Ben and I met in college while I was rowing at Rutgers and Ben was a cadet at West Point. He asked me where I was from. I said “Indiana,” and his face lit up as he said “no way, I’m from Missouri,” like we were next door neighbors.   

 

As a graduation gift, he bought me my first road bike and we started riding in the Alabama countryside near Fort Rucker, where Ben was training at flight school. Soon after, he was assigned to fly Blackhawk helicopters with the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

 

As his first deployment to Jalalabad, Afghanistan neared, we wanted to find a way to capture our dwindling time together. Despite the season’s chilly November air, we packed our panniers and set off on a ride from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., rustling our tires through the fast fading leaves of fall. It was indescribably therapeutic.

 

In the weeks before Ben’s second deployment, this time to Kandahar, Afghanistan, we again braced the near-but-not-quite-freezing Tennessee air (it was the week between Christmas and New Year’s) and biked the Natchez Trace Parkway from Nashville to Natchez, Mississippi. The effect was the same.

 

In the midst of the tumult and uncertainty of separation, biking was a return to the basics. A way to reclaim and celebrate the simplest and most certain gift we had: our moments together.

 

To date, our pedals have taken us thousands of miles on four continents as we’ve celebrated life’s milestones along the way: deployments, homecomings, marriage, moving (6 states in the last 10 years!), post-graduate degrees and, now, after almost a decade in the military, Ben’s transition from the Army to his first job in the “civilian” workforce.

This ride is for the friends we were blessed to serve with, and for all those who support us along the way.