Zoology senior Brent Tluczek finishes his beer outside the Orion cooperative house to donate the bottle for labor relations and human resources graduate student Jon Barth’s fund for biking across the U.S. for Habitat for Humanity.
After a summer biking more than 3,600 miles on his Specialized Allez bicycle, Jon Barth had to hang up the bike in his parents’ shed.
“I can’t even ride it anymore,” said Barth, a human resources and labor relations graduate student self-described as “on hiatus.”
He added that the bike was slowly but surely destroyed along his way across the country.
“Basically, it’s really tragic,” he said.
But that will happen to a bike when you start out in Jacksonville, Fla., in June and end up in San Francisco in August by riding an average of 70 miles a day.
Barth was one of 32 riders on Bike & Build’s Southern U.S. route, where not only did they bike the length of the country, but also made stops to help build houses along the way.
“It was totally surreal, I didn’t really believe it,” Barth said of the trip’s completion in California. “You don’t really connect the fact that you are going across the country … It doesn’t really sink in — the fact that you are actually covering all this distance.”
In a trip that took him through Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and New Mexico, among other states, Barth said there were both ups and downs.
“I think Santa Fe (N.M.) was my favorite city that we went to,” he said. “New Mexico in general was really, really beautiful.”
Texas was Barth’s least favorite destination of the ride, because he said the people there were the least receptive to their cause.
“We got to Texas and the drivers tried to run us off the road,” he said. “And the people there are just very strange, some people were kind of friendly, but most people were like ‘What are you guys doing?’”
Roger Knight, a friend Barth made on the trip, said Barth had a few trademarks.
“He would always have some sort of stuffed animal with him … He lost a few of these along the way due to him falling off the bike or (the animals) being stolen,” said Knight, 23, of Baltimore. “We don’t really know what happened. Perhaps they came alive and wandered off on their own to start their own life.”
When a person is biking day in and day out, a sore butt and a negative attitude about getting back on a bicycle often come with the territory, Barth said.
“In some ways I’m kind of proud of myself,” Barth said, “but I was also kind of surprised at how hard parts of it were.”
MSU graduate Patrick Singler, one of the trip’s leaders, said he never felt that way, which was good for him — because one of his responsibilities was to keep the rest of the group excited and motivated.
“I tried to transfer my excitement to them, and it seemed to work,” Singler said.
All three seemed to agree that one of the best parts of the trip was the group of people they were with.
“We weren’t a bunch of headstrong cyclists,” Knight said. “We (brought) just a huge range of biking experience and affordable housing experience and life experience.
“We were a very diverse kind of ragtag team riding across the country saying that it means something.”
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