During the summer of 2007, I climbed onto my bicycle in Austin, Texas, and didn't stop for more than a day until I reached Anchorage, Alaska. I had spent the previous 8 months planning and fundraising for the trip. I travelled with 39 others through sun, rain, wind, mountains, valleys, and bear attacks. I cried a lot, for the people we met and the people we'd never get to meet; we rode for those who had suffered and were suffering from cancer, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars the team raised will be donated through the american cancer society to cancer research. I laughed a lot--my faith was restored in the basic goodness underlying human nature as strangers came to our aid time and again, and my teammates turned into family members. I rode 4400 miles; it was hard, but it was fun.

While I was on the road, I documented my travels on the Texas 4000 web site as a series of daily summary posts, and have merged and edited those individual daily journal entries into an illustrated narrative of our trip on this site.

  1. before we left
  2. week 1
  3. week 2
  4. week 3
  5. week 4
  6. week 5
  7. week 6
  8. week 7
  9. week 8
  10. week 9
  11. week 10
  12. the aftermath
I picked around 400 of my favorite pictures from the cameras of others and have posted them in my online gallery. Many of these pictures illustrate the trip journal linked above, but there are some in the gallery that I don't have in the sidebar of the journal, so you might find it to be worth a look. Most of the pictures you see in the journal, and all of the pictures in the gallery were taken by my friends, and clicking on the picture will take you to a higher-resolution version (click again thereafter to get the full-sized version) with attribution to the photographer.

I have some supplementary writings to what I wrote about in my official trip reports. This might eventually be merged into the primary narrative of the journal entries above, but until then, it is available here as separate pages. Please be warned, I am entirely frank about what some would consider delicate subject matter, so read on at your own risk (particularly the body function entry!).

I have a handful of other travellogues online which are about as detailed as this one. If you like my style, you might enjoy them, too.
You're welcome to email me: texas4000 at w dot tf.
This document was last modified on Friday, 26-Aug-2011 14:18:10 CDT.