Trans-Am 1978

In 1978, my long time friend, John O'Connor, and I rode from Astoria, Oregon to Bar Harbor, Maine. At this juncture, John went north toward Nova Scotia and I went south to see relatives in Pittsburg, Kansas.

Now, 30 years later, I am trying to get back into touring—weather, family and work permitting. In the process, I have resurrected a variety of things from trips-gone-by and tried to merge them into a coherent package. To help, I recently received a Christmas gift of a Nikon film scanner which has added the new dimension of the transparencies—the medium of all my pictures in those days. (The scanning is a complete and separate story.) The pictures, though, have filled in cracks in the log, brought bake a flood of memories and created a need for more commentary to tie a log (sparse at times) to pictures (also, sparse at times) to make a more complete story.

I am not sure what value this new "journal" might be to you, since I hope the roads have changed—for the better—and I have no idea how people's attitudes have changed. My hope is that it will inspire you to do such a trip.

I do not remember the planning time that went into the ride, but my memory has it as a couple months. John had done more long trek rides than I had and was the primary designer. In fact, the whole thing was his idea, I think. We spent time with gear laid out on his parent's living room floor making sure we were carrying enough and not too much duplicate gear. The log indicates that were at odds at times on the route, so I know we did not have it planned to the "T". I also remember looking at a map on Chicago and wonsering how to get around/though that mess. I think that acnchored the northern Ontario route, although I cannot be certain.

The overall route is shown below. The trip started June 11, 1978. John and I went separate directions, as planned, on July 31. He continued north and I went south with the goal of reaching my relatives in Kansas. This "Journal" follows my route simply because I do not have any of John's data, as, unitl now, he had had none of mine. I finished up on August 31, 1978, boxed up my bike and flew home to go back to school. My portion of the trip was a total of eighty days.

The Log

My entire log is included on this site. It is "unedited" in the fact that misspellings, punctuation, run-on sentences have been left intact and clarification has been added in brackets, where even I could not understand what I was trying to say. Yes, my spelling is better these days, but not much.

The Maps

I scanned the original maps we used for planning the trip from a Rand McNally Road Atlas copyright 1977 (Library of Congress #75-654428). The road atlas did not go on the trip with us. On my return, I marked the nightly stops from Astoria to Bar Harbor, but the route to Kansas was not. The log gives me good high-level details, but small details of the route are from memory or the logical route. I am not sure how well my memory should be trusted.

To jump to the log and photos for some portion of the trip, click on the section of the route you want. Once you are at the page you want, clicking on the map will get you a higher resolution version of the map. Clicking on the pictures will get you higher resolution versions of those too.

Please enjoy.