Day one

There’s nothing wrong with growing closer to your traveling companions, but for bikers there’s a catch: Proximity can trigger tangles and tumbles. That lesson was etched in like a scar on day one when Brandon and Nate’s bikes snarled and threw each other off kilter. Bicycles and bodies were bruised as they were grounded in the forced deceleration. 

They left Oceanside on June 1, and after 42 days they would dip their front tires in the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland on July 12. Day one, though, was marked by the topple, along with an unanticipated topographic reality check: several thousand feet of hills to climb.

They may have prepared for the trip, but not one of them would say he was actually prepared for this.

“Little adventure junkies”

Brandon Arnold, a senior philosophy major, Nate Peirson, a Biola alumnus and student at Talbot, and Micah Hamilton, a Vanguard University alumnus, met when they were in junior high school. They were “little adventure junkies” from the start, according to Hamilton, a statement Arnold and  Peirson echoed in their own “adventure” phrases.

“It was just kind of a dream at first, and we were just kind of fantasizing about how awesome this would be, and then we just started planning and planning and planning, ended up buying our bikes, and it just kind of turned out to be reality,” Peirson said.

Baptism by fire continues

The strain continued for over a week when they traversed through desert in California and Arizona. The heat hit a high of 112 degrees more than once, and drinking three gallons of water in a day was not at all extravagant.

“Your water would get so hot that when you’d finally find a little bit of shade to rest in for a couple seconds, you’d put water in your mouth and it’d be like scalding hot,” Hamilton said. “So it was hard to find relaxation or rest anywhere. Even at night it was over a hundred, so we’d be like laying in a puddle of our own sweat. It was gross. It was brutal.”

More than once, their thirst overwhelmed their water reserves, and local ranch-dwellers bailed the bikers out when they came knocking.

Traveling

Their trajectory was patterned after the Race Across America, or RAAM, with some deviations, like Four Corners Monument. Their schedule intersected with the race’s running in June as riders pedaled past them, Peirson remembers. Hamilton recalls meeting Christoph Strasser, who was on his way to first place in the RAAM’s solo male category, in Durango, Colo. Strasser’s time was 7 days, 22 hours and 11 minutes.

The three reserved days for recuperation. Unless it was one of these five days, their tents would often be their lodgings. Some locals let them stay, even eat, in their homes or sleep at their churches.

“I think one of the coolest parts of this trip … was all the people that we met,” Peirson said.

En route, rendezvous was the standard traveling method. While the starting point and destination would be shared, the commute would be individual.

The motto, in Hamilton’s words: “If we all know where we’re going we all do our own pace. If we don’t, we stick together.”

One night, though, the reunion did not happen.

Peirson remembers stopping with the other two well behind, sleeping on someone’s lawn in his rain-breached, “collapsed” tent. Hamilton remembers riding on a one-lane section of freeway, flashlight in his mouth, feeling invisible to quick-passing vehicles as epic thunder and lightning accented a soaking storm. He camped at an elementary school campus with enough modest roof cover to suffice for the night. Meanwhile, Arnold’s roof that night was an overpass.

According to their Tumblr,  they were together again the next night — under the side roof of an unoccupied house in West Virginia.

Redefining adventure

Four days later, they posed in Annapolis for their Atlantic arrival photo to complement their Pacific starting shot. They and their bikes had finally tasted both oceans.

Arnold was surprised to feel energetic, rather than sluggish, when he returned from the trip.

“It took me awhile to adjust to the slower pace of regular life and not having to worry about where I’ll sleep, and it almost feels too easy,” he said. “It was hard, but I kind of miss the adventure of it.”

Hamilton says he learned to break past contentment along the way.

“I don’t know, it’s just kind of redefined the word adventure for me,” Hamilton said about the trip. “Adventure no longer means, ‘Oh, let’s go get pizza and go watch a movie spontaneously.’ Adventure means discomfort. Adventure means going away from home; adventure means being lost. Adventure means trusting God with safety, with everything, with your mental well-being.”