From Sea To Shining Sea, On Three Bicycles

By the time Sandra Sirota, Carly Ferguson, and Heidi Straub reached Long Island, the rest was simple. They pedaled alongside the Belt Parkway from the Verrazano Bridge, hit the Rockaways and the Five Towns area, then headed east on Merrick Road to Route 27, and stuck with it the whole way to Montauk Point. What's a mere 100 miles when you've biked through the Mojave Desert, over the Rockies, across the Great Plains, and over the Appalachians?

On Saturday, after 54 days, 3,800 miles, 30 flat tires, and too many Powerbars to count, the three young women rode past the Montauk Lighthouse and dipped the tires of their touring bikes in the Atlantic Ocean.

They had started their cross-country adventure by christening their wheels in the Pacific in Ms. Straub's hometown of San Diego and finished it within easy distance of Ms. Sirota's parents' house on Napeague.

Two days earlier the young women were riding through water up to their knees and ducking a serious lightning storm in New Jersey. It was some of the worst weather of their trip, but Saturday dawned sunny and dry - perfect for the final leg of the journey.

With the opposite ocean lapping at their bikes and the dust of 14 states on their panniers, the young women were all smiles (with a few tears of joy), stumbling over each other to share road stories and hugging everyone who helped them along the way and now gathered to celebrate their success.

Their parents had come from as far away as San Diego and Bermuda and were eager to see their daughters round the final bend in the road after tracking the trip through phone chains and shared E-mail messages.

All six of them wore T-shirts from the trio that read "My daughter biked across the U.S. and I survived." They trusted their daughters' common sense, but it can't have been easy.

"You know," said Gary Sirota, Sandra's father, "there's something like 1 percent crime in this country and you read about it 99 percent of the time, but those girls had nothing but good experiences."

Mr. Sirota, who lives on Napeague and in Massapequa Park, has a bicycle shop in Wantagh and helped his daughter and her two college friends with equipment selection and touring advice.

The six parents created a cross-country support system, planning routes, sending supplies to stops along the way, offering knowledge on certain parts of the country, and generally encouraging their daughters to stick with their dream.

No one had any doubt they would make it.

The three recently graduated from Cornell, where they had been crew teammates. They rowed or trained almost every day of their school career, and the week before flying to San Diego to meet Ms. Straub, who graduated in December, Ms. Sirota and Ms. Ferguson had been competing in nationals for crew.

The women themselves, sometimes sore or soaked to the bone, bruised from a fall or sunburned, said they only really questioned the journey once. That was during the flight to San Diego as two of them looked down at all they would have to bike across before their adventure was complete.

It was Ms. Sirota who first dreamed up the idea of a cross-country bike trip. "I was thinking of going abroad and realized I hadn't even seen my own country," she said over a late morning cup of coffee at her parents' house Sunday.

She was a sophomore then and knew she would probably be in the best physical condition of her life after another two years of rowing. She told Ms. Ferguson, then Ms. Straub and another crew teammate, Liz Healy. Hasn't every bike rider toyed with the idea?

A year and a half later, each was wondering if the others were still up for it.

"We were all thinking we still had to do it somehow," Ms. Straub recalled. All four were in, but in the final weeks Ms. Healy slipped a disc in her back and was unable to join them.

The three who made the trip weren't serious bikers before they started out. "Even in training we had never biked more than 100 miles," Ms. Straub said.

"We were so busy we never had time to," Ms. Sirota added.

"You can't plan this kind of trip. Things go wrong, you learn as you go along, but that was good for us; it matched our style very well," Ms. Ferguson added.

They rode Trek 520 touring bikes, wore clip-in shoes, and carried only rear panniers (the saddlebags that hang over the back wheel of the bike). They each had a sleeping bag, and communal necessities - camp stove, toiletries, tools, and so on - were split up among each of their panniers. Their loaded bikes weighed 70, 75, and 80 pounds.

"We had everything we needed and used everything we had," they said.

As far as the three women were from home, their parents were right along with them, learning about each state and keeping up with the day-to-day travails of the journey by exchanging E-mail with one another.

June 19: Their legs are definitely getting stronger. . . . It was important that they were fit when they got to Utah because it's so hilly. It was cold at Zion . . . they got caught in a violent hailstorm there, but found a gas station where they waited it out. . . . They will be in Colorado in two days and in Denver about four days after that.

The Fergusons

"I think they had as much fun on our trip as we did," Ms. Ferguson said Sunday.

But it wasn't just their parents who were interested in their journey. As they traveled they met someone in each town, every truck stop, grocery store, and campground who wanted to hear their stories. Questions tumbled out and with them awe, envy, and admiration.

"So many people would say what a great thing it was to do, that they had always wanted to do something like that if only they had the time," they said.

June 29: The families that Carly grew up with . . . were waiting on their front lawn when they arrived at 12 a.m. . . . How could we be so lucky to have these friends and these daughters?

The Fergusons

The endless plains of east Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri brought with them a few near disasters. The first of many tires wore out somewhere along that route and they encountered one of the most formidable thunderstorms. Being the highest thing on the plains aside from the wheat, the young women stowed their bikes in a ditch, took off their metal-clipped shoes, and huddled barefoot under a raincoat until the storm passed.

On the freeway in notoriously dangerous East St. Louis, one of them got a flat, then another, then another, and finally five more. Rather than danger, what they found were plenty of locals willing to stop and see them on their way, just in case.

All that time on the road gave the three women plenty of time to think about what came next. Ms. Straub, who had a job in marketing for Black and Decker, began to wonder if that was really what she wanted to do. Ms. Ferguson was looking forward to a job in Boston working on projects to get children excited about learning. Ms. Sirota was considering working with at-risk adolescents and had been trying to set up an interview with Americorps throughout the trip.

July 13: They hit the road at 6:30 for Louisville, getting all the way across the Indiana leg (148 miles) in one day! . . . I plotted a course from my aviation charts that would avoid as much of the Appalachian Mountain terrain as possible.

Jeff Straub

After the Rockies, the bikers weren't so worried about the Appalachians. But it turned out this lower mountain range, with steeper grades, was more difficult.

Even though they found fewer and fewer campgrounds in the East, it didn't seem to matter. By that time, new acquaintances were taking them in at each stop.

They were averaging 72 miles a day, sometimes more sometimes less.

July 22: We're staying in Hershey, Pa. . . . Tomorrow is 73 miles, but we're done with the mountains! See you all in five days. We're having trouble believing there's an end to this country.

Love, Peely, Scabby, and Greasy, your daughters

They had been worn out, soaked, pelted by hail, chased by dogs across the East, but through it all, they said Sunday, they never felt they were in real trouble. "Not with people. Never once," Ms. Ferguson said.

They had proven to themselves that, despite the news, despite the problems, despite the pessimism that so many people feel, the country can still be "American the beautiful."

"The greatest thing was finding out how many cool people there are in this country," Ms. Sirota said. And they'd be pleased if their trip inspires others to get on their bikes and go. "We want to show people they can do it," Ms. Straub said.

They can't help thinking about the next trip. Maybe touring in France or the California coast. They heard New Zealand was well set up for biking.