pg. 1 of journalIn the summer of 1987, just before my senior year of high school, my sisters and I drove out to stay with our brother in Virginia Beach. Somehow I ended up getting a job as a lifeguard at the beach and stayed after they left. It was awesome. I actually got permission to miss the first two weeks of school so I could finish out the season and collect a bonus for doing so. I got a job working at night as well on the main drag at a place called Old Tyme Photos, you know, you dress up to look like a cowboy or gangster and then the photo is black and white and grainy and faded... just like in the old tymessss. right. So, so here I was, a skinny kid [aka: punk] from Middle America opened up to a whole new concept about what a person can do with their life: return to the beach and start a life of seasonal employment! I was a paperboy delivering the Southern Illinoisan for most of my teens and at best earned $60 a month... at the beach, between the two jobs, I was earning $100 a day. Man, how little $2 a day sounds now for dragging my butt around Carterville slinging papers and always short on collections because of my poor money management. Seriously, I cannot manage money and for the first time in my life, I was actually earning enough to do something cool even if I was careless with parts of it. Now, I could have used the cash to start college, but the idea of going to college was second at best, and more like fourth or fifth even though I had managed to get accepted into Southern Illinois University with a ridiculous GPA. I heard this once before and I've always enjoyed repeating it because it was exactly me: "... in high school, I was third in my class--from the bottom up." Ridiculous GPA? Ridiculously low!

gear & cost listI spent the rest of that summer dreaming about bicycle touring around the United States and asked my brother if I could return after school so I could work at the beach again. I sat in the guard stand during the days visualizing the routes, the destinations, and the activities surrounding them - anddd I also looked out for drowning tourist. I met other guards who spent summers at the beach and winters in the mountains. I listened to all kinds of stories and the places they had traveled and I knew that's what I wanted. The following year, after securing the gear, I rode 1,060-ish miles from Carterville to Virginia Beach and worked again for the next leg of the tour which I later gave a title to: the "Here to There to Here Tour."

It wasn't actually a long ride to the coast, it only lasted twelve days, and it was shorten by making friends with a church youth group from Wisconsin who were just ten or twelve days from completing a group ride from the west-to-east coast. They let me join them and saved me from my own inexperience. And despite all the cash I piled up working days and nights the summer before, I was saved from eating ketchup packets and crackers swiped from truck stops by my seventh grade school teacher, Mrs. Louise (Grey) Humble. She called me a week or so before I was to take off asking me to meet her at the Triple A. She had heard about my upcoming cycle trek and surprised me with $100 in travelers cheques, all of which became my entire road budget for those twelve days... like the "trail magic" people talk about while through-hiking the Appalachian Trail, her gift couldn't have been a more tour-saving action and I even managed to arrive in VA Beach with almost $20 in my pockets; making headway on the moola management :) .

So that was it, I started the bicycle tour with the idea I would work the remaining summer at the beach and then head north to Vermont and find a ski resort to work at. Only, one weekend nearing the end of tourist season in Virginia Beach, my brother drove us up to Tennessee where we hiked in the Roan Highlands. Here I learned about rhododendrons and the Appalachian Trail. We were on Hump Mountain, with its panoramic views and "bald" crests covered in blueberry bushes. My brother told me the trail we were hiking actually started in Georgia and went clear to Maine. "Georgia to Maine?" I asked. "Yes," he said, "and every year about a thousand people start at Springer Mountain, GA, and only about one hundred finish." I remember thinking it was incredible that a person could walk through the woods for some 2,000 miles all on the same trail. Oh yeah, and how cool it would be to have the bragging rights for life: "I hiked from Georgia to Maine."