Coast To Coast—

A Bicycle (Trip) Built For Two

By Nancy K. Crevier

It is the kind of trip people talk about all of their lives, but Arthur Upshur and his 19-year-old son Raleigh are making it a reality. The two Upshur men will fly out to San Francisco June 4 and begin a bicycle journey that will span seven other states between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans before ending near Machipongo, Va., on August 15.

“I realized a year ago that Raleigh was graduating from high school that year and that we still hadn’t done this big adventure we had talked about. He was grown up and I thought the opportunity had slipped by,” said Arthur Upshur. But as the end of the 2006 school year drew to a close, he decided to throw out the idea of a monumental bike ride during the summer of 2007 to his son, anyway.

“I thought it was a pretty good idea,” said Raleigh, who has recently finished his freshman year at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. “Why not? But then, it seemed so far away and not real, that I just said, ‘Yeah,’ and then I didn’t really think about it a lot until this winter.”

As an opportunity for son and father to bond, it could not be a better venue, said the men. “We haven’t been thrown together this tightly since Raleigh was a little tyke,” Arthur said. “It will be interesting how it shakes out.”

The 3,800-mile bike ride has taken on even more meaning than building family relationships, though, since the unexpected death of Raleigh’s 7-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Rupert Bear, this past Easter. “I kind of want the ride to be in memory of Rupert, now,” said Raleigh, and he hopes that people will pledge contributions to the Canine Advocates of Newtown (CAN) at his e-mail, upshur_raleigh@wheatonma.edu. “When I complete the ride, I will let people know, and they can send their pledges to CAN in Rupert’s memory,” Raleigh said.

Both Raleigh and Arthur have moderate biking experience. “I’ve always had a bike, and I’ve biked around Newtown and up by college,” Raleigh said, “but this is the first trip of this caliber I’ve done. Really, I’ve done nothing like this.”

A honeymoon bike trip down the western coast from Seattle to San Francisco in 1983 with his wife, Carol, was the last bike ride of any substance Arthur has embarked upon, he confessed, but he has been diligently training to prepare for the coast-to-coast experience. Since September, he has clocked nearly 2,200 miles biking the Redding/Easton area and up into Litchfield County. In recent weeks, his training has included riding with the bicycle fully packed, as well.

In a case of making lemons into lemonade, he has also turned his layoff as CFO of a Canadian water distributing company last fall into the luxury to prepare for and go on this expedition with his son. “It’s funny how things work out, I guess. I’m certainly not happy to be not working, but I don’t know that I could have taken the time to get ready for or to even go on this ride if I was still working,” he said.

Their two Cannondale touring bikes were shipped to a friend’s home in San Francisco on May 24. They will be reassembled and packed with four waterproof panniers each, front and back, a tent, sleeping bags, a small propane stove, snacks, and water when the Upshurs arrive on June 4. Spare bike parts, including spokes, chains, and tire patches, are necessities, as there will be several stretches of up to 80 miles without services in the more western states they cross through.

“Bike technology has vastly improved in 20 years,” commented Arthur. “Our bikes have 27 gears, including a ‘granny gear’ that basically has the wheels practically spinning in place as you slowly go up a mountain. The seats are a soft, flexible composite, not the hard, leather seats we had years ago, and they have a piston in them that acts as a shock absorber,” he said. Cushioned hand rests of a neoprene material will ease the discomfort that can set in after hours on the road, as will, they hope, gel-padded gloves.

There is no plan to push themselves, outside of aiming to cover 60 miles each day, they said. “It will be very flexible. We’ll rest every seventh day, or when we find some incredible place we want to check out,” Raleigh said. “It might be that we get up that seventh day and are ready to ride, and we’ll be open to that, too.”

Both father and son are eager to get underway. “It’s a big commitment,” said Raleigh. “It will sort of pluck us out of life for a while. It will be an event we can always look back on. I think we will be glad we did it and did it together.”