How are you paying for this?

Where do you sleep?

Why did you decide to do this?

What is the geographic center of a state, and how do you determine it?

What kind of bike is that!?

What equipment are you taking?

How are you carrying your stuff?

How do you get your bike to Hawaii and Alaska?

How do you train for something like this?

How are you paying for this?

There are actually two answers to that question: a playful one, and a practical one. We anticipate that our journey—like most of life—will end up an unpredictable mixture of these elements of whimsy and pragmatism. Since we wield the keyboard, we’re going to give the fun answer first.

A) At its heart, our journey is focused on exploring and enjoying the glory of the ordinary and the dignity of the commonplace. Our chosen destination in each state is not a tourist site or some exceptional spectacle. Instead we have chosen the exact middle, the place that is the most average (geographically) in each state. Why? Because we believe that every place has value and interest, if only we would take the time to look, listen, and learn. As G. K. Chesterton said:

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person

Our journey is devoted to giving due honor to the ordinary, but our focus is not just on ordinary places, but ordinary people too. For what is a place apart from its people? So in the spirit of Lincoln, we endeavor to make this journey for the people, of the people, and (finally we get around to answering your question) by the people!

What we mean by that is, we hope for all of you to become an active and supportive part of our journey. We are the sojourners, and all of you are our co-journers. So please, join with us on this journey; become both our partners and our patrons! You can help in two ways:

    1) Become a member of the (mostly made-up) National Geographic Center Society, and have the center of a state named in your honor

    2) Offer your couch/guest bedroom/garage/yard/barn for us to stay in along the way!

B) Okay, we’ve covered the fun answer. Now on to the practical one.

    1) Bicycle travel is incredibly cheap. With our decision to avoid hotels by camping and staying with people we meet, our costs are reduced to food, entrance fees for campsites and national parks, and various incidentals. This kind of bike touring is incredibly cheap once you get all the gear you need. In fact, it’s far cheaper than our normal life!

    2) We have also decided to take a break from riding during the winters. This will enable us to work and to get to know a couple of places in greater detail. When it’s all said and done, this will hopefully enable the trip to be financially self-contained. Granted, we had to have some money on the front end to at least get started. We were both fortunate enough to graduate from college debt-free, and in our first nine months of marriage, we’ve been able to save enough to get us through the first five months of travel. Then we’ll be settling in Hawaii for the winter to harvest coffee and macadamia nuts!

Our plan is to try and average $25 per day during the traveling months. This covers food, entrance fees to parks, camping sites, the occasional movie, etc. That’s about $11,500 for all of the traveling months. We hope to save about $700/month during the working months. With 4 months of work in Hawaii, and 5 months in Oregon, it should all add up (more or less).

Where do you sleep?

We plan to camp or stay with people we meet along the way. This decision stems from our philosophy of travel that emphasizes meaningful interaction with local people and experiencing the natural world. It also helps tremendously in making the trip financially feasible. We plan to stay in hotels twice: for our first and second anniversaries.

Why did you decide to do this?

This whole hairbrained scheme began two years ago as I was reading an issue of Backpacker magazine. This issue had an article about “highpointing“, which is simply making it your goal to climb to the highest point in each state. Usually this is a goal that takes a lifetime (or at least a decade) to complete, but I thought, “Why not make it into one colossal roadtrip? Do them all in one summer!”

This idea had some initial appeal, but then I began reflecting on what the actual experience would be like—endless hours in a car, lots of characterless interstate driving, too little time to really get to know a place. Not so appealing anymore. Yet the turning point came when I considered my own state from the perspective of an outsider.

“What if I were from, say, Oregon?” I asked myself. “And I’ve never been to Oklahoma in my life. If my endeavor is to visit the highpoint of each state, then in Oklahoma, that quest will take me to Black Mesa.”

Now, as an Okie, I know that Black Mesa is in the panhandle of Oklahoma, and in fact it is within a few hundred feet of the New Mexico border. The area has its beauty, to be sure, but it is a beauty far more representative of New Mexico than of Oklahoma. If the goal of my travels was to get to know every state, then how accurate a picture of Oklahoma have I gained? Answer: not very accurate. I tap my toe in the corner, look around, and say, “Looks like New Mexico,” having never seen the rolling plains of Oklahoma’s interior, the forests of eastern Oklahoma, or the buffalo-covered Wichita mountains in the southwest.

Additionally, although I have a deep love of both wilderness and mountains, there are certainly other elements that one must experience before considering one’s self to have, in any meaningful way, “experienced” that state. Like its people, for instance. Wilderness doesn’t lend itself to that very well. Nor do mountains always make good representatives of a state’s geography. Take Kansas, for instance. I’d say experiencing the mind-blowing flatness of central Kansas is a better bet for understanding the state than “climbing” Mt. Sunflower.

