Yearly Rides on our Route 

Year in and year out, cycle tourists will bike across America using our route. What will start out as a trickle, will become a regular migration of bike riders moving from east to west and west to east, from ocean to ocean. A familiar sight to the communities through  which they will pass, they will be welcome visitors to all the new lands through which they will find themselves pedaling. This is so because, the quiet and the minimal foot print their efforts bring will be both respected and appreciated. Combine this with the fact that Americans feel it is their duty to learn about other parts of the country and how the rest of their brothers and sisters live in them and our human powered travelers will be seen as special guests. 

They will stand out in the population centers along the way because of the often heavily laden bikes that make their character building mission possible. They will be honored because, with half of America being unpopulated, locals will have come to understand these people had to make peace with themselves before they got to them. And with very little of this country being flat, along with its inevitable headwinds, they will also know long distance cyclists earned their every mile. For those willing to listen, the stories they tell of adventure and the goodwill of their fellow Americans will bring hope.

NBG TransAm Hall of 
Fame Proposed

Those who have ridden a bicycle across America, need to be honored. Because they do not stand out or have a way to call attention to their accomplishment, we need to recognize them. We need to know they are walking amongst us.

Far more than the sports stars and movie actors whose opinions we seek when our communities or the Nation seek answers, we need to have a way we can call upon TransAm cycling veterans. Blessed with an outsized accomplishment few can equivocate, they understand America and its people at a core level that goes deep beyond what can be taught in traditional learning environments. Like a journey to the mountaintop, the only instructor for them has been the actual experience of interfacing with the people along the way.

They have learned, first hand, how our brothers and sisters all just want to help each other get to our next destination. Unlike the motorist who needs to minimize their contact with other humans to get to where they are going, people are a huge part of a long distance bicycle ride. For their very survival, those out for the long-haul have come to understand how much we need each other no matter the role any of us may happen to play. As anchors for an expectation of the best, in situations that present difficulty, it is the presence of TransAm cycling vets amongst us that can have the potential to bring comfort.

This is especially important as the nation struggles to once again place a premium on truth, a truth that has been marginalized by the nation’s media in recent years. George Orwell warned against this when he wrote –

The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it

By celebrating TransAm vets, making them honorable parts of our society, the same way we do for our professional athletes and Hollywood personalities, we are assigning worth to those who genuinely walk (bicycle) their talk.

By giving TransAm vets a way to stand tall, we are using their example to remind us that talk does not move one’s own body from one coast to the other. We are affirming the fact that, in any endeavor, no matter how often we repeat it, mere words do not get us the results we desire. We are acknowledging the importance of building grit, goal setting, inner strength, belief, trust and hope into any winning formula.

As attributes that have come into possession of these gentle warriors, it was the long distance road that brought out the best in them. It was connecting the coasts with their own two legs that gave them a blue print they could use for the rest of their lives. As such, it has built the mix of humility and pride they have needed to go forward in life with love, purpose, inner peace and a greater ease. It is this we need to promote.

As a right of passage, we need to encourage TransAmerica cycling. Especially amongst our youth. We need to make this something they aspire to. When they leave college, for example, instead of traveling to Europe as a way to broaden their horizons, they need to have the TransAm cycling option before them.

We need to be able for them to put NBG TransAm Hall of Fame Member on their job resume. In trying to understand why we have made this such an honor, potential employers will quickly learn the value a TransAm cycling vet can bring to their place of employment. They will see that these are prospects who can work with a lot of variables and people to get a very large job done. They will know that these job candidates do not substitute excuses for accomplishment.

In the game of life, coast-to-coast pedal veterans are a better different for many reasons as well. When on the long distance road, stuck in a desert with headwinds and no services for miles around, they have learned they can go inside for the strength to continue. When the mountain ascent in front of them cannot be conquered in a few minutes time, but requires much exertion for hours on end, a deep understanding of perseverance has become their very nature. When forced to drink warm water, put on the same clothes day in day out or wipe their  face with a dirty rag, instead of complaining, they have acquired a profound appreciation for the simplest of things.

