Choose your own adventure

Corbett’s Handy family completes the trip of a lifetime in a 4,350-mile cross-country bike trip from Maine to Oregon

By Kari Hastings

The Gresham Outlook, Sep 14, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (3 Reader comments)

contributed photo

From left, Daniel, 15, David, 12, Paul, 42, and Sue Handy, 50, arrive at their Corbett home Tuesday, Aug. 28, after 80 days on the road.

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Ask 12-year-old David Handy what he took away from his family’s cross-country bike trip, and he’ll give you one of those simple yet profound answers children are famous for.

“I know I can do it,” he said.

That’s saying a lot, especially when you learn that what David did, along with his 15-year-old brother, Daniel, and his parents, Paul and Sue, is bicycle 4,350 miles from Bar Harbor, Maine, to their home in Corbett.

From June 9, the day after school got out, to Aug. 28, the Handys were on the road, on their bikes, six hours a day, pedal to the metal on a mission to make it to the other side of the United States.

Corbett or Bust.

Not that they didn’t have their moments. Right from the get-go, in fact. Their first night they ended up in a campground on Mount Desert Island in Maine, where Daniel wrote in his journal, “the mosquitoes were so bad, we wore raingear to keep them away even though it was a fairly hot day. It was not a very good start to the trip.”

And then there was the moment of near mutiny when David hit an emotional low after one of the high points of the trip – a visit with his 3-year-old cousin, uncle and aunt at Niagara Falls.

“I have nothing left to look forward to,” a forlorn David said to his parents, who quickly found a large city on their maps and promised a day of fun (with absolutely no bike riding) a few days later.

It was enough to get David over the hump, and to get the family a little farther down the road.

Paul’s cross-country tip: “Take it one day at a time.”

The surprising thing about the Handys’ trip is that they are not avid bike riders and didn’t train for their coast to coast undertaking.

Sure, Paul and Sue met on a cross-country bike trip in 1990 and married a year later, but really, they’ve done next to no biking since then.

“It was something I’d dreamed of doing as a teen,” said Sue, who was 33 when she signed up for the guided trip traveling from Virginia to Oregon, her home state. Paul was 26, from Maryland, and didn’t realize until after the trip how much he missed Sue.

A “very sweet” letter from Paul sparked a courtship. After their wedding, the couple landed in Corbett, where Sue is a third-fourth grade teacher at Corbett Middle School and Paul works as a forestry technician on the Mount Hood National Forest.

As their sons began to approach their teenage years, Sue and Paul began talking about a trip that could bond their family before the inevitable hardships of adolescence set in.

The parents thought a cross-country trip might be a good fit for their sons, especially because, as Paul said, “they’re not whiners.”

Sue’s cross-country tip: “Know your kids and make sure they want to do it.”

For the next four years, Paul and Sue ordered cycling maps, read books, made lists of things to see and planned their route.

Choosing the “north tier” route instead of the one they’d done in 1990 across mid-America would accomplish two goals, they thought. Less hilly and cooler.

A Portland bike shop shipped their bikes to a bike shop in Bar Harbor. The family flew, with the maximum poundage of luggage permitted, to Boston, where they rented a car and drove to Maine.

The start of their journey was intense, Sue said, particularly because they’d done little training.

“The first two weeks we actually said, ‘Do we wanna keep going? This is really hard,’ ” she said.

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