Hamish and Joan Blanch’s latest cycling trip in the United States covered 3,400kms, and over the years they have now cycled 45,000kms in that country alone.
In their latest cycling trip, the Richmond couple spent two months peddling through mainly rural America, from Houston, Texas, in the south to the New York Finger Lakes near the Canadian border.
From hot, humid temperatures in the mid-30s when they cycled through the southern states, they completed the tour in cool, frosty temperatures in the north, with a couple of hurricanes thrown into the weather mix along the way.
On their Surly long-haul bikes, they camped or stayed in “cheap and cheerful” motels through fields of cotton and other crops, but it was the people they met and the insights into their lives that stand out as highlights.
“Every day we met people and in situations where you wouldn’t have met them if you were travelling in a vehicle,” Hamish says.
“The people come to you,” Joan adds. “If you’re waiting outside the supermarket with your bikes, people come to you and ask where you are from. We quite enjoy having a yak with people – that’s part of the joy of travelling.”
Almost the entire trip was in Trump country where they “listened”, rather than discussing politics, but Hamish points out that rural America is quite different to the cities and how the rest of the world views it.
“Everyone (here) thinks everyone is running around with a gun, but it’s not like that. We felt quite safe, though we weren’t in the big cities. We met a lot of kindness along the way.”
Incredibly, throughout the entire trip, they only saw a couple of other people cycling and one of those was a man on a penny-farthing, riding the huge front-wheeled bicycle as a fundraiser for autism.
Despite no bikes on the roads, they reckon cycling was probably safer than in New Zealand because of the large shoulders on roads and the space drivers gave to cyclists as they passed. One stretch of their journey was 700km on a parkway that was wide with gentle curves and no commercial vehicles.
“It’s all really cruisy and one of the reasons we really like it,” Hamish says.
The couple have been heading overseas for cycling trips since the 1970s when there was no internet to help them plan their routes and now, as they hit 70, they have more trips planned. They left their bikes in the United States with a friend for another cycle trip in the future, but before that, they will be joining other cyclists in May to head to Australia to pedal from the Spencer Gulf to the Gulf of Carpentaria.
