About

This is an account of my bicycle tour on the Bikecentennial Transamerica Route in 1988. I kept notes in a paper journal during the trip, and took pictures on 35mm film. After returning, I took many weeks to do an ex post facto writeup, which was simply a narrative with no pictures.

The original journals., roughly the size of 3″ x 5″ index cards. I started with just one, but had to buy more along the way. These were kept in zip-loc bags, since my panniers weren’t waterproof.

I’m now in the process of capturing the trip into blog format. I’ll edit the dates on the posts to reflect the actual trip dates, even though it’s now July, 2026. Original writeup text will appear as follows (with possibly minor edits):

In the morning, I found that something had come in the night and eaten all my honeybuns. Boy, was I pissed! It even left tiny footprints on the picnic table, still greasy from my honeybuns. For breakfast, I had one small can of mandarin oranges, and drank the water.

sometimes, i will expand upon the quoted text like this.

Most of the pictures will be digitizations from the original 35mm negatives, but I will add a few recently taken ones of my original gear. For the most part, the pictures are presented in the original order on the film roll, but occasionally, I’ll insert a photo slightly out of order to match the narrative

This was the set of maps I used. They’re printed on some kind of waterproof paper, a brilliant touch. The maps included turn-by-turn directions, and distances between turns. Though this was long before GPS was readily available, I did have a digital cyclometer (relatively new technology at the time) to measure mileage. I had to mentally calculate the distance to the next turn, or the estimated time of arrival. Not a particular strain for someone of my generation, who grew up before abundantly available electronic computing.

It’s a bit of a detective sleuth coordinating the data, as my original writeup did not include exact dates for the most part, and of course, film pictures have no time stamps. Further, the original journals are not strictly chronological, since I didn’t record most things just as they happened, but at the end of the day, or even the next day. In general, here is my trust order for source veracity:

  1. Pictures from the original negatives.
  2. Original BikeCentennial maps.
  3. Original paper journals (including sketches).
  4. The 1988 text writeup.
  5. My own memories from almost 40 years ago.

Back to Main Page

Visited 8 times, 1 visit(s) today