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Ben once ran from his father’s house in Loudon to his mother’s house in Concord because he couldn’t get a ride and didn’t have a bike. It is probably a twelve or fifteen mile run and, in order to shave off a few of those miles, he ran down Interstate 393. I don’t really know why he decided to run or why he thought the interstate was his best choice but there it was: he had done it.

Up until the Hood River, however, neither Ben nor I had ever ridden our bicycles on the highway. We’ve had no need to. The highway was always tempting, of course, because it was so straight and flat and went exactly where we wanted to go, but we always resisted. We got in enough trouble riding our bikes as it was and there was no need to push the envelope. When we woke up in Stevenson, we were faced with a minor dilemma that was quickly solved by our saviors and hero: the Adventure Cycling Gods. In order to avoid backtracking (which never would have happened) they suggested taking our bikes for a spin on Interstate 84. You can imagine our delight, our joy, our rapture, at the very prospect. We were giddy.

We first headed west, towards the ocean, for a brief time in a vicious headwind that was absolutely unnecessary and then crossed over the Bridge of the Gods, which separated Washington from Oregon, and pulled up onto the interstate and headed east towards Hood River (which is a town). We traveled along the breakdown lane of Interstate 84 for seventeen miles and accomplished this feat in less than one hour. It was exhilarating. You haven’t lived until you first pull your bicycle off of the tiny access road and onto the highway exit and see a white sign with the typical “No Pedestrians” warnings but that consciously makes no mention of scooters or bicycles. You haven’t lived until you have felt the rushing air of six consecutive eighteen wheelers passing within one foot of your handlebars while traveling over seventy miles an hour carrying lumber that extends out and over your helmet and whose red warning flag whacks you on the back of the head. You haven’t lived until you have to decide between pedaling on the rumble strip or in the right-hand lane of traffic because the breakdown lane has ceased to exist right before your very eyes and your right pannier is scratching against the guard rail.

The entire time we were on the highway I kept expecting to see a police cruiser pulling alongside of us and a mean looking visage bearing down. But it never happened. Biking on the highway felt like being encouraged to steal from a convenience store and, here we were, walking out the door with armloads of groceries, and the cashier was waving us through.

When we first were planning our biking trip Ben tried to convince me that we could bicycle from Denver, CO, up through Wyoming and Idaho, over to Washington, and down through Oregon and California. All in four to five weeks. He figured this out by making an Excel spreadsheet that took the number of miles generated by MapQuest and applying a special Benjamin Bjorn Fudge Factor, which resulted in an answer dictating how many miles we would have to bike each day and how many days off we would have in the process. It is a wonderful little formula and outlined a number of various trip possibilities with the number of miles traveled each day. I got it in an email attachment one morning with instructions to review and comment. As I sat down to go over the figures, I realized that in order to accomplish what it was Ben suggested, however, we would have to pedal one hundred miles each day, every day, for the entire five weeks. I suggested to Ben that this may be unreasonable: my thinking was that I had only once in my entire life pedaled over one hundred miles in a single and that it was painful. I couldn’t imagine doing it for five weeks straight. Ben’s thinking was that after a few days, we would simply get used to it, and it really wouldn’t have been that much of a problem for us. He could imagine doing anything on a bicycle indefinitely. If I told him we had to ride a thousand miles each day I am sure he would assume that eventually we would get used to it — there is no distance that he would deem unreasonable.

The year before, Ben had set out with his girlfriend and her sister (kinky, I know) to bicycle across the country. I believe they only made it to New York before turning around. I wasn’t there. I had been invited to join him on the trip but I am a pragmatist and really didn’t want to be on a bicycle between, say, the Vermont border and the border of Wyoming. There is much of the Midwest that I feel does not deserve to be viewed at twelve miles and hour — however flat and easy the pedaling may be. Much of where I grew up, in fact. I was also keenly aware that venturing out on a cross-country trip with Ben, his girlfriend, and her sister (all three of whom are cute, attractive, and sexy), could lead to some uneasily tense moments. I imagined I would have been peer-pressured into all sorts activities I did not feel comfortable with and how could I have resisted: by signing up for the trip in the first place I was basically sealing my own destiny. Who can say no when the other three people in the tent say yes? Not I. Nor any man. So I had declined the offer from the outset. Ben went for it anyway — without me — and the three of them set off from Maine and made it to New York and then turned around and came back.

Ben, of course, was disappointed; he wanted to keep going all the way to California but at least one (if not both) of his female companions did not. Might it have been different if I had been there? Maybe. Might Ben still blame me for not having accompanied him, providing the perfect balance to maintain the forward momentum necessary to consummate his trip? Possibly. Might a voice of reason have helped a group of people wrought with sexual energy and unfilled desires? Perhaps. But we’ll never know. I do know that Ben still wants to bicycle across the country and I also know I still do not, despite the beauty and availability of female tent-mates.

The real reason their journey ended prematurely was not my absence; rather, it was that the three of them averaged eighty miles per day. Ben carried the bulk of their gear (over seventy pounds by himself, I believe, which is more than he and I carried combined) but eighty miles a day turned out to be too much. It was too hard, too fast, and no fun. So they turned back. Even after his first failed attempted to cross the country, Ben still hadn’t learned the value of a steadier and slower pace as we were planning our trip for the Summer of 2005 — it took him well into the second week of casual riding to admit the obvious. Eighty miles a day meant anywhere from six to eight hours of actual riding time — and that is just too long for anyone’s buttocks. At some point on our trip, when we had accomplished another sixty mile day in four hours of riding and enjoyed every minute of it, he said with much remorse:

“I pushed them too hard.”

It took a lot for Ben to admit that; having to only ride an average of sixty miles a day certainly helped. And the reason we only averaged sixty miles a day (factoring in days off and other nonsense when we weren’t riding) is because, as it turns out, MapQuest and our AAA maps were surprisingly inaccurate. During the planning phases of our trip, we had expected to go 1,500 miles or more. It turned out to only be 1,100 and this was good. Because I would not have been happy if every day were an eighty mile day and Ben wouldn’t have been happy either. While there was no sexual tension in our tent, our buttocks still became very sore.

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