Biking Across America (part 5)

We are riding this three seater bike across America and living in our vans along the way.

We should really make ourselves do this more often.

Our 3,000 mile route started in Oceanside, California and ends at the Atlantic Ocean in Annapolis, Maryland. We only have a little over a month to complete the journey, so our goal has been to average 100 miles a day on the Trandom for 30 days straight. We're currently 24 days into pedaling east and so far we've made it 2,000 of the 3,000 miles. As expected, this journey has been full of ups and downs. It's happening, but not the way you think it's happening. In this episode, the adventure continues. This is not good.

Good morning. It is day 25 of biking across America. Last night we slept in the parking lot of the Lewis and Clark Museum somewhere just right outside St. Charles, Missouri.

Hi, boys.

If Lewis and Clark could see you.

And Clark. We go east.

I think they went west.

All right. It's a really sad day. It's time to say goodbye to our beloved Katy Trail.

Without a doubt the loveliest stretch of the entire trip so far. But it's also a very exciting day because we are about to cross into our seventh state.

And we're back.

Missouri, Missouri. Missouri. Missouri.

Missouri.

Missouri. Missouri. Illinois.

That's a lot less fun by yourself.

The land of Lincoln. Is Abraham Lincoln from Illinois? Yes. I did not know that.

Seven states over 2000 miles and 25 days later, Illinois has brought the energy that we've needed this whole time.

Oh my gosh.

I love it here. The amount of honks and smiles. Hi. It's amazing how one tiny border changed everything.

Nice to meet you.

Okie dokie. My work is done for the day. The lady climbed crushers crushed out 50 miles. And we just swapped places with the dads in Alhambra.

The girls got off the bike raving about how amazing Illinois was, how nice all the people were. So far all we've gotten is a headwind and no shoulder.

Don't la me.

You gave me attitude. This is what happens.

You gave me attitude.

26 days in to a bike trip when nobody has slept enough and we're all a little tired and cranky. Good morning.

Good morning.

On the rare morning that we're riding in the van together, we're in a bit of an argument. Can we refocus here?

Can we just do the little 30 minutes? I love you.

So one of the goals of this trip is for the little girls to ride the bike in every state. And by the end of today, we're going to be in Indiana.

That is so crazy.

The east coast states are small and it's so nice to just be checking off the state.

So someone had to sacrifice their seat on the bike this morning.

So we are now going to meet the girls who rode the bike at the bike shop where we're gonna get some stuff replaced. The bike sounds horrib.

So we're gonna get a little work done on the bike at the bike shop, and then we have some special guests coming to join us.

It's gonna add some energy.

If you thought a triple bike was unique, just wait until you see our special guest. It's fun to be riding together in the van.

I know when you're not yelling at me.

Whatever we said was wrong with it that we brought in there to have it fixed, it was about seven times more thing. This was loose which was causing that vibration. There were three spokes that were loose. So the other part started slip.

These two crank about to fall off. It's like a brand new bike.

Wow. It's crazy.

Amazing.

What? I'm Alex from World of Unicycles. So Alex emailed me a few days ago and asked if him and his brother could come join us for the ride. And when he said they rode unicycles, it was a done deal. What I didn't realize is it's an entire family of unicyclists. Is this what you're riding today? No way. No. This thing's a slug bug compared to what I'm rewriting. These are fast, so you can go 15, 16. Just cruise along. This wheel is gigantic. Oh, wow. You're too good to us.

That's the biggest dart pickles I've ever seen. You think we can finish these before the trip is over?

We'll do our best.

Thank y'. All. My favorite chocolate. I love you.

We're about to lose one of our riders. Dusty didn't make it across the US because he tried to ride a unicycle. There you go.

There you go. Nice.

Don't worry. Simon will show you how it's done. He told me he learned how to ride three days ago. What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, everything.

There you go.

Nice. That was good.

No way.