So the question became: if not the high point, then what point? And the answer came immediately: the mid-point! The exact geographic center! This way, we are forced to do more than tap our toe in the corner or bag a solitary peak, but to cross an entire state and to see its very heart!

The idea also had appeal because of the arbitrary nature of the point: it was not a tourist destination, not a “point of interest” on any travel map, but simply a place determined by the vagaries of a meandering river-border. The unknown and unpredictable nature of the endeavor smacked of adventure! Will it be in some guy’s living room, or deep in a swamp? In the middle of a corn field or high in remote mountains? Perhaps in a prison or a tire factory? Who knows! But if you follow us here on Fifty by Bike, you can discover each point along with us!

What is the geographic center of a state, and how do you determine it?

The mathematical name for the geographic center of each state that we will be visiting is the “center of area”. The easiest way to understand the center of area would be to take a piece of plywood and cut out the exact shape of the state. Then take your plywood state and balance it on a nail. The point that the state would balance on is the center of area of that state.

Things get a bit more complicated for states with islands or disconnected pieces (like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula), but the idea is still valid. For shapes like that, you would have to put all the pieces in their correct places and then attach them together using weightless connectors. Not really possible, but you get the idea.

So did we spend weeks in the garage sawing the states before we set out cycling the states? Uh, no. We don’t even have a garage. As you’ve probably guessed, computers can do the calculations much more quickly and precisely (and with a lot less sawdust). So we contacted Tarek Rashed, a geography professor at the University of Oklahoma (Laura’s and my alma mater.) He was very excited about the idea, and was eager to help. We also had help from Joseph Kerski, who has worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and now works for the company which develops ArcGIS, a very popular Geographic Information Systems software package. They were both kind enought to use their expertise and resources to do the calculations for us.

There were a few decisions we had to make about how to do the calculations. One was whether or not we wanted to include bodies of water in the “area” of a state. For ponds and small lakes, the effect is negligible, but for the Great Lakes states, this decision moves the point by several miles. We decided to use the land area and to exclude bodies of water in our calculations. This is not necessarily the “right” way, but simply the way we chose.

Another decision we had to make was about Hawaii, because the center of land area for Hawaii is actually in the Pacific Ocean. Although Laura and I both have a fascination with sailing, (stemming not from experience, unfortunately, but from reading great books like A Severe Mercy and Dove) we decided to make the geographic center of the big island our goal. However, we will still probably try and talk our way onto a sailboat and visit the true geographic center as well, if for no other reason than to have an excuse for going sailing.

Those decisions made, we now we have fifty latitude/longitude pairs, which we will use our GPS unit to hunt down once we get close. The coordinates that the GIS program spits out are ridiculously precise (it gives the points down to the thousandth of an inch!), but the methodology does not lend itself to great accuracy (largely due to the lack of precision in the shape maps of the states). In any case, though, we are more interested in precision than accuracy—that is to say, we care more about having an exact point to visit than knowing that the point is exactly correct. So our limiting factor in this process is our GPS unit, which can give locate us ±9 feet. This is sufficient for our purposes: if the geographic center is inside a house, it will tell us whether the center is in the kitchen or the living room.

What kind of bike is that!?

If you’ve never seen a bicycle like this, you’re not alone! Even people within the cycling community who know bikes inside and out are surprised when they see us.

Our bike is made by a German manufacturer named Hase Spezialräder (Hase means “rabbit” in German. Spezialräder means “specialty bikes”). The model of our bike is the Pino (Pino means… “Pine”? In Italian?).

You can learn more about our bike and why we chose it at our page about the bike.

What equipment are you taking?

Here is the equipment that we are setting off with:

Cycling Gear

• Hase Pino Tandem Bicycle
• SKS Fenders (front & rear)
• Tubus Cargo rear rack
• Hase Lowrider front rack
• Axiom Champlain rear panniers
• Axiom Lasalle front panniers
• Axiom Louis Handlebar bag
• Topeak Turbo Morph Pump
• Cable/lock

Home Sweet Home

• Sierra Designs Electron Tent
• North Face Blaze 3D Sleeping Bags (2)
• Coolmax sleepsacks (homemade, 2)
• Outdoor Research Hydroseal Dry Bag #5 (for sleeping bags)
• Big Agnes REM Air Core sleepmats (2)

Cycling Wearables

• Specialized S1 Helmet (Aaron)
• Giro Skyla Helmet (Laura)
• Pearl Izumi X-Alp Low Shoes (Aaron)
• Cannondale Roam Shoes (Laura)
• Performance Bike Athena Sunglasses (2)

