Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun
December 8th, 2005
She turns around, sees reminders of how far she’s ridden, and thinks about how different the world seems when you’re on a bike. The hills she’s finished climbing look so innocent from a car and feel so challenging on a bike.
She looks ahead and sees how far she has yet to go. The road is arrow straight and flat. Lined with corn and soybean fields on either side, her path stretches to the horizon.
Judy Martell, 55, of Durham is a little less than halfway through riding the American Discovery Trail, a 6,800 mile patchwork of paved greenways, state parks, and roadways connecting Delaware with San Francisco. In 2001, she woke from a dream with a goal to use her own two legs to get her from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
A month ago, she reached St. Louis, Missouri.
If she were to ride the entire Discovery Trail in one effort, she estimates it would take her anywhere from a month to a month and a half. Whether to raise money for a charitable cause, bring attention to an injustice, or just to experience the changing landscape of our vast country on a more human scale, Martell says “there are a lot of people who are doing it straight through on the Discovery Trail, biking or walking.”
“I do it in chunks… in sections, because I can’t do the logistics of being away from home long enough to do it all in one shot,” says Martell. When she knows she’s got five free days coming up, she starts to plan the next trip.
For most of the route, she’s been riding alone. But friend Alison Carpenter also of Durham recently kept her company from Cincinnati to St. Louis.
Traveling at the speed of a bike allows a different perspective, says Carpenter. “Life’s just fleeting from an automobile on a day to day basis. Then you get on a bike… and time just sort of disappears, everything changes, and your perspective becomes ‘eat, drink, bike, sleep, bike.’ It was definitely a meditative experience.”
Carpenter had never done any long-distance bike touring before. “The first day was mentally challenging. We did fifty-five miles in the first day, and I’d never ridden fifty-five miles at once,” she says. “[The] second and third were more physically challenging. But, after the third day I felt like, ‘alright, I can do this’.” By the end of the fifth day she had a hard time letting the trip come to an end.
Her pluck speaks to the c’est la vie attitude that got them through parts of their ride; it was not without challenge. Martell lost her GPS device early in the trip. At one point they ended up riding on a limited access freeway with tractor trailers passing a little too close and too fast for comfort. And on their last day, they found themselves riding through the headwinds of a tornado system that hit Illinois later that day.
Nor do they forget the killer leg cramps, a semi-paralyzed left hand, and the ka-chunk of an adjusting chiropractor’s table that still rings in their ears.
But, then there was the time they stopped at a restaurant and a pickup truck driver who had passed them thirty miles back welcomed them with a “you made it! Alright, way to go!”
Or the time they rolled up to an auto-auction with a vending machine tucked behind a fence decorated with a “dealers only” sign. After sneaking in to get water from the vending machine one of the dealers struck up a conversation with the two weathered and worn-out cyclists.
And they’ll never forget that warm, inviting cafe — with fresh baked bread — in, “where was that cafe again?” Carpenter asks.
Riding through the country side and small towns endeared them to the folks they passed. Martell and Carpenter feel like the people they met along the way would not have been as open or willing to strike up conversations if they’d been just another driver passing through.
Planning for a trip like this is not as difficult as you might think, says Martell. That is, if you plan the way Martell does, it’s not that taxing. She likes to leave a lot of the details to just work themselves out. But, not without reason.
“I think we get into this box of ‘it’s a scary world and let’s stay in our safe route’. But when you put yourself out there, then you’re reminded that the world’s not that scary. Life is going on in these little towns just like it is here. It’s just a different pace in a different place,” she says.
“A yearning for pure spontaneity is human nature,” says Carpenter, “but at the same time that time runs together on [a trip like this], it also becomes more precious.”
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For their ride, Carpenter rode her 1980s Motobecane with downtube shifters and Martell rode her custom recumbent, made here in Durham by Wayne Schnackel.
Information on the American Discovery Trail can be found at http://www.discoverytrail.org/