent the night at her house with her husband, which was really neat. Here’s two strangers on the road and we’re taken in for the night. I was very surprised that people would actually come to the route and meet us along the route. We spent the night in Baker. Then we went into Idaho. We went, I think, down to the Snake River. And then we climbed up to like Weiser or something like that. It was like 105 degrees Fahrenheit. It was just burning hot. We were climbing. I would take off my jersey and put it in the stream, which was ice-cold, and put it back on. And I could barely handle that. But at least I could go another 10 miles and then do the same thing. Because it was just plain and simple hot. Idaho was a little more remote. You know, the towns were a little farther apart, but we never camped, I don’t think, that I recall.
Gabriel: That’s the impression I’m getting. That tent is then dead weight, Jim.
Jim: It’s dead weight. It’s there if we need it.
Gabriel: And the sleeping bags, maybe you use those at times if you were staying with someone.
Jim: Oh, yeah. We would use those. Then we went up through the rest of Idaho. And then we came down into Missoula, Montana, from a place called Lolo Pass. And then we went into Missoula. We met with Dan and Lys then.
Gabriel: How were you received? Were Dan and Lys super excited to see you?
Jim: Oh, yeah. Yeah, they just loved what we were doing so far.
Gabriel: Keep going!
Jim: Keep it up. Then the Missoulian came out again. And the female reporter that had interviewed us before we started, she said, “I never thought I’d see you back in Missoula.”
Gabriel: Well, that was honest.
Jim: We had ridden was shocked that we made it, because we were such novices. We were there probably for a few days. Then we took off. We went down the Bitterroot Valley in Montana, which is south of Missoula. And then we went over a pass into Wisdom, Montana. Wisdom, Montana is a very small town. And the first thing that happened to us, we thought we were going to be carried away by the number of mosquitoes that attacked us. They were just swarming on us. We went into a store to get some relief. Then we said, we’re not going to camp. We got a room. And so then the next day we got out of Wisdom early in the morning before the mosquitoes. We continued on in Montana. And went through a place called Virginia City, which is an old silver mining town, which was at the top of the mountain. And it was a silver mine. This was our first patch of gravel road that we got through. It was about 10 or 15 miles, getting up to the road to Virginia City. So we spent the night there. Again, not camping, hadn’t taken out that tent. The coming down from Virginia City was like being in an airplane, zooming down, because the road was probably dropping easily 2,000 feet in probably 20… 20 miles or something like that. Just boom down. One thing about a tandem bicycle, downhill, there’s nothing faster because you have all that weight. So we were going pretty fast down the hill.
Gabriel: And who was in front on the tandem?
Jim: It was always me because the stronger rider should be in front because you have to steer. And so it takes a little bit more strength, especially for a heavier bike like that. And we were on standard 27-inch tires, what are the, an inch and a quarter or something like that? We must’ve had steel rims. So we got down from Virginia City and we went on our way to Yellowstone National Park. It’s like our first National Park. Teddy Roosevelt started it. And it was in the 1800s sometime. So it was a huge national park. It had geysers and wildlife. It was pretty nice. The only thing is that it was a big tourist thing. We were riding our tandem. It was a two-lane road and there was a lot of traffic. And the people were pretty much bumper to bumper. Well, the first two or three people that would come up on us would go around us. The people behind them never even noticed us. So they were almost trimming us every time because they didn’t see us till the last minute. They didn’t know why these people were going a little bit off to the left. So that was a little harrowing. But you know, we got through that. But then we did go south of Yellowstone. We spent the night at a campsite near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is probably 50 miles from the Yellowstone Park. The only thing is we had to take out our tent to camp there.
Gabriel: Yes, you did. Oh, no.
