I’ve always spoken as if my first bicycle tour was in the summer of either 1962 or 1963 when I rode from our home in Seattle to Salt Lakes State Park in north central Washington, just south of the Grand Coulee Dam.  I was biking there to join mom and my sister for a week-long vacation, and it has always impressed me that my parents let me do this on my own.  Perhaps since I’d taken the collections from my paper route and used them to hop on the Greyhound and run away to San Francisco the year before they thought it best to give me some latitude lest they lost control completely.

But it wasn’t really a tour, but more of a long weekend.  A very long weekend, with me riding across Snoqualmie Pass on what is now Interstate 90 the whole way, and ending that first 140 mile day (and if RideWithGPS is close to accurate, with over 7,000’ of climbing on that heavy steel-framed three speed Schwinn) sleeping on a billboard blown over in the sagebrush at sundown, overlooking the Columbia River and Vantage on the opposite bank.    

The second day was easier: just 60 miles and more or less a straight, flattish shot northeast across the sagebrush and desert, arriving midday sometime burnt black by exposure and probably dehydrated.  Try as I might, I’m not certain what I rode or how I was outfitted.  I’m pretty sure it was a three speed Schwinn and that I was likely cycling in cutoff blue jeans, a tee shirt, converse tennis shoes, no helmet, maybe some cycling gloves, and with a small rucksack on my back for the bare essentials. 

And looking at this again, I wonder if I set out thinking I was going to pull a double century and do this in one day?  There were no mapping tools either of course, and I probably thought that once I was over Snoqualmie pass it was easy the rest of the way.  If so, mom must have been frantic when I didn’t show.  No cell phones back then either, of course.  I’ll have to pick Elizabeth’s brain to see what she remembers about that.

But was it a tour?  Not really.  Just a long weekend overnighter, but what an epic adventure for a 15 or 16 year old boy!   Over sixty years later, that accomplishment still amazes me and fills me with pride at my much younger self.

My first real tour though was in 1972, the ride from Bellingham to Salem, Oregon, a tour that began after I completed my bachelors degree at Huxley College of Environmental Studies the year I got out of the army and before  my wife Carol Jo and I moved south to Seattle where I was enrolled in a Master’s program in Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington.  It was a tour begun with my brother Stewart and my best friend Alan, with the intent that we ride down the Pacific Coast to San Francisco; but Stewart bailed for personal reasons just south of Whidbey Island; and Alan and I stopped short in Salem because Alan was so disappointed by the breakfast in Astoria that he didn’t have the heart to continue on.

There are a dozen of these older tours that have never been published, mostly because insufficient resources exist to create a real journal.  Some have a bit of narrative, most have none.  Most have at least a few photos to share, but some have none of those either.  Most were ridden solo, but some had a companion or two along.  All have memories though, enough to at least shape a narrative to flesh out the remembered route and whatever other raw materials are still lying around. 

The plan is to to treat them all as single post presentations, to be published one at a time as I’m in a position to work it up and have the resources at hand to develop it.  I might as well set down what I can while there’s still something to work with.  Year over year, the memory isn’t getting any better over time.

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An addendum.  I’ve just spent most of the morning looking through all the journals from the past seven years for a photo I took on a day trip to Salem to visit Frank.  I’m still looking for that one, but I was overjoyed to find this post created in March 2018, just a week or two after we moved out of our condo and went vagabond.

A few weeks earlier we were up in Seattle for dad’s birthday and I spent some time rifling through boxes of their photographs, hoping I’d find a photo of my first bicycle, which I still think was a three speed Schwinn.  I’m sure it was a three speed, because I remember I was able tomdisassemble and reassemble a three speed Sturmey-Archer hub.

So that’s one thread in this addendum.  The other is that I wondered if I really thought I meant to ride the whole way in one day.  I asked Elizabeth what she remembered, and she surprised me by saying she didn’t remember me being there at all.  There’s no doubt about that though, and I told her about sitting on a raft in the lake there with another guy and two girls.

And the proof is in the link:

Heart

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There is another surprise though.  I wasn’t sixteen or fifteen, I was fourteen; and I look like it in the photo, alright.  This was in the summer of 1961, when I was transitioning from junior high to high school.  I feel quite sure about the year now, because Elizabeth graduated that year and in the fall moved to Sigma Xi, a a sorority affiliated with the University of Washington, her home for the next four years.  The summer she graduated would have been the last time she’d have joined us on a family vacation. 

It’s all in the link, but here is the part of the narrative specific to this ride:

Here’s yet another photo I was elated to find.  It’s not quite the one I hoped for (it doesn’t include my bike), but this is a scene from my first overnight bike tour, when I was fourteen.  This is at Sun Lakes State Park, in eastern Washington.  I bicycled there solo on a two day ride to join my family for our summer vacation.  I put in about 150 miles on the first day, crossing Snoqualmie Pass and sleeping in the sagebrush on a blown-over billboard outside of Vantage.

I’m the one on the left with the cheesy grin.  The others were friends I made at the campground, pairing up on a semi-date.  I was with the girl in white (Janet, if I recall right - I think she had a limp).  There was no hanky panky, to the other guy’s disgust - he had bigger plans for that evening, but I had no idea what to do with the opportunity at hand.