Yeah. Yeah. Rick, did you get that on video? What? Alex, you ready for this? Oh, yeah. Let's do it. Chester? Maybe. I'm excited. Thanks for joining us. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for having us. And what's your YouTube channel? World of Unicycles. All right. If you want more of these, we'll leave it on the screen and in the Description.

Thank you.

1, 2, 3.

Bye. Here we go.

Good luck. Oh my gosh.

We just look like the circus rolling through town between a trandom and two unicycles. I'm just smiling thinking about how many people we're gonna make smile. This is so cool. Every single one of these cars is.

Like, this is one of the coolest families I've ever met. They're a family with nine children and eight of the nine can ride a unicycle. The only one who doesn't is 3 years old. I'm pretty sure the mom and dad do too. And they don't just ride them. Like they're really good and they're hilarious.

For once, we are not the most attention grabbing bike on the road. I hadn't thought about how you ride downhill on a unicycle, but you have to keep your legs moving. There's no coasting. So I knew these guys were serious. It have too much of a problem keeping up with us because they told me that last year they actually rode Ragbrai, which if you've been watching our channel, is the bike ride that we did that went 500 miles across Iowa. They did that entire ride on unicycles.

Before I go to our meeting town, I have few errands to run. Really just have one errand and that is to get our propane tank filled.

You'll never believe what just happened.

If you saw the last episode, then you know that on one of our more dramatic days of this trip, we ran out of propane just to top it all off. And we haven't had it since. Which means we've been eating a lot of instant ramen with borrowed hot water from our neighbors and junk food basically. So hopefully I can solve that problem for us today. The Internet says that this place does it.

You're crossing it. I think you've taken triple the amount of pedal strokes. All right, how's it going so far? How are you feeling? I've never gone this fast and 10 miles, I don't have any problem with it. Keep doing what you're doing. But it's super fun.

Wow. That could not have been any easier. I literally just went in, handed it to the guy, wiped my credit card, used their potty, and it was done. He's already filled it up and it only cost 12 bucks. How does this fit in here? $12 for another year's worth of cooking. Two years, three years.

Terrifying. It's kind of hard to know what the shoulder is going to be like when you're looking at the root. Yeah. One mistake and you're done for. I'm just hoping to get these kids back to their dad safe at this point.

Absolutely crushing it. All right, here we go. We are officially going through our first drive through. This is epic. What in the world? This is definitely the first time a tranom and two unicycles have ever gone to a drive through in history.

Thank you.

All right, how much mileage did you do? I'm at 22.2. Nice work. Thank you. Nice work. I was honestly just tired watching we started counting pedal strokes. I think they did three for every one that we did. Next time we'll all ride together when you get a little older. Us.

We've left the unicycle family behind. We're going to try to knock out another 30 miles before it gets dark. I just wanted to give a big shout out. I'm not going to be able to do this without cars. This road's too busy. A big shout out to bike and hike. The bike is working better now than it has the entire trip. It is dialed in and we are going to finish much faster because of them.

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Day 27. Feeling fresh.

Spicy. We slept in a park last night. This is actually a campground. It has hookups. We think it was free. We didn't pay anything and nobody's told us that it wasn't.

We basically played in the park for like two hours last night at bedtime.

Never grow up, Rick. Never grow up.

No danger of that.

All right, good luck, girls. Hope you don't get wet.

Same love you go.

Can you see the raindrops raining Just a little.

See how this goes. It has been over 10 days since any of us have had a real shower. Actually, we haven't even like halfway showered. It has been over 10 days since we have done anything hygienic except for wipe ourselves with the wet wipe. There's a place to fill up with water here at this campground, so we're going to use the rest of the water in our tank. Try out the new shower. It's going to be cold.

With strandom riding. Either none of us shower or all of us shower because we're all just one cohesive unit.

Turn it on. Okay, here we go. Spray. Spray. Oh, my God. Oh, this actually feels so good. Get in here, Rick.

Why is it so cold?

Looks like a nice bath. I'd say it's actually working out pretty well.

