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Westport, Connecticut 

July 6, 2003 

     Finis.  Over.  Stick a fork in my Geezerpalooza Trans-America bicycle tour, it’s done.  But the memories, ah the memories, they’ll wander through my soul forever.

     Under bright blue sunny skies my bike rolled into Westport, Connecticut last weekend and headed to Compo Beach just two miles east of my sister’s home.  At Compo, friends and family awaited and there they joined in and witnessed the bike wheel being dipped in Long Island Sound, the celebratory sipping of Dom Perigon, water saved from the Pacific being poured into the Atlantic and golf balls being blasted from beach into salt water all in celebration of completing the Geezerpalooza Trans-America Pedal N Putt bicycle tour. It was a smiley, grinny afternoon, a real party with folks inquiring about the trip and trying to listen to answers while their real concentration centered on making sure the kids didn’t venture out too far as they splashed in the near-by waves.  Our little group hung out, hamburgered and hot-dogged the afternoon away until the sun began to sink.  Then cars were packed with coolers and kids and everyone said their “good-byes” and “Congratulations, again” and the last day of my adventure was drawing to a close.

     Everyone else squeezed into his or her car for the trip home but I wanted one last ride to stave off the end of my odyssey.  Pedaling slowly through the dusk of a New England summer night presented an opportunity for reflection on the past ten weeks.

     I did some things right on this adventure.  One was keeping a journal. This helped me realize that once upon a time I focused on the goal and not the journey.  That was wrong.  Like sports in high school, it was always we scrubs pining to be a starter, the starters wishing to be the star and the star, not content with just being the local hero was all about college scholarship offers.  Ten years later it finally dawns on every member of the team, the best part of high school sports were the road trips and the practices, not the games.  The same was true of my first marathon.  It wasn’t completing the race that made the memories but looking back, what I remembered most were the training partners and the five a.m. runs on the Monument with donuts afterward and the constant discussions about how we runners would fare come race day.  This time I was determined to enjoy the trip itself and try to remember the moment. Looking back through the pages of what I wrote at the close of each day, I accomplished that.  But riding into the night, I was also very aware this had been one of the great adventures of my life.   Duplicating the excitement and exhilaration of Geezerpalooza will be most difficult.  That thought made me very sad.

     People ask, “So what did you learn?”  And I don’t know that I learned anything.  But then again maybe I did.

     If there has been one “most asked,” question about my journey, besides “How many tires did you wear out (the answer is none, which always seemed to disappoint the interrogator), it is “What has been the greatest surprise on your trip?”  In all honesty the most eye opening aspect of the journey was the total lack of surprise.

     When I left in April our country was supposedly deep in doubt about the conflict in Iraq, SAARS was infecting the world, we were on heightened terrorism alert, West Nile Virus was returning for a nation-wide summer visit and drought was strangling our nation.

     I expected to find a nervous, doubting, tense, suspicious USA awaiting me.  That expectation could not have been more wrong.  It will come as a great disappointment to CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, NPR, CBS and ninety-nine per cent of the talk radio hosts in this country, but the folks I came in contact with from Oregon to Connecticut are just living their lives and living quite happily.

     Yes, there are stabbings in California and child abductions in New York and floods, tornadoes and tropical storms in-between but the population of this country carries on most optimistically by just carrying on.  There are myriad cities, towns and villages in this country where kids still ride their bicycles to school and to the swimming pool and around downtown and they ride that bike without parental escort.  And I am not only talking just Broken Bow and Prineville but Erie, Elmira and Norwalk.  The media mavens would have you believe our children are behind locked doors and shuttered windows to protect them from the “evil” that is rampant in our country. It ain’t so.

     Drivers across the USA still stop to check and see if assistance is needed by an individual stopped along side the road and that’s as true in New York as it is in Idaho.  We are not a nation that goes through life without so much as a glance left or right because  “we don’t want to get involved.“

      Yes, there is much divorce in our society but there is also a far greater emphasis on family than was prevalent two decades past. That’s another trend that knows no sectional boundaries.  Little League games, kite-flying, boating, walking, swinging on the school ground, hitting golf balls on the driving range and getting a Blizzard at the Dairy Queen with the kids are still a part of daily life in Iowa, Ohio, Wyoming and New York.

      Rust-belt cities have accomplished wonderful things in transitioning themselves from a manufacturing economy gone south of the border to more jobs in the service and technical sector.  One of the great comments I heard was from a recent Notre Dame grad who said, “I knew when I graduated from South Bend I wanted to come back home to Cleveland so that is where I limited my job search.”   He didn’t bolt for the West as I did many years ago.  He wanted to stay home.  And I could see why.  Cleveland is no more the “mistake by the lake” but has instead evolved into a beautiful, vibrant city sitting beside Lake Erie, the cleanest of the Great Lakes.   And Cleveland is not the exception to the rule.  Many places I visited have turned themselves into the kind of town people want to call home.  Coming immediately to mind are Columbus, Nebraska; Erie, Pennsylvania; Riverton, Wyoming, Baker City, Oregon and Corning, New York.   Yes, I know I’m leaving out another dozen cities and towns that deserve to be mentioned. 

     What I’m trying to say, without sounding like some syrupy politician begging for votes as election day draws near, is just that we, you and I, live in one really cool country.  Americans are blessed to live in a land with an incredible landscape that boasts a wonderful environment in which to live.   But our country’s greatest asset is our fellow citizens, the people who are the grit and fiber of this country.  As human beings they just flat out kick butt.