Three Midwest adventurers take off from Newport, Ore. to bike 3,730 miles to Newport, R.I.

By SHAYLA ESCUDERO/Lincoln Chronicle 

As Matt Hager packed his eldest daughter’s car at his Illinois home for the road trip to Corvallis he knew that he would not be traveling back the same way he came. Instead, he would be pedaling thousands of miles back by bicycle.

Hager isn’t an adrenaline junkie or even a particularly fervent biker. Rather, his friends say the 58-year-old Chicago-area resident has an insatiable itch – a need to be challenged. It’s the same drive that led him to kayak 2,100 miles over 75 days on the Mississippi River three years ago.

Hager has a new itch – to bike from Newport, Ore. to Newport, R.I. He and two friends will traverse the 3,730 miles, averaging 67 miles over 70 days.

It’s a dream he conjured when he was 13 and saw the Tour De France for the first time. That summer he and a friend biked 20 miles together.

“It planted a seed to do a cross-country ride from one end to the other,” Hager said.

When his daughter got into graduate school at Corban University in Salem, living in Corvallis and would be taking her car on the one-way trip, Hager saw the opportunity.

At first he didn’t know anything about Oregon’s Newport. Then he learned that pioneer Sam Case named the town after his favorite city in Rhode Island – and Hager found the start and end points for the cross country trip he always wanted to complete.

Then he enlisted his two friends to come along.

Geeto Reilly and Mark Lecy have known Hager since their days at Valparaiso University and their fraternity Phi Kappa Psi. They have kept in touch along with 30-40 of the frat members, Reilly said.

A recently retired firefighter, Reilly doesn’t have the same “insatiable itch” Hager has. His motivations for making the trek are a little different.

“I like to stay fit, Reilly said. “I’m trying to live well and be in good company.”

The common thread that ties them together is an openness for adventure, Lecy said.

The trio will begin their route Friday, starting from the Elizabeth Inn in Newport. Then they travel into northeast Washington, Idaho and Montana with stops to see friends and family. From there they will go through North Dakota into Minnesota and stop in Illinois before heading to Rhode Island.

Lecy won’t be on the whole trip because his daughter is getting married. So, when the trio stops in Illinois they will leave Lecy there. Once Hager and Reilly reach Buffalo, N.Y. they will take a break and fly to Wisconsin to attend the wedding. Lecy plans on reuniting with them again to congratulate them at the finish line in Rhode Island.

Even though wildfires have been blazing through the Pacific Northwest, Hager hasn’t had to change their route. But they will have to check periodically to make sure it stays that way.

“I think traveling with the former captain of the Chicago Fire Department makes us impervious to fire,” Hager joked.

When the trio was training last month for the trek they pedaled from Chicago to Wisconsin while the state had record-breaking poor air quality from wildfire smoke from northern Minnesota and Canada.

“It was like a zombie apocalypse,” Lecy said. “In some ways that might have prepared us.”

Not his first adventure

Hager is confident about the journey, mostly because he has sought a similar challenge before. It was two years after he retired from his job as an engineer, he had run several marathons but something else nagged at him for more.

“I needed something significant; that was going to make me feel like a better person,” he said.

So, he set out to kayak from the source of the Mississippi to New Orleans. Before he embarked, he mapped out the exact GPS coordinates of where he would begin and start each day. Lecy saw the meticulous itinerary and was impressed by Hager’s planning and decided to join part of the journey.

“But nothing went as planned,” Hager said. “I didn’t stop at a single GPS coordinate.”

Hager had asked for a challenge, and his call had been answered. The river was unpredictable and Hager and Lecy didn’t always see eye to eye.

“It was delightfully chaotic,” Lecy said.

The sights were a mixture of some of the ugliest industrial landscape with beautiful natural wonders. Nearly every day Hager saw a bald eagle. Often his mind wandered and he built fantasies of being a pirate as he passed by barges and tugboats. At night Hager hunched over his phone to recount the days on his blog.

“There was this constant threat of the unknown, of not being in control of your destiny – you have to let go,” he said.

At the same time, he was met with the kindness of strangers and the fortune of coincidence. A restaurant owner he met on the river let him stay the night in his building. Hager noticed a change in his perspective – the days he spent apart from the mundane rhythm of his life at home made him more grateful for the things he had.

“When you put your mind to something you see how capable you are,” he said.

• To follow the three friends’ journey from Newport, Ore. to Newport, R.I. go to www.pedalingpilgrim.blog. 

• Shayla Escudero is an enterprise reporter for the Lincoln Chronicle covering local governments, education, housing and social services and can be reached at [email protected]