Clothing

• Convertible Pants (2 pr each)
• Coolmax tees (3 each)
• Long Sleeve Coolmax shirt (2 each)
• Dressy shirt (1 each)
• Microfleece (1 each)
• Mountain Hardware Epic jacket (Aaron)
• Marmot Precip Jacket (Laura)
• Sierra Designs Hurricane rain pants (2)
• Windproof fleece gloves (2 pr)
• Windproof fleece hats (2)
• 3 prs each Coolmax low socks
• 2 prs each Merino wool tall socks
• Salomon Techamphibian Shoe/Sandals (2 prs)

Kitchen

• Coleman Multi-fuel Stove
• MSR Duralite Classic Cookset
• Lexan Spoons, Ginsu knife, can opener
• MSR Dromedary Water Bag (10 Liter)
• Hose/coupling/bite valve for water bag
• Nalgene bottle (1)

Bathroom

• Toiletry bag with Toiletries
• Sunscreen
• TP!
• Microfiber towels (2)

Misc

• Hohner Special 20 harmonica
• Explorist 210 GPS Unit
• Petzl Tikka Plus LED headlamps (2)
• Canon Powershot A540 Digital Camera
• Fisheye & Telescopic lens
• Vanguard Tourist-2 Tripod
• Solar Battery Recharger
• Radio/MP3 Player/Voice Recorder
• Bible
• Books to read
• Compact Dictionary/Thesaurus
• Alpha Smart 3000

How are you carrying your stuff?

When bike touring, the two common options are panniers (saddlebags) or a trailer. Panniers were the standard method for decades and were refined over the years into a very effective method of hauling your stuff on tour. Basically, you install racks on the front and rear, then the bags attach to these racks on each side. Simple! Clicking on the image to the right will show you a chromatically-pleasing example of a fully-loaded touring bike using panniers.

Then, in the mid 1990’s, trailers such as the B.O.B. Yak or the Burley Nomad came on the scene. Now we have a choice! With trailers, bikes without the attachment points (called braze-ons) for racks could pull all their gear behind them. Trailers also have the advantage of moving much of the weight of your gear off your bike wheels, thereby reducing the chances of broken spokes. And finally, trailers tend to be very easy to detach from your bike when you arrive in camp, thereby giving you a “normal” bike to run around on. To the right is a fellow who is very excited about his B.O.B. trailer. They even dress alike!

So what about us? What did we choose? Well, I have toured with a trailer in the past and enjoyed the benefits of trailers. In fact, as a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate, I designed, and built my own trailer! My trailer included brakes and the ability to use my internal frame backpack as a bag to carry my stuff, so that whenever I wanted to get off the road and into the backcountry, I already had all the gear and a bag to carry it! Here’s a picture of my trailer on the Blue Ridge Parkway on my first cross-country tour.

However, for our journey, Laura and I chose to use panniers instead of a trailer. Why? Mainly because a tandem is a pretty long vehicle as-is, without adding feet to the overall length by adding a trailer. Plus, our bike’s unique design allows the installation of a lowrider rack up front that places the front panniers low to the ground and centered between the wheels—the perfect placement of weight for stability! So, instead of an overall length of nearly eleven feet (!) and a wheelbase of five and a half feet as one would see with a conventional tandem with trailer, we have an overall length of about seven feet and a wheelbase of only four and a half feet.

You can read more on the panniers vs. trailer debate at Adventure Cycling’s website.

How do you get your bike to Hawaii and Alaska?

Good question! Too bad we don’t know the answer yet! We will try to work something out with the airline, but airlines have this nasty habit of not declaring themselves not liable if damage occurs to the bike in transit. Scary! Therefore, we may FedEx the bike to our destinations. I’ve done this in the past, and it actually ended up cheaper (fully insured) than checking the bike with the airline (uninsured).

How do you train for something like this?

The first thing you should understand is that bicycle travel is quite different from bicycle racing. We will average about 60 miles a day, but almost never will we ride all of these miles in one go. Good bicycle travel (in our opinion) includes plenty of time for stopping to look at interesting things you stumble across, taking meal and snack breaks, and general lollygagging. So for a typical day, riding at about 12 miles an hour, we only spend about 5 hours riding. In the course of a day, in which you’re awake for at least 16 hours, this is a pretty laid back schedule!

That said, we are still trying our best to prepare our bodies as well as we can. In addition to long rides on most weekends, we try to work in short or medium length rides during the week. Also, about a month before departure, we spent five days on a “shakedown” tour in Northwest Oklahoma as a training ride and a test of our equipment arrangements.