Jim: Yeah. And there was another fellow camping beside us in his car and he had a tent. But there were again so many mosquitoes that he came to us and he said, “I’m sick of the mosquitoes. How about you guys? Do you want to go into town? We’ll get a room and I’ll bring you back tomorrow so that you continue on your trip.” We said, “Yes.” He brought us back the next day. He picked up his tent and he took off in his car. And then we went over a pass and went into Lamont, Wyoming. There we stayed with a family who were cyclists, but they had a ranch. We had ridden probably they wanted to do for us was let us ride around on horses. So they had horses. We got on the saddles, which weren’t that comfortable after being in our saddle for 60 or 80 miles. So then we continued on in Wyoming. And it seemed that every time we would come to a hill in Wyoming, we were going up hill and the wind was blowing in our face. It didn’t matter whether we were going, east, west, north or south. If we were going up a hill, the wind was blowing in our face. We ended up going to Rawlins and then continued basically through a town called Encampment and then down into Colorado. We were a little seasoned by this point, but at this point still, if people would say, “Where are you going?” And we say, “Well, we’re going to Virginia.” They’d say, “Boy, you got a long ways to go.” Even though we’ve maybe gone a thousand miles already. And we were going to Kremmling to spend the night there. But I ran out of gas completely. I had to stop the tandem about 12 miles away. We ran out of water. I couldn’t even stand. So, you know, here’s Linda sitting on the back. She’s, well, what in the hell is wrong with you? I’m laying on the road. I recovered enough to get that last 10 miles into Kremmling. And then we got some water. And then we went from there to just before Breckenridge. But we had a TV interview set up in Denver. There was a freeway that went from Breckenridge basically to Denver. So here we are, the side of the freeway on the on-ramp, with a tandem bicycle hitchhiking to get to Denver, which was probably a hundred miles away. So a guy came by with a van, didn’t think twice, picked us up, and drove us in to Denver. There we spent the night with a Weight Watcher owner of the franchise in Colorado. And so he had arranged for us to be on TV. So we met the photographer who was, it was a Sunday. Oh, he filmed us a little bit riding around a park in Denver. And then we went with him while he did other shots. Then we went and spent the night with the fellow from Weight Watchers. And then we went back with our tandem bicycle and hitchhiked back to Breckenridge.
Gabriel: Amazing.
Jim: Yeah, I mean, people picked us up. As we were coming into Breckenridge, we had bicyclists passing us. And then we realized when we got into Breckenridge, there was a race that we didn’t know about. And we were in the middle of it. Here we were riding a fully-loaded tandem bicycle. And everybody else was on racing bikes, but they thought we were in the race and they all clapped for us. Like we were in a special class.
Gabriel: Yeah, the heavy tandem class.
Jim: Yeah, that’s right, fully loaded. So we continued on. We went over Hoosier Pass, which was 10,000 feet.
Gabriel: That’s a big one.
Jim: That’s a big one. That was after Breckenridge. And then we went down to a little town called Fairplay, which was down on the other side. And then we continued on through Cañon City. As we were coming into Cañon City, this guy in a car came out, went by us because he was going the opposite way, and then turned around and came back at us. And we went, what in the heck’s happening here? It was another person that had heard about us. It was a priest who had seen us or heard about us somehow. And so he brought out some water and some snacks and things like that. And then he continued back into Cañon City. And we continued on with our trip.
Gabriel: I thought you were going to say he brought some water and he brought some bread.
Jim: No, he didn’t have to do that. But what was cute is in Cañon City, we were on the front page of the newspaper there. And on the front page was a picture of Linda and I, two people, and the headline across this top said, “Two Escapees from Prison.”
Gabriel: Really?
Jim: And it was our picture, but it was an article that was beside it with no picture.
Gabriel: Oh, wow, that is very poor layout.
Jim: I think so, but that’s a small town.
Gabriel: World’s slowest escape from jail.
Jim: Yeah, getting a tandem bicycle and taking it up. So then we went through Pueblo and spent the night in Pueblo. I think we stayed with a Weight Watcher family there. Then we took off from Pueblo to go to Kansas. And there was virtually nothing on the road east of Pueblo, Colorado.
Gabriel: And by now you’ve hit the plains.
Jim: This was the start of the plains. Then we went to the first town in Kansas and we were staying with a family, a Weight Watcher family, there.
Gabriel: All the Weight Watchers. I mean, you had the whole country mobilized.