All right, big day. This is my last snack in Illinois because we just made it to New York.

Woohoo.

Celebrate our 8th state on this trip. We're going to do a little Q and a sesh. So ask us anything.

All right, before I start driving, I'm going to answer a few of these questions.

I have a question for you girls. On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad does your butt hurt? Weight? 2. Yeah, only like a 1. It doesn't hurt at all. But I may have lost all feeling for the rest of my life. For me, it depends on the day. Today it's like a two. The day that we're on the Katy trail and it was just completely flat, I was at like a nine. Oh.

This is an interesting question. How much roadkill, if any, have you seen and which state had the most? For some reason, Missouri. I don't know if it's just because there's more animals there or because they don't clean up their roadkill.

Oh, I can taste it.

But Missouri by far had the most amount of roadkill. Dead armadillos, dead raccoons, dead bats. We saw it all.

Are you still going to stop in D.C. or go straight to Annapolis. I'm glad this question was brought up because it needs to be addressed. Day one, I said we were biking to D.C. because that's genuinely where I thought we were going. Turns out it wasn't. The plan was to ride straight to Annapolis. D.C. was never part of the route. Then at some point after the, I don't know, hundredth car almost hit us, we went off road a little because it meant we could go on the Katy Trail, which was much safer, no cars. And now we're considering changing the route altogether, and we still actually might go to D.C. instead of Annapolis. So the answer is, I don't know. We're gonna see how we feel in the next few days.

Will you finish the bike trip on time? We said 30 days at the beginning of this challenge, knowing that it was probably gonna take a little bit longer. I'd say it's probably gonna stretch to 35. Is it easier or harder to balance on a three seater? Bite versus a regular bite? Way harder to balance on a three seayer right out of here.

All right, this is a relevant question since we're having a snack break. Favorite snacks on this trip. Swedish fish all day.

I would say pretzels have been the star of the show for me. This, I was gonna say this week, this month. And my new favorite pretzel brand, Pop Daddy pretzels.

So addicting.

Favorite and least favorite part of this trip so far. Honestly, nothing compares to the feeling of taking your shammy off at the end of a ride. That and then obviously, just like the adventure as a whole with literally our favorite people in the world is pretty special. Least favorite has to be the cars, which for the last two days have not been an issue.

Okay, this is a good one. Someone asked where the bike came from. Rick actually bought this bike off of Craigslist years ago for $400. So it's not like we planned this and then found a bike for it. Rick had the bike, and that's what gave us the inspiration for this trip. And right before this trip, Rick ended up doing a little more research about the bike just to see if it had, like, good components on it that would make it across the US and it turns out the guy who built the bike also builds tandem bikes for the US Olympic team. Apparently, tandem bike racing was in the Olympics at some point. So that same guy built this bike. And originally, that bike cost $12,000. And Rick picked it up without knowing off of Craigslist for only 400.

No one asked. But this is Our favorite gas station. Do y' all have a favorite city or state that you've ridden through? Alton, Illinois. Alton, Illinois. That was the name of that city. Yeah. Where we had freaking fan club cheering us on. I feel like everybody knows Colorado is our favorite state. As hard as it was, like, the challenges of the passes and just, like, having no idea what every day would bring, like, that was exciting.

How does your body feel? Do you pass out every night? I would say the first two weeks were by far the hardest. The elevation getting through California and Colorado, the heat in the desert in Arizona, and then just our bodies getting used to biking every day. I was just passing out every night, but now we're staying up, hanging out till, like, 11. It's gotten flatter, the weather's gotten cooler, and we're getting in bike shape. So honestly, at this point, doing 100 miles a day, like, splitting it up into 50 in the morning and 50 in the afternoon, actually feels. I don't want to say easy, but very doable.

