When Sarah Lonning, Aaron Reuben, Anna Moench, and Patrick Baron decided two years ago that they would bike from Lonning’s home state of Minnesota to Wesleyan, few of their friends believed they’d do it. But this summer, the four students turned their far-fetched fantasy into a triumphant reality. Twenty-nine days, 1,500 miles, five states, two countries, and three accidents later, they arrived on campus, jacked, slightly cocky, and unable to stop eating.
DW: How did you come up with the idea to bike cross-country?
SL: We’re not sure. We think it was part of an IM conversation two years ago. We were just like, ‘Let’s do this. No, seriously. Let’s do this.’
DW: How did you prepare for the trip?
AM: A lot of it was planning logistics, planning routes, getting our gear together.
AR: We all slept in the same room together. We had a bunch of sleepovers.
PB: Sarah tried to lose weight. Unsuccessfully.
AM: Patrick ate a marshmallow candle.
PB: A marshmallow-scented candle.
AM: A scented candle. We also beat each other with sticks.
PB: Sodomy.
SL: Just a bit.
DW: Did you all have any mishaps over the course of the trip?
PB: We were coming down this big old hill in Wisconsin. We had seen deer before. Live deer, dead deer. But this one came out of nowhere and was, like, seven or eight feet away from us.
SL: That was one of the times Patrick didn’t fall.
DW: When did you fall?
PB: Once in a spot where everyone falls. It was in Michigan.
SL: We were all going pretty fast, cruising. Patrick falls, Anna swerves to miss him, spins on the gravel, and falls. Then I couldn’t miss them. Aaron was fine miraculously.
DW: What kinds of places did you sleep in at night?
AM: Pews in churches.
AR: A ferry. Backyards. The backyard of a diner.
SL: The practice fields of Roberts Wesleyan [College] where a lawn mower woke us up.
PB: A dorm at Hamilton College.
AM: A fort from 1812. Fort George. It’s a historic site.
SL: Strangers’ living rooms. A nice lady’s gazebo.
DW: How did you convince people to let you stay in their yards?
PB: We guilted them into letting us stay there.
AM: We’d go to church. If no one was there, we’d ask to stay at the church and oftentimes people would offer us their yards or even their showers.
SL: Sometimes it took looking really sad and whimpering a bit.
DW: Speaking of showers, you must’ve smelled bad by the end of the twenty-nine days.
PB: We smelled [bad].
SL: I smelled the worst. I haven’t done my laundry yet. I put in a plastic bag and haven’t touched it.
PB: It’s probably grown a new bicycle by now. A bacteria bike.
AR: You get really dirty, too. I was convinced I had a tan until I went home and took a shower.
DW: Any parts of the trip you could have done without?
PB: I’ll say this: [Screw} New York. And Sarah. She’s fat [laughter]
PB: Biking behind Sarah’s bulbous ass is the most horrifying thing ever. It was like an eclipse of all hope.
AM: Sarah lost her gloves in her rolls of fat.
DW: Why all this animosity toward New York?
AM: New York is a godforsaken place. The New York bike route is a joke.
PB: It’s all downhill after that.
AM: It was so ugly. Someone drew a line with marker along the highway on a map, put up some bike signs, and called it a bike route. So we rode through New York on the highway.
PB: And some [jerk] threw a full can of soda at me.
DW: You must have had to eat a ton to keep your energy up.
AR: So many of our meals took place in parking lots. We were so hungry we ate the food right there.
SL: One of the great things was walking into a gas station and seeing food I hadn’t had since I was a kid.
PB: Now you’ve got those oatmeal thighs.
AM [to Sarah]: You were more about those gas station pies.
PB: You were all about those gas station pies.
DW: So now that it’s all over, do you miss life on the road?
AR: The hardest transition I’ve had in going back to Wes is curbing my desire to pee wherever I want.
SL: I was standing with Anna outside Fisk the other day and I said, ‘I have to pee’ and I started looking for a tree. All of our socialization went out the window.
PB: We need to start a club where we meet at night and piss wherever we want to.
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