The easy version had a support van.
I have been planning to ride a bike across America for a few years. My original idea was to do it with Trek Travel. They would handle the route, hotels, luggage, food, and the thousand small things that can break over several weeks on a bike.
COVID has made that version hard to imagine right now.
The trip I am considering instead would be solo with minimal support. That is not a small change. It means finding the route, carrying what I need, fixing the bike, getting food, and working out where to sleep without assuming every town or hotel is operating normally.
I asked a friend to introduce me to someone who had already crossed the country. The timing was perfect. The day we connected was exactly one year after his final ride into Washington State.
I told him the longest trip I had done was across the Pyrenees. That ride took me from one coast to the other over roughly ten days, with long climbs every day. It changed what I thought I could do on a bike.
America is considerably bigger than the Pyrenees.
He pointed me toward the Adventure Cycling route network and offered to talk through the plan. He also warned me that his daily blog posts were written on an iPhone as the last task between a long ride and bed. That detail might be the most useful part of the whole conversation. The romantic version of a cross-country trip has sunsets and empty roads. The actual version ends each day with laundry, food, charging everything, checking tomorrow's weather, and trying to stay awake long enough to write three paragraphs.
I would also need to keep working. Apply is moving quickly, and disappearing for a month is not an option. The strange idea is to bring the work with me and build the company from the road.
For now, I am riding around the Hudson Valley. The roads north of Poughkeepsie have enough distance and climbing to make the idea feel slightly less theoretical. A hard day can still end at home. If something breaks, I am not stranded in the middle of Kansas.
I have not committed to the trip. I do not have the route, support plan, or a good answer for how to work every day after riding all day.
The cross-country ride would be a pretty big lift.
That is also why I keep thinking about it.