When I was in my early twenties, I set the goal of bicycling through all 50 of the United States. I accomplished this over a 12-year period, and wrote and published two books about my experiences.
My travels also took me into Canada. During a 1987 ride down the Icefields Parkway between Jasper and Banff, Alberta, I met another bicyclist from Quebec.
In heavily accented English, she told me that she didn’t really feel like a Canadian until she’d gone out and pedaled around her country. I said that my American bicycle travels had done the same thing for me.
And that’s why the Stars and Strips fly outside my house on the 4th of July…
This is my country, and, thanks to the generosity of the people I met on the road, I’ve seen it, heard it, and felt from Maine to California and from Alaska to Florida.