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Redefining Road Trip Making a Difference Riding Bikes Across U.S.

Posted on: Monday, 20 June 2005, 15:00 CDT

Are you 18 to 24 with the time and gumption it takes to ride a bicycle across America? That's a start.

To make the trip as part of a Bike and Build team of riders, you'll also need to raise $4,000, educate yourself on affordable housing and be willing to stop along the way to help build some of those affordable dwellings. Meredith Holtz, 21, of Mobile, Ala., a May LSU graduate in biology, started her two-month ride across the United States from Annapolis, Md., June 14. Holtz and other riders on her team are to arrive in San Francisco Aug. 20.

Follow the ride across the country at http:// www.bikeandbuild.org.

The riders will log 40 to 100 miles a day, work on houses along the way and arrive in California with memories for the rest of their lives, said Chris Burns, a May graduate of the College of New Jersey who'll be making the ride for a second time.

Holtz already sounds like a spokeswoman for Bike and Build.

"We don't give the houses away," she said. "We sell them to families at the lowest possible price and set them up with an affordable mortgage. They have to have a job, and there's an application process they go through."

"I'd absolutely do it again," said Stephanie Schwartzmann of Hammond who rode last year.

Holtz had dinner with Schwartzmann a couple of weeks before Schwartzmann was to leave on Bike and Build's Virginia to Oregon ride.

"I was active in Habitat for Humanity," said Schwartzmann. "Bike and Build is a fund-raiser for affordable housing."

Habitat for Humanity and Bike and Build aren't affiliated though they often work together. Both are nonprofit organizations whose goals are to create awareness of the need for affordable housing, Burns said.

On this trip, Burns will be a co-leader.

"I was a rider just like Meredith last year," he said.

Burns and 31 other riders covered the distance from Providence, R.I., to Seattle in two months with stops in Scranton, Pa.; West Lafayette, Ind.; Casper, Wyo.; and Spokane, Wash., to help build houses.

Having building experience is a help but not a requirement for riding with Bike and Build. You don't even have to be that accomplished a bicycle rider. By the end of two months, riding for hours every day feels routine, Schwartzmann said.

"The ride is a public relations and fund-raising vehicle for affordable housing," Burns said. "It's getting young people out doing something exciting and worthwhile. There are days when your butt hurts and you feel like you can't go any farther. But you help each other across the country."

You haven't seen the Midwest until you've seen it from a bicycle, Burns said.

"We ride every day that we're not working on a house, sleep in churches, camp or spend the night with hosts," he said.

"We'll stop at a gas station and people want to know, 'Where's the race?' From there, you get into conversations about affordable housing. If it's a parent you're talking to, they'll say, 'I'd love to have my child do that.'"

Holtz, Burns and the others will see the Pacific on the second to last day of their ride at a beach 25 miles north of San Francisco. The next day, they'll ride triumphantly into San Francisco for a celebration in Golden Gate Park.

Burns and Holtz are runners in addition to being long-distance bicycle riders.

"I started bicycle riding at the beginning of this school year," Holtz said. "I've been running a lot because my bicycle has been broken for a month."

Bike and Build supplies the bicycles for the cross country ride.

"I'd never ridden a bicycle more than 10 miles around the LSU Lakes," she laughed. "Most of us weren't serious bicycle riders or track athletes. We were just average college students.

"A lot of us got into shape on the ride. Some of them had never ridden their bicycles because they were so busy with finals."

Riders keep their bicycles at trip's end. Over the years, a few riders have ridden their bicycles home rather than fly.

"The first day was 40 miles," Schwartzmann said. "We didn't have anyone who was completely sedentary. These were people who believed in themselves but weren't extraordinary athletes, just willing to sweat."

Not everyone in Burns' group was a big Lance Armstrong fan as the ride started. But climbing South Pass through the Rocky Mountains, the Bike and Build riders knew well what Armstrong was going through in the mountains of France as he rode toward victory in the Tour de France.

Burns and the riders crossed the Rockies between Lander and Farson, Wyo. "We got to Farson and found a bar to catch that day's stage of the Tour de France. There was only one bar, and it didn't have satellite," Burns said.

So after riding all day, "We rode another four or five miles downhill to the next town where we found a bar that had satellite but didn't subscribe to the Outdoor Life Network." OLN carries the Tour de France. Burns and the other riders talked the bar owner into subscribing to OLN after promising to eat and drink enough to make it worth his while.

"We're watching the Tour de France on television," Burns said, "and we're screaming, 'WE climbed a mountain, too.'"

"We had a smaller group, 21 riders," Schwartzmann said. "We broke into groups that meshed well. There were times, because you're waking up at 5 in the morning and riding all day, that tempers flared. But there's no one now that if I saw them I wouldn't be ecstatic to see."

The ride was the thing Holtz was looking for between the end of college and starting medical school. She's not worried about her lack of house building experience.

"I do whatever they tell me," she said.

To contribute money to Holtz's ride, make checks payable to Bike and Build, 56 W. 22nd St., Third Floor, New York, NY 10010.

Source: Advocate; Baton Rouge, La.

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