Jim: Yeah, in the state of Kansas, we never unrolled our sleeping bag. People would say, “where are you going?” Sometimes we would be with a Weight Watcher family. Sometimes they’d say, well, you know, when you get to that town, see this person, they’ll put you up. So that was really neat. Kansas was really nice. The people were very, very friendly. The only problem we had from the border town, which was Tribune, was probably 50 miles to Scott City. There, the front wheel of our tandem, all the ball bearings started falling out of the front hub. So we made it to Scott City, keeping the speed down and just hoping that it didn’t completely collapse or something like that. Scott City did not have a bicycle shop. So we got a motel room, which I think cost us five or six dollars, something like that. And then the next day, I heard that there was a bicycle shop in Garden City. So I grabbed the front wheel, went out to the side of the road, and held up the wheel in my red, white, and blue jersey. I got picked up and taken to the bike shop in Garden City. So then he replaced and repacked the front hub and hitchhiked back to Scott City. Then people told us, well, what you want to do is you want to go through McCracken. And they said that there’s an old cattlemen’s hotel built in the ’20s. And they said it was really neat. But it was also the shooting location for a movie called Paper Moon with Tatum O’Neill and her father that was filmed there in 1973. It was about a couple of grifters, father and daughter, who just sort of ripped people off. And they were on the road and they spent the night there. So we spent the night in that hotel, which was really neat, bath down the hall. They had food service, we had dinner there, and then the next day we had breakfast and we got back on the road. The McCracken hotel was $2.50 a night. So we were the first people to go across the TransAm Trail across Kansas, the Christies, they knew that we were putting that together, and so after we finished our ride in ’74, they did their first ride in ’75, Bicycling Across Kansas. BAK.
Gabriel: In Part Two of the Original Bikepackers and the Improbable Bikecentennial episode, Lys Burden mentioned an organized ride that tested the Kansas portion of the TransAmerica in 1975. However, it wasn’t a professor from Lawrence who organized the event known as Bicycling Across Kansas, but rather an ordinary couple from Wichita named Larry and Norma Christie. They are the Christie’s that Jim is referring to. Thank you to listener Pete Simonson for providing this correction.
Gabriel: The Christies started this BAK because they were inspired by Bikecentennial?
Jim: Right, yeah. And they did the route that we did to give Lys more feedback because, you know, they had like 100 people riding it.
Gabriel: It’s amazing how much momentum they were able to generate with people just joining.
Jim: Well, yeah, it was shocking, really. I mean, I thought we were going to be by ourselves the whole time, but as you can tell, we were taken in a lot. We talked to people every time we’d stop at a cafe. Because usually we would get up early in the morning and ride, you know, 25 miles before breakfast and then we go into a small town with a small cafe. We’d park our tandem bicycle fully loaded at the front door and we would come in and people were friendly. They were all farmers that had already been on the field and now they were coming for their break and we were really accepted by everyone there. And most of the people that we stayed with were Weight Watchers. In fact, one of the families that we stayed with out of Chanute, they rode with us and they had a Schwinn tandem, which is the big heavy kind. She was in front and he was in the back, but he was blind. So that’s why she was up front.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Jim: So we rode with them for the whole day. After Chanute, we stopped by a farm sort of in the middle of nowhere. We needed to use a bathroom. We noticed they had an outhouse. So we knocked on the door and said, “Can we use your outhouse?” And she says, “No, no, you can come in the house.” So then she said, “Well, why don’t you have lunch?” And so we said, “Fine.” And we got talking and it was really something. They had a small farm in Kansas and at that time, big farms were taking over the small farms. And she said that her husband and her had never been on a vacation. And would they mind if we sent postcards of our trip to her because, you know, they didn’t travel and they knew that we’re going cross-country. I can tell you now at this point, we had gone through probably 20 or 30 tires on our tandem from the weight and the distance that we went. We broke probably 80 rear spokes, some of which I was able to replace. Others, you know, I had to do the bike shop. I got pretty good at threading it through and getting it up to replace it. But then we went to Pittsburg, Kansas. And there was a bike shop there that was called Pedal Power. And that guy was amazing. He solved the rear spoke problem that we’re breaking spokes on and put us on a pair of Schwinn LeTour tires. And those lasted the entire rest of the trip.
Gabriel: Amazing. But now I’m curious, how did he solve the spoke problem?
Jim: Well, what had happened is that Bud’s Bike Shop had redrilled the holes to put heavier spokes in. As we’d stress the spoke, it would pop the head off.
Gabriel: Right.
Jim: What he did is he put little washers over the heads.
Gabriel: Distributed the…
Jim: Distributed the weight so that where they had drilled a bigger hole didn’t act like a guillotine and cut the head off the end of the spoke. So that was amazing to me.
Gabriel: That is amazing. Did you give that feedback to Bud’s?
