A – Z Ride in 12 Hours
06/12/16
On a partly cloudy morning Bryan Dunlap and I set out from a cheap hotel near Dayton, Ohio, hoping to accomplish a goal I had pondered for years. We were going to ride the alphabet. We would ride from a town with a name that started with the letter A and go to B, etc… until we had visited 26 towns in order ending in a town which began with the letter Z.
I got this idea sometime in the 1990’s when I read about a guy who rode from California to Xenia, Ohio in winter. He was working on the alphabet ride idea and could not find another X town in the United States.
I thought that since we have the X here in Ohio, I could do the A – Z ride in one day. Years passed without action until the winter of 2014. Then I got out my maps and started making a route. My plan was to stop in front of the sign at the town limits and take a picture, thus proving that I had indeed done the ride in alphabetical order and in one day. The data attached to each photo by the digital camera would verify the ride.
The rules, as I saw them, would be that each town’s sign or United States Post Office would be the target. I disallowed directional names, so no North, East, West or South. Only the first letter of each town name counted. Mount Victory could only be used as an M, for example, and not a V. Likewise St. Marys qualified as an S and not an M.
The project seemed like it would be more fun if shared, so I invited Bryan to join me. The riding seasons of 2014 and 2015 passed without a suitable day on our calendars. We kept it secret for over two years, because I feared that too many people would want to join us and that more than two or three bikes would become a safety hazard.
Finally this June, as we were preparing for the trip to STAR in Vermont, I reminded Bryan of the A – Z ride and he responded that he was available the coming Saturday. I checked the weather and suggested that Sunday would be better. He agreed and we set sudden plans in motion.
I converted my old route to a gpx file and loaded it into my Garmin. It was so big that I had to delete all the other routes from internal memory. We both had GPS units running during the ride. We both wore hi vis jackets and helmets, hydration packs and Bluetooth intercoms. The bikes we rode were liter-class adventure bikes which offered a good compromise of comfort, fuel range and agility.
We agreed that a fresh start near the beginning of the route would be best, so we booked a hotel room. The ride to Dayton Saturday evening featured a car that looked as though it had rolled over in the median and a van that was engulfed in flames. Neither Bryan nor I are the superstitious type, so these things were mere curiosities rather than signs and omens. Nonetheless, our cheap hotel room gave me fitful rest.
We took a leisurely approach to Sunday morning, walking to breakfast then rolling away from the hotel at 7:30 am. Towns A-E were in a tight cluster, but the routine was new to us and the GPS tried to take us to the nearest town instead of the first one. By the time we had sorted that out we were sweating in the humid air. Without the headsets giving us the ability to talk our way through those first five stops we could have had a stressful forty-five minutes. As it was, those early steps allowed us to get our act together, mostly, and we headed into the hinterlands of western Ohio feeling good about our day.
Soon a front of drier air moved through, making the day very pleasant. All went smoothly until I made a mistake after the letter J. Towns K and L were roughly equidistant and in opposite directions. I turned toward L and the GPS took me there without protest. We eventually visited our J town four times, since M was also opposite L. This cost us a bit of time, but it could have been worse. At least J, K and L were fairly close together.
At each stop our operation went as follows: I led using the GPS. Sharp-eyed Bryan often spotted the town sign before I did. We pulled over onto the berm so that he could get my bike, his windshield and the legible sign in a photo. He took the picture, announced that he had it, we checked traffic and I said whether we needed a U-turn, which we often did. When traffic was clear Bryan gave the OK and we headed to the next stop.
It all happened easily, but there was some necessary adjustment. Since the GPS would take us to the nearest point on the route, Bryan and I had to look up the next town several times using other sources. Bryan continually used his GPS as an error checker by entering only the next destination. I could have avoided this problem by using my GPS differently, however on a normal ride it would not have been a problem. Again the intercoms made communication easy and it was no small advantage that our adventure bikes made U-turns a breeze.
After 2 pm we stopped for lunch, already more than halfway through the alphabet and over 200 miles into the ride. W, X and Y lay in a tight cluster ahead, but the letters before them were well spread out. The afternoon went quickly. There was little traffic except on I-70 and US 68. We hit a snag when we could not find a sign for W. There we used the post office.
We snapped the last picture just under 12 hours after the first. I had thought we might finish in the dark, but even taking long breaks we did not need all the daylight we had available. It was still not dark yet when we left the restaurant after dinner and headed home, completing a 500 mile day by the time we each parked for the evening.
This was our first time attempting such a project. We thought of several ways we could have improved our effort, but we had anticipated the big factors: a long, dry day; the right equipment; and calm, safe, resourceful traveling companions (at least Bryan was all that).
So the question now is, will anyone accept the challenge of beating our mark of 11 hours 57 minutes 13 seconds and 464.2 miles? I know Bryan and I could improve on those numbers. Any takers?
