Before Anne and I biked the Great Adventure, we had a dry run.  The Great Adventure  was our 1982 bicycling trip around the country.  On that trip we took six months off from work and biked 5,000 miles around the United States and Canada.  Our dry run, I’ll call the Tour de Detour.

For part of a week, in 1981, we biked from the Cabin to Detour, to Mackinac Island and then back again to the Cabin.  I came across these three pictures, that show Anne and I starting off on our Detour tour.  In these photos, we are biking, not walking mind you, up the Green Tunnel Road.  I wish that we could remember who took these pictures of us?  Will the mystery photographer please step forward?!?

In the Great Adventure, in 1982, the list of cities that we toured include, to name a few: Arlington (TX), Houston, New Orleans, Greensboro, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Wilmington, Kitty Hawk, Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, Washington, New York, Providence, Fall River, Newport, Sturbridge, Rome, Rochester, Niagara Falls, Stratford, Sault Ste. Marie, Saint Louis (MI), Ann Arbor, Kewaunee, Superior, Kenora, Calgary, Banff, Lake Louise, Kamloops, Bellingham, Lopez Island, Seattle, Portland and then back to Arlington and of course Saint Louis, MO.

The Tour de Detour was a good shakedown cruise for us before we tackled the Great Adventure.  We probably got less than two-hundred miles, but we learned a lot.  The Great Adventure might not have gone as well as it did, without this preamble.

Another benefit of this little tour was that it allowed us to purchase the equipment that we would first use and eventually wear out, all in less than a year.  That was a fun shopping experience.  After the Tour de Detour, we discarded some of the items that we had carried, but added others to replace them.  Examining these pictures, I noticed that we did not have helmets.  I know that we added them.  This was a process that continued throughout most of the Great Adventure.

In 1981 we were still newlyweds.  Dan was less than five years away and Dave was just another two years after that.  Before Dan came, we would buy our first (and so far only) home.  The years stretched onward after that to today and beyond.  Back in 1981 neither of us knew what the open road would bring, but we both rode out to meet it, together.