Jim: Oh, yeah. Pittsburg was a really neat town right on the Missouri-Kansas border. We were basically doing the Ozarks, up and down, up and down, and up and down. And there was a TV film crew that came out and met us on the trail. I think they were from Springfield. So they had a cameraman and a couple of reporters and they drove out. So what they wanted to do was they wanted to put the cameraman on the back of the tandem. And I would drive it. Linda went in the press car and they followed us as he filmed from the tandem bicycle. We probably went five miles together or something like that. And then they interviewed us and we continued on.
Gabriel: Was he adding a lot of power while he was filming?
Jim: I don’t think so. You know, he probably wondered why these feet pegs to rest your feet turned.
Gabriel: Right. Why are my legs moving?
Jim: Yeah, that’s right. I couldn’t see him back there, so I didn’t know. So then we continued on through Missouri. And then when we went across the Mississippi River, we crossed by a ferry, basically the oldest corporation in the United States. It had been in business that long, you know, probably for 150 years or something like that. And so we went across by ferry to get to Illinois. Illinois was our shortest distance for a state. We went down to Carbondale, which was a university town. And then we went across the Ohio River to go into Kentucky. And so we had a setup in Sebree, Kentucky, which was going to be our first overnight in Kentucky to speak to a school about our trip. So this was the first time on the whole trip that we had somebody escorting us. It was the policeman from Sebree. So he was ahead of us and we were riding behind him. And all of a sudden a dog ran out. It wasn’t chasing us. It just ran out, hit the front wheel of the tandem and folded it. I was diving for the brakes and I went on my head and I was knocked unconscious.
Gabriel: Oh, wow.
Jim: This is the only part of the trip where Linda was ahead of me because she flew over the top, landed ahead of me. She was okay, but I went right on my head. I was knocked unconscious.
Gabriel: Now, were you wearing helmets?
Jim: We were wearing helmets. They were like those old spaghetti or hairnet types.
Gabriel: Oh, yeah.
Jim: But they had insulation probably about an inch around, or padding. And that probably saved me from bigger injuries.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Jim: But I can remember when I was waking up, somebody was pulling my helmet off and I could see blood in my cap, my riding cap, bicycle cap inside my helmet. And I said, gee, this is not good. And then the guy said, “Call the mortuary.” And I thought in my mind, I said, it’s not that bad, really. I’m still alive.
Gabriel: What a crazy thing to say.
Jim: Well, that was because the ambulance service was at the mortuary.
Gabriel: Oh, God. I guess they didn’t have too much confidence in their hospitals.
Jim: No, I guess not. So the ambulance took us to Indiana to emergency. And, you know, they x-rayed and everything else. And then we got a ride back and we ended up in Sebree. And I spent two days there. It’s funny because, you know, we got a new rim. And the lady that we were staying with there, who was, I think, again, a Weight Watcher, she took that rim and made it into a Christmas wreath.
Gabriel: Thank goodness it wasn’t more serious. I just have this image of Linda…
Jim: Flying.
Gabriel: Not only going over the handlebars, but going over you. And that’s crazy.
Jim: Yeah. That’s when, you know, after my accident, I decided that Linda and I were going to get married. So I asked her to marry me. And luckily she said yes.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s very sweet.
Jim: The bicentennial national heard about the fact that we were going to get married. And so they arranged to do our wedding in Jamestown, Virginia. You know, we didn’t have a wedding license or anything like that. We had to wait until we got into Virginia to get our wedding license. At that time, we had to go through West Virginia. West Virginia is a tough state to ride. Very hilly. Going down a hill into Hinton, West Virginia, we burned out our rear brake, which was a drum brake on our tandem bicycle. Such a big downhill.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Jim: We had our regular cantilever brakes, but we didn’t have our drum brake on there anymore. Then we finished with West Virginia and went into Virginia. By this time, we decided we’re getting close to the end and we’re going to get married. And we’re going to get rid of our tents. All the stuff that we thought that we didn’t need, we got rid of, so that we could ride much lighter. I think we just gave away as much as we could to lighten ourselves.
Gabriel: That’s a little late in the game, isn’t it? You’re in Virginia and then you lighten up the bike.
