Their trip started in San Diego and ended in St. Augustine, Florida.
“One day late last year, I decided 2017 would be the year,” said Rich Markowitz in the middle of his story.
He’s in the middle of telling the story of how he accomplished one of the most arduous and grueling accomplishments a human could possibly achieve: Rich biked across the United States.
“When I was about 13 or 14, I had this idea that I would ride across the USA. And that was a good 40 years ago,” said Markowitz, a Shamong resident.
He didn’t do it alone though. He brought his daughter Jessi.
It wasn’t the first adventure they had been on. Rich and Jessi are, to say the least, physically active. How physically active?
Rich completed the Ironman competition in 2011. He and Jessi climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro together in 2015. In the summer, Jessi works in Alaska guiding kayak trips. She’s also worked as a snowboarding instructor.
Impressive? Impressive.
Rich, 56, had always dreamed of riding his bike across the country. When he was 13, he wrote a song about it in school. Here’s a snippet of the lyrics:
“Climbing the mountain you know it’s tough / I’m glad going down ain’t quite as rough / Across the plains is surely fast and I’m sure I’m not the last / To ride my bike across the USA / Across the USA”
“When I was a kid, we spent our lives on bikes. And then when we got our 10 speeds, we rode farther,” he said.
When he decided he wanted to make the nearly 3,000 mile long trip — 2,958.3 miles to be exact — he asked Jessi if she wanted to come along.
“She didn’t even hesitate,” he said.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Jessi, 25, said. “This is totally something that he would want to do. So I was just really excited.”
Rich spent months training for the trip. Jessi? Not so much.
“I did not train at all,” Jessi said.
“She has youth on her side,” Rich said.
On April 13, Rich and Jessi flew to San Diego with their bikes. On April 15, two days later, their trip commenced.
“It was definitely a train-as-you-go trip,” Jessi said. “I just need to do day one, and if I do that I can do day two and just go day by day. Because after day one, my muscles were sore in a way they never were before. I was like ‘I don’t know if I can do this a second day.’”
Prior to heading out on the trip, Rich made a binder full of directions and an itinerary to prepare. It looks about two inches thick.
The trip went entirely through the southern portion of the United States, starting in California, going through Arizona, then New Mexico and Texas, followed by Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The trip finished in St. Augustine, Fla., where the pair dipped their bike tires into the Atlantic Ocean.
Another noteworthy tidbit: Throughout the trip, Rich and Jessi recruited family members and some of Jessi’s friends to come with them via a car for support. They called the car the “Chase Mobile.” The Jeep Liberty was packed with a bunch of emergency supplies, including a spare bike, for support. For part of the trip, Rich’s wife Debbie drove. Other driving shifts were split between Jessi’s boyfriend Jake Ward, her cousin Alyssa Markowitz, and her friends Lisa Taggert, Carline Withlow and Kate Medicci. Rich and Jessi paid the drivers for their time.
“I think Jessi sold it as a little vacation, which it really wasn’t,” Rich said. “They had to get up early with us, make sure we have all the gear we need. Travel through these uncharted, small towns eating cheap food in small interesting restaurants, but they all volunteered and seemed pretty happy about it.”
Rich and Jessi would meet up with the Chase Mobile for lunch and at the hotel to make sure everything was going as planned.
Speaking of planning, in Rich’s planning binder, there were confirmation emails for reservations he had made at hotels, motels and Airbnbs in each city he and Jessi planned to be in throughout the course of their 43-day journey, 37 of which were spent riding. They gave themselves only six off days, mostly to keep up with bike maintenance. This meant that if for whatever reason Rich and Jessi couldn’t make it to their next scheduled location in time and had to stay back a day, all of the reservations they had made from that point on would be thrown off schedule. For this reason, Rich and Jessi persevered through every major issue that was thrown their way — and there were a few.
For starters, on day 7 of the trip, Jessi’s bike was stolen in Tempe, Ariz.
Luckily, Rich and Jessi had an extra bike in the Chase Mobile Jessi could use for a few days until they got another bike. In the meantime, they called Jessi’s grandmother who was in Denver, Colo. She had one of Jessi’s old bikes in her garage, so Rich and Jessi had her drive it to the local Denver bike shop, where it was shipped to Silver City, N.M., where Rich and Jessi would pick it up along their route.
The other incident that almost threw them off schedule was a blown radiator in the Chase Mobile. Instead of letting the radiator throw them off schedule, they rented a car to drive while the Jeep was in the shop, and worked out a way to have the drivers coordinate returning the rental car and getting the Jeep back on course.
Not to mention, the father-daughter duo sported approximately 15 or 16 flat tires throughout the course of the trip. Flat bike tires, that is.
“We had a flat tire about once every two to three days,” Rich said.
Yet none of these issues would stop them — not even the weather.
“In Alabama and Florida, we got some torrential rain for two or three days and we rode through it. So we were prepared for that. We had rain jackets and we knew the rain was coming. So we geared ourselves up,” Rich explained.
He went on: “In Marianna, Fla., there was a heavy weather forecast. So we took a look at the weather map, and we decided we could make it if we pushed pretty quickly to get out of the way of these huge thunderclouds that were chasing us. Later in the day, the clouds caught up to us, but for most of the day we were in the dry.”
Finally, on May 27, 43 days after they started in San Diego, Rich and Jessi reached St. Augustine. They flew back into Philadelphia two days later on the 29th.
“I feel like I really lucked out and just hopped on this awesome adventure,” Jessi said of the trip. “I just experienced the fun part of it. It was insane.”
“My advice to anybody who’s thinking about doing it is just to do it,” Rich said. “It doesn’t matter if the bike breaks, it doesn’t matter if you get rained on. Just the fact that you’re going is the spirit of what we did. Just to go.”
