Gordon Taylor from Stone has been cycling across the length of the United States this summer – 3,800 miles from Seattle on the Pacific coast to Boston on the Atlantic. Gordon has almost finished his epic trip and has reached New York. Here’s the sixth of his regular reports of his adventure.
Click HERE to read previous installments. The final installment will be on the site soon – Gordon has a three-day journey to Boston and will be heading back to the UK at the weeknd
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]en years ago, I was sitting on a park bench in Alabama – having a picnic and minding my own business – when a man joined me and said something so bizarre, that I thought we must be getting secretly filmed for some kind of Candid Camera show. The man, middle-aged and smartly dressed, wanted me to join him in rapturously celebrating the recently reported deaths of a quarter of a million people in the previous year’s Indonesian tsunami. According to his warped logic, the deaths of all those “heathens” was absolute proof that his god – a fundamentalist Christian god – was almighty, all powerful and was to be revered with all your heart and soul.
I’d been warned not to argue with the “fundies” in the southern states on my first bike ride across the USA, so I quickly finished my sandwich and pedalled onwards, perturbed. Wherever that man is today, I’m pretty sure that he’ll be supporting and voting for Donald Trump.
A decade later, this year’s bike ride across the USA (through the northern states) has coincided with the rise of Mr Trump as the frontrunner in the Republican presidential nomination. In the Midwest, I’d hear working men in bars and cafes praise him and bang the table, but as I slowly work my way east, the sentiments change. I’ve been in New York State for nearly a week and have heard nothing but condemnation of his right-wing views. I was invited to dinner by a cyclist a few days ago and a woman at the table was almost speechless and reduced to tears at the thought of what he was stirring up in “her” America.
So with positive sentiments ringing in my ears and following a wonderful week of rest and hospitality with relatives in Canada I set off again on the last leg to Boston. I even had a long walk back into the USA, over the Peace Bridge at Buffalo.
The route involved several days of unexpectedly grim hill climbing along the Delaware valley, but I cycled into New York City yesterday… finding it as big, noisy, busy and brash as you’d expect.
It’s taken 3,600 miles of pedalling to get here, virtually all of it through countless small towns and rural communities. I’m often asked “What’s the USA like?” but that’s impossible to answer. There are some constants, of course – the people I’ve met this time are invariably pleasant and interested in my trip – but the contrasts in poverty and politics, to name but two, are quite extreme.
New York is surprisingly bike friendly. Over several years, there has been a deliberate policy of reducing the amount of public space used up by parked cars. Many traffic lanes have been filled with planters and street cafes have opened up. There seems to be music everywhere too. It’s still frantically busy and the bike lanes are often filled with delivery trucks and construction vehicles, but I absolutely loved my long meandering ride through Manhattan, around Central Park and over the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s still more than 200 miles to go to get to Boston and my plane home, but technically I’ve already cycled from coast to coast.
Many American children are taught by their parents to ride their bicycles against the traffic – on the wrong side of the road. It can seem safer, as there is nothing coming up behind you, but it does cause some confusion in a busy city like New York with cyclists using both sides of the road. I’ve ridden in cities like Copenhagen and Berlin, where the vast numbers of cyclists are conformist and almost choreographed around the trams and traffic lights. New York is different.
In fact, that’ll be my answer to “What’s the USA like?”
“Different – utterly and completely different!”