When the next camping is miles away, it is getting dark, and before they can sleep, they  have to make camp, make a meal and and tend to their many nighttime chores, they resolve to become better planners. As a skill they perfect with each new riding day, away from the road they feel called to spend a few moments thinking through any of the challenges that lie ahead.  This as they become more  fulfilled and productive human beings.

Armed with a working knowledge of the principals of success, these are people who have come to know themselves pretty well. Comfortable in their own skin, this is who we need leading us. We need to be shown the way by those who know that whatever they can do, is possible for anyone willing to do the work required to build themselves. We also need to be reminded by their example that any accomplishment is measured one day at a time.

As a society, we win when we place the TransAm cycling vet on an equal footing with our movie actors and sports stars. With the NBG TransAm Hall of Fame on our web site and as a large room at our main Indianapolis office, the National Bicycle Greenway can make that possible!

Because they will become familiar to the locals along the way, it will be easy for them to get directions should they need them. The blogs they keep that get a wide NBG readership, will also be known about well before they get to a new city or town. Because this is so, the new people they meet will do what they can to show off their city as well as recommend points of interest that only long time residents could know.

Honor for those on the long distance road was a by-product of the National Road that Thomas Jefferson signed into law in 1806. Until transcontinental rail and then, at the turn of the century, automobiles changed the equation, cross country travel was only for the strong of character. Then, especially during the Gold Rush years, 1850-1870, all the Conestoga wagons, the 18-wheeler of the day, piloted by the original Teamsters, that plodded along on this dirt arterial legitimized the search for adventure. They gave authority to learning about far away lands. 

Nor could they be ignored. There were so many that from sun up to sundown there was a steady stream of them. So steady in fact,  in Indianapolis alone, 90 Conestoga wagons, crossed the National Road wood-covered bridge over the White River, every hour of every day (well over one a minute, theirs was a steady drumbeat of clacking). Add to this the prairie schooners, people on horseback and people towing carts etc.

Cross country travel stopped being a challenge to a persons physical and mental muscle after the 1869 transcontinental railroad arrived. And at the turn of the century internal combustion then made it possible to get pretty much anywhere in a car or truck and later a bus.

The 485-mile, Camino de Santiago in Spain, however, has kept human powered propulsion alive since the 8th century. Approaching 400,000 visitors a year, many of whom are religious pilgrims, on it, little towns are quietly visited on foot and by bike. The terrain itself  consists of dirt tracks and quiet, paved country roads through occasional small villages 

Administered by the Catholic Church,  once the city of Santiago de Compostela, about 25 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, is reached, the traveler’s efforts are acknowledged with a certificate called a compostela. 

This is what we foresee with our NBG Passport program that will be talked about later in this book.  

Here in America, we can reverse engineer our own Camino de Santiago. We can run it between the Greenway Capital of the World, the Crossroads of America, Indianapolis, and Washington, DC. Once DC bound cyclists reach Pittsburgh, about 350 miles away, their reward will be the 300 car-free miles that stand between them and the Nation’s Capitol. In moving from Indianapolis, they will be leaving from a downtown corridor that was designed to be a scaled down version of the National Mall, by Alexander Ralston, the man who helped Pierre Charles L’Enfant design DC.  We can call it the Mall to Mall Ride!

This is something we can start doing now. A two week trip at 50-miles a day, this is eminently doable. All we will need is a picture of the rider and his or her bike at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis (which looks out on the Indy Mall) and the DC Capital and we will celebrate them on the  NBG Indy to DC rider roster for the year in question. 

Indy to DC, is Level 1 of our NBG Bike the Capitol series that we will be launching. 

Level 2  Denver to Indy
Level 3 Reno to Denver
Level 4 SF to Reno
Level 5 SF to Indy
Level 6 SF to DC

As the planet is dying all around us, this is what we need to return to. The simplicity of human power. But we have to make it attractive and a way for it to generate jobs, opportunity and financial reward. Read on as we show you how we will bring this about.