Okay. I love this question from our friends Becky and Chris, who also have a YouTube channel. Not actually real life friends, right? Just Internet friends, but, you know, feels like it. How do y' all find the energy to do all these things? I perish after a few days of heavy travel. And it's actually funny. We were talking about how our last. All right, we just started climbing. Now I'm out of breath. After our last two bike trips, which were only seven days, I literally couldn't go on. Like, I was like, if I had to get on the bike one more time after this last day, my legs are gonna fall off. Here we are on day 27, still going strong, and I think it's just totally a mindset thing. I mean, there are little things, like, we're probably not biking quite as far per day than we were on those last trips. Plus, the weather has been just perfection. You know, we're not sweating. But most of all, I think it's mindset. Like, your body is amazing and could do really hard things.

Well, isn't this lovely? A big, empty parking lot to nothing. Perfect for three huge vans.

All right, question. While you're making lunch, how did you decide who sits in which position? I think the first week, Rick and Beck were the only two that were brave enough to drive, so they sat in front. Also, the seats on the bike, like, they can all raise up to the same height, but you have to lean further forward in the front and a little further forward in the middle. And then the back seats, the smallest so I'm the smallest guy, so I ended up on the back.

I'm the shortest girl, but I was brave enough to try, unlike Natan.

Alright, Evie, question for you. This one says, are the kids bored since they're not biking?

Well, depends if everyone else is biking and we're just stuck, nothing to do. All our school's done. It's boring. But if we have school to do, then it's not boring. So half. Half.

This one says you guys are fake.

What?

If you could smell Kara through the camera, you would know this isn't fake. Okay, it's not a question from Instagram, but what's for lunch?

We have a bag of chips. All you have to do is put in the pot and heat it up. And it's amazing. And we're feeling very awesome today. It just happened to be Vegemite's 100th birthday yesterday and we missed it. We're gonna celebrate. We have some toast heating up in the pan and we're gonna smear some veggie on top and have it with our chili. Is this the Vegemite? Oh, my God. Are you ready for your first Vegemite experience?

Yeah.

You like? I love it. So salty.

I'm still not sure that I know what veggie might taste like.

Can I get a little more? Yeah.

Oh, that is a heavy amount of Vegemite.

Let's take a bite.

All right. That was pretty good. It's been years since I've tried this Vegemite. Oh.

Oh.

That'S disgusting. I don't.

Oh, my God. My breath's gonna sting for the next month. Has your palate changed? Catch up with my sister, Gally. You want to be in the video?

I love it. We have our friends Steve and Jess to thank for this Vegemite. They gave it to us when we visited them in Perth. Thanks, friends. Okay, for the real Australians.

Ooh, fancy.

Let me know how the ratio is.

Amazing. Vegemite toast always tastes better when someone else makes it. I love that. I feel like I would make it just like this. I'm honored.

Let me just show you what I'm left with most afternoons. I mean, it's just.

A total mess. Okay. It's not perfect, but this is better. We are heading to Bloomington. Oh, hi. No, Indiana. I don't know why I keep forgetting which state we're in.

Oops. My entire box of trash just fell over.

I need the group input on this. How many tubes of chamois cream have you gone through? One full size tube and then stopped wearing it after I got a new chamois. I feel like the way I use it, it could last like two years. I probably use two or three of the small to go packs during the first two weeks and then I haven't been wearing it for the last two. I think I've got calluses down there that probably aren't pretty. Too scared to look, but I'm grateful for them.

The drive to Bloomington in the van is an hour, so I'll answer a few more questions. Why a three seater bike? Why not? I feel like if I could choose one adjective to describe these three groups of people, it would be unconventional. Each family is unconventional in their own way and I feel like we're all drawn to anything that's just not the norm. And it doesn't get more abnormal than a three seater bike.

I've been reading the next questions for two minutes and Dusty and Rick are still discussing how did they wear their chamois butter. Okay, I think this is a good one. Are you excited to be done biking or still enjoying the ride?

The easy answer for me is I just wish I could do it forever. It's fun, we're stronger, we got a good rhythm.

There's kind of like real life stuff.

That just starts to take over.

Like.