In 2023 I met Tamara Keith, NPR White House Correspondant, while we were both touring across Iowa during RAGBRAI. I even got a picture with her!

I remember reading your account of meeting Tamara Keith.  That is a great famous person meet-up.  In my RAGBRI days I remember hearing about quite a few famous people who were riding, but I was never lucky enough to actually meet any of them.  (Well, I did meet one of RAGBRAI's most famous food vendors, Mr. Porkchop.)

I guess I've been unlucky and have only met regular (and some irregular) non-famous Homo Sapiens while on tour.  Except for this one famous guy, or at least he SHOULD be famous;

The above photo was shot in Wisconsin, but Mr. Garceau was welcoming me and my riding partner to Minnesota at the time - don't ask, just accept it.  Mr. Garceau's traveling companion known as G-2 is equally famous in the rather specialized world of cycling cartoon characters.  Outside of cycling, I've met a few folks who society would hold to be famous because of their wealth or public fame for whatever reason.  But that sort of fame is just skin-deep fakery; true fame in the cycle touring world is achieved only through derring-do acts involving stamina, courage, perseverance, and other such flattering words.  I consider many in the CycleBlaze community to be truly famous folks.  Peace to all,

I agree, George, I was very honored to meet famous-in-our-subculture folks like Amaya Williams and Michael & Jocelyn Rice by happenstance on one of our trips. We were a few days behind Chris Pountney on that trip too, and even glimpsed him from afar in a town in Thailand (saw that orange shirt!) but we were on foot and didn't catch up with him. Willie Weir and his wife Kat Marriner are the first touring cyclists we'd ever met, ironically on a bus, in 2005. Jeff and Kristen Arnim started their first tour together from our front porch (we met Jeff earlier in 2011 in Libby, Montana). Chris Wee and his wife Coleen stumbled on our Bike Fridays at a guesthouse and introduced themselves, we rode together for a few days after that. And of course Scott and Rachael Anderson are mainstays in our life when they are in Portland. All of these people are inspirational to me. 

Let me close with the famous quip, "My friend Paul McCartney said I should never drop names."

What kind of knucklehead welcomes somebody to Minnesota when he's in Wisconsin?  It could only be somebody who is famous for being a knucklehead.

Anyway, I met a famous person that day too.  It was a multiple-time cross country bike tourist and journal writer who rides through any malady ranging from an abscessed tooth to a cancer diagnosis.

When I started this topic, I did think of including some of the famous Cycleblazers I've met, but I remembered that there was already a forum discussion about that a while back.

A friend and I had I had a very brief conversation with a lone guy on a beach in Costa Rica. He was by himself, wearing board shorts and a t-shirt. I asked my friend afterwards: ‘did that guy look like Matt Damon’?  She replied: ‘kinda’ 😂.  

We soon learned that he was staying with his family just a few houses down the beach, without an entourage. I respect that. 

He's not properly famous but I came upon a Buddhist monk in a cowboy hat on Route 66 in Missouri in 2019. I waved to him as I rolled by. It turns out he was walking across country to promote world peace. 

https://www.lionsroar.com/this-buddhist-monk-is-walking-across-the-united-states-to-promote-peace/

This is almost as weird as going to Disneyland on rare rainy day. I did not see Mickey Mouse, but I did see Stephen Stills. 

I respect that too.  I bet that made it seem like you had just talked to a regular guy and not a famous movie star.  Thanks for the story.

That's definitely a case of somebody who should be more famous than he is.  The vision of a Buddhist monk wearing a cowboy had to be pretty strange--almost as strange as that photo in the article of him sitting next to his modern hi-tech tent.  Knowing what you know now, I'm guessing you wish you had stopped to say hi.

Greg that’s a memory provoking question. Very hard. It’s taken me three days to think of someone famous who I ‘met’ while cycle touring.

The revelation to me is that cycle touring so far removes us from the orbit of the famous, the non-famous and the even infamous, that anyone wanting to escape paparazzi should take up cycle touring.

Anyway, it’s a tenuous claim but I’m putting Prince Charles (now King Charles III) on the brag list. 

At the conclusion of my first ever cycle tour, in late 1979, I was in London staying with friends preparing to pack my bike and fly home. The friends obviously thought I needed a dose of ‘culture’ so they took me to see Handel’s ‘Messiah’ in the West End.

Lo and behold, as we arrived to enter the theatre, there was small flurry of activity a few metres from where we were standing, and Prince Charles (with a few well dressed others… no Princess Di  back then) stepped out of a regal looking car, walked by us very close, waved to the few onlookers and walked into the theatre.