Woodward: Family logs more than 9,000 miles on yearlong bicycle trip

John and Nancy Vogel just finished a year doing something few of us would have the nerve to do. They quit their jobs, took their twin sons out of school and spent a year traveling around the U.S. and Mexico. On bicycles.

They started at their home in Boise and pedaled to Portland, down the coast all the way to the tip of Baja, across the U.S as far east as Connecticut and back to Boise. A 9,500-mile bike ride. You can read their journals about it online via IdahoStatesman.com. The Vogels not only saw much of the continent as few of us ever will; they say they also formed a stronger bond as a family. And they learned that the world isn't necessarily as uncaring, dangerous and downright nuts as we sometimes think it is from reading the news and watching television.

In Portland, they met a woman who invited them to her home for the night and left them alone there while she went to a meeting. The next morning, she took them all out to breakfast. "People would just ask us out of the blue to come and stay at their houses," John said. "That probably happened 30 to 40 times. They thought what we were doing sounded interesting and wanted to hear more about it. They'd either put us up in their homes or have us pitch our tent in their yards."

"I got nervous at first," Nancy said. "Evening would be coming on, and we wouldn't know where we were going to stay. After about two months, I got over it. People came out of the woodwork. They'd offer us places to stay before we could ask."

In a remote, blistering stretch of Baja, they were worrying about not having enough water when some Mexicans flagged them down and offered them Gatorade. "They'd seen us a week before and knew we'd need it in the direction we were heading," Nancy said. "They'd bought us a whole case of it, plus Power Bars and tamales. They knew we wouldn't be able to carry it all on our bikes, so they went ahead and left us a stash every 10 or 20 kilometers and marked it by making a rock cairn. That got us through the next four days."

In San Diego, the couple told some people they met that their sons, Daryl and David, were disappointed because they'd bypassed Los Angeles — and Disneyland. They were going to take a bus to Disneyland from San Diego, but their new friends insisted that they borrow their car instead. These were people who had been strangers a few hours before.

Traveling on bikes was nothing new for John and Nancy, who met while working as teachers in New Mexico. He was in Albuquerque; she was in Gallup. Each had planned to take a year off, and each independently had advertised for a travel partner for a bicycle trip across Asia. They ended up cycling across Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and China together, and became partners for life. Their sons were born in Ethiopia, where they were teaching at the time.

"I just have the travel bug," John said when asked about the many places they've called home. The travel bug bit again last year while they were teaching at Meridian Middle School. Nancy's sister stayed in their house during the year that they and the boys were gone. Without fuel or lodging costs, the trip was relatively inexpensive. Their biggest expenditures were for food, and they'd have had to buy that anyway.

Teaching their sons was second nature. "They won't be behind when they start fourth grade this year," John said. "They'll be ahead." "They'll be fine academically," Nancy agreed. "My concern is that after all this freedom, how will they react to being confined by four walls?"

No problem.

"We won't be confined," Daryl patiently told his mother. "There's two doors where we can get out."

The Vogels are convinced that their year on the road taught their boys more than they'd have learned at home. "We met a guy who commented that our sons were 8 years old and thought it was normal to have ridden 9,000 miles on bicycles," Nancy said. "He said that if an extraordinary experience like that is normal for them, they'll know no limits."

"And what a relationship we have with them now," John said. "It's deeper, more meaningful. We were with them 24/7 for a year. How many parents can say that?"

They add, however, that the experience is not for everyone. "The majority of people couldn't or wouldn't want to do a trip like this," Nancy said. "But everybody has a dream of some kind. My advice is not to put it off. Live your dream with your kids while you still can."

twoodward@idahostatesman.com377-6409