Jim: Well, we’re in Virginia. I guess this wasn’t an IQ test, riding cross-country. Outside of Charlottesville, we thought that it was a town that had a motel, but it didn’t have a motel. You know, it was a small town. Motel was closed for good, but there was an abandoned house there. We still had our sleeping bags. So I said, “We’re going to unroll our sleeping bags and just sleep in that house.” But I’m going to go to the house next door and tell that neighbor what we’re doing. And the first thing that she said out of her mouth was, “No, you’re not.” I said, “Oh, really?” She says, “You’re going to spend the night with me.” So Linda and I spent the night with her the next day. We continued across Virginia through the Piedmont area and up over the Blue Ridge Parkway. And that’s the only time that we had to walk was getting up on top of the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was short and straight, you know, because it was designed for a car to speed up and make it to the top. But you couldn’t get going fast enough on a tandem bicycle to get you to the top. So then we continued on. And now we were dead set on getting to Williamsburg. There was a couple there that were cyclists that, you know, had contacted Bikecentennial and said that we could stay with them. They knew that we were getting married. So they became the best man and maid of honor for us. On the day that we were getting married, it was 12 miles to the Jamestown Festival Park. It was raining, but we still rode our bike. We ran our rain suits. We had rain suits with us. So we rode that the final 12 miles of our bicycle trip for our wedding day. We get there. Now, Linda’s parents heard that we were getting married there. We had told them that. They jumped in their car and came out to be in the wedding with us. So the bicentennial national, or Virginia, had arranged for us to be married there in Jamestown Festival Park apparel. Linda was dressed like Pocahontas. I was dressed like, who was it?
Gabriel: Smith.
Jim: Smith, yeah. And I was married with pantyhose and a sword. Because, you know, I had the tights on and puffy pants. And, you know, I had the shirt, but I had a sword. Her parents were in costume, the best man and woman. And the preacher wore a robe. And he was from William & Mary College. And he did the vows in an old English prayer that he found for the wedding. And what was amazing is that they wanted to know if we wanted to be filmed. And I said, no, I didn’t want the TV channel there. But press was okay. I said, yeah, the press can come. You know, they can take pictures. We’re coming in a procession with a bagpiper leading us in. Then we go into the church and the church is completely packed. It’s a thatched-roof church from the 1600s. There were all these people and I was just shocked. We thought it was going to be just us getting married there. But then, you know, I heard all these people, they thought we were characters at the festival park, saying, “You know, I think this is a real wedding.” So we were married there in costume and in front of all these people that was really neat. And then we got changed and went into Yorktown, which is about 12 miles away from there. And we had dinner there at a restaurant. My father-in-law was going to pay for it. But the owner said, no, you know, it’s on him. So that was neat.
Gabriel: This is so memorable to end with your wedding. Incredible stuff.
Jim: Yeah. And then the bicentennial group had arranged for us to spend three nights in Williamsburg for a honeymoon. So we got to stay at the Williamsburg Inn and the International Inn. What was funny is that when we were walking around Williamsburg as tourists, we were wearing our jerseys and so many people recognized us from the newspaper.
Gabriel: You were celebrities by then.
Jim: We didn’t realize it, but that’s true. We got on a train with our tandem bicycle and went to Washington, D.C. And we had a ceremony that was set up by the National Bicentennial. We were supposed to meet President Ford and he was going to be awarding us something for riding across the TransAm Trail as part of one of the bicentennial groups. But on the day before, he pardoned Nixon.
Gabriel: Oops.
Jim: President Nixon. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that or not.
Gabriel: Pardoning Nixon was very unpopular.
Jim: Oh, yeah. Yeah, very much so. He didn’t want to come out with the press. It was safer for him not to be there. So we lost our chance to meet the president. They had a stand-in for him and it was John Warner, who was the Secretary of the Navy at the time. He was more famous for being married to Elizabeth Taylor at one time.
Gabriel: Oh, okay. One of the many husbands.
Jim: One of the many, yeah. We had a ceremony there and Dan came out for that. There was another couple who had ridden a northern route across the US, and they were there also. But we didn’t use that northern route. And then actually West Virginia got dropped from the tour. So it went from 11 states down to for the ’76 ride.
Gabriel: Right.
