GoGeezGo : Easy Rider II: Cycling the Southern Tier

Bike emerges from its box

With my 70th birthday looming on the horizon, I decided to check off a couple of items that have been lingering on my bucket list this year, starting with a coast-to-coast bicycle tour of the 3,000-mile Southern Tier route from San Diego to St. Augustine FL.

I am no stranger to self-supported bicycle touring. I did my first one—a 335-mile off-road linkup of the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal trails from Pittsburgh to Washington DC—with a friend in 2011.

I did the 4,300-mile Northern Tier route from Anacortes WA to Bar Harbor ME in two installments, solo, in the summers of 2016 and 2017.

I also did sections of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route between Canada and Mexico in 2019 and 2020 with friends.

Almost everything seems OK

In addition, I completed the 1,800-mile Pacific Coast route between the Canada border and San Diego in the summer of 2021, solo.

But I had yet to do a Pacific-to-Atlantic coast-to-coaster across the US in the same year.

So when a window of opportunity opened for me to ride the ST between mid-March and mid-May in 2022, I leaped.

I already owned a great touring bike, a bombproof 2011 Surly Long Haul Trucker. In addition, I had a closet full of lightweight backpacking and bicycle touring gear.

So really all I had to do to get this adventure started was decide to do it, then buy an airline ticket to San Diego and ship my bicycle (via bikeflights.com) to my brother Jerry’s house in nearby Fallbrook CA.

Alas, pannier attachment is broken

For this tour, I brought a complete set of camping gear, including a tent, sleeping quilt, and an inflatable mattress. I also brought a wool watchcap, puffy jacket and rain gear. In addition, I brought a camp stove, cooking gear and several days of food.

It’s a good thing that I put my bike and gear together soon after arriving in San Diego, because I discovered that the attachment clip on one of my panniers (bicycle saddlebags) was broken, rendering it unusable. Fortunately, I was able to purchase a set of new panniers at an outdoor gear store near my brother’s house.

To navigate, I planned to rely mostly on maps and the app provided by the Adventure Cycling Association. But I was open to the idea of taking a few shortcuts and detours, particularly to avoid the punishing and demoralizing headwinds for which the ST is notorious.

I decided to call the tour Easy Rider II, in homage to the 1969 counterculture biker film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

New panniers

Like Fonda and Hopper, I was riding a route through the South.

Of course, those two were riding motorcycles and dealing illegal narcotics. I, on the other hand, was pedaling a bicycle, and the strongest drug that I brought along was ibuprofen (used on two occasions).

Spoiler Alert: Thankfully, I reached a far less-violent and tragic ending than Fonda and Hopper did in their movie. I survived the whole 3,062.3-mile tour. They were blown off their motorcycles by a shotgun-wielding yokel somewhere near New Orleans. Karma can be a bitch, folks!