Jim: From there, we went to Columbus, Ohio. I think we met Dan there and then we flew in the rest of the way to Missoula. That’s when Dan had talked to us about coming to work for Bikecentennial. We were going home in our ’66 Chevy, but he talked us in the stain because he said, we’re the naturals. We know the route and we need two field directors to go out there and work on the trail to set up the bike ends and trail heads. Trail heads were where the groups would start. So that’s what our job was. Dan bought a ’72 Volkswagen camper with a pop-up. And that was going to be our home on the road when we were field directors. We were actually employees number three and four because Dan and Lys were one and two. We weren’t getting paid. We basically volunteered our time.
Gabriel: Right. So employee, we have to take that a little loosely.
Jim: A little longer, yeah. We went back to Southern California, had a reception for our wedding. Then we came back to Missoula and then we started back on the trail, going the full length of the trail maybe a couple of times.
Gabriel: But this time in the Volkswagen.
Jim: In the Volkswagen, yeah, which we found to be very comfortable. What more could you ask for than being a newly married couple living a honeymoon for over six months in the VW van? Then we got to go back through the towns that we had visited. And, you know, we got to see the people in Baker, Oregon, Mr. and Mrs. Morgan. We never saw the priest again.
Gabriel: Most times you meet somebody on the road and you probably never see them again. But in your case, you got to visit with these folks that you met.
Jim: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we’d go in and we get to meet them and we were in civilian clothes then.
Gabriel: You haven’t mentioned a single negative experience with people. Did you just not have any?
Jim: We had none. We never had an encounter with anybody that said you’re nuts or anything like that. Oh, except in West Virginia. We had our fully-loaded tandem bike up against the restaurant. And this policeman came by and he said, “You can’t have that vehicle on the sidewalk. You have to put it in the street.” Luckily, there was a parking space there. So I put a quarter in and laid the bike down. I said, “I don’t have a kickstand.” You know, he thought it was a motorcycle, because there were bags on the front, bags on the back. That was probably the most negative thing. And that wasn’t that negative.
Gabriel: No.
Jim: I did ask Linda to take a picture of me and the policeman and she did it. But she said, “That was a stupid thing to do.”
Gabriel: That’s wonderful to hear, that it was overwhelmingly positive during 93 days.
Jim: And the event itself was overwhelmingly friendly.
Gabriel: Yeah, that was my last question is, how did you actually spend Bikecentennial ’76?
Jim: In ’76, we were actually able to do a trip in Oregon, basically from Salem to Sisters. It was Linda and I and 10 Japanese tourists.
Gabriel: Japanese tourists?
Jim: They were all Japanese and they had a Japanese leader named Kuneo, who was an around-the-world cyclist.
Gabriel: Kunio, I think is mentioned by June and Greg as having joined them in Panama?
Jim: He probably did. Yeah, because he was, you know, a hardcore cyclist. Yeah, that was quite a trip in itself. The amazing thing to me is that Adventure Cycling is going 50 years after Bikecentennial in ’76.
Gabriel: Bikecentennial in 1993 changed their name to Adventure Cycling.
Jim: That’s the thing that’s amazing to me. Also, the bike that we rode cross-country, once they got their office in Missoula on Pine Street, which we’d never had when I was there, I donated the bike so that they could put that in their headquarters. When tours come through, if they go through Missoula, they can see the first bike across the trail.
Gabriel: The TransAmerica Trail.
Jim: Yeah.
Gabriel: That’s really neat that you did that. It’s a museum piece now.
Jim: Well, it sure is. It was very unusual for people to ride across the United States by bicycle. Like people would ask us all the time, “Are you the first people to ever cross the United States by bicycle?” And we said, “No.” Stevens, he was the first one. And there’s been tons of people that had ridden across. When we had our accident in Kentucky, Dan and Lys got press out to all the places along the route saying what happened to us and that we got married at the end. And they all ran it in their small town papers, too.
Gabriel: Like, remember the people who came by? They’re married now.
Jim: That’s right. In some states, they were married. Some, they weren’t.
Gabriel: Right, right.
Gabriel: Jim and Linda’s story is a reminder that sometimes the biggest adventures don’t require years of training or the most expensive gear. They just require a willingness to start. The couple went from a single overnight trip to literally blazing a trail across 11 states. Here’s a parting thought. What monumental challenge in your own life could you conquer if you just stopped worrying about having everything perfectly figured out and simply said, like Jim did, “Well, why not?”
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Jim: Maybe like a title for what we did is you could have something like, “We Thought After Riding 4,252 Miles That We Would Get to Meet President Ford, but…” You know, sort of a clickbait.