By Lou Melini — On June 25, 2016, Kristen Jokinen, and her husband Ville, started their 2-year, 18,215 bike ride from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city in Argentina. They did this without any previous overnight bike ride. Their camping experience was good, having hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) shortly before tackling the bike trip. Their first camping experience was the first night on the PCT. As a cycle traveler, I have done two bike trips each being 70+ days plus a 176 day thru-hike of the Appalachian trail. However, to do the magnitude of 2-years on a bike deserves genuflecting praise and admiration.
I was in the airport awaiting my flight to Alaska when I started the book. Julie and I did a 440-mile, 11-day ride in Alaska, so I had some evening time to read. I could relate to some of the experiences that Kristen and Ville experienced, though in a very small way. When Kristen mentioned hamburgers as the main menu item in Alaska I thought of the relatively remote lodges with burgers on the menu. If you want vegetables, be happy if you have lettuce and tomato on your burger. You could also vary your burger with bacon if you wish. Fortunately, the torrential rains Kristen and Ville encountered were not present on my travels. Kristen needed to wear a head net to keep from being bitten by mosquitoes as she rode. Joy Ride details the sometime realities of bike campers in remote areas of the northern continent: torrential rains, the need for head nets as protection against mosquitoes, and having to schlep many pounds of food and supplies as their first stop, Coldfoot, was 240 miles from their start.
Please note that I received from the publisher an uncorrected proof that asks to not quote without comparison to the finished book. My apologies as what I quote, may not be in the finished book. The quotes will give you a sense of what Kristen and Ville experienced.
“Cutting through the open tundra, the road-a dirt packed berm, two lanes, no shoulder-became a sloppy slip and slide, and my knees could barely rotate the pedals. Temperatures hovered just above freezing. I knew this because the water in my drinking tube began to freeze and I could barely feel my fingers through my waterproof gloves. … Sometime around midnight, with rain still coming down in sheets, Ville turned to me, water dripping from his nose, and asked, Hey KG, are you ready to camp? I can’t feel my toes. I had quit feeling from the waist down an hour ago.”
If someone was to ask me to describe a multi-day, multi-week, or multi-month bike tour, I might reply that a bike tour is a series of stories from day one to the end of the tour. When I read Joy Ride, I was struck by the numerous stories in Kristen’s book as she described the ride that she and Ville did. I found the first part of the book a joy to read when Kristen and Ville traveled in North America. Despite some horrendous weather that they encountered, the stories were mostly upbeat, such as the generosity they received from truck drivers in Alaska and Canada. Many bike touring stories are short and seemingly trivial, but to the rider, the event creating the story may become a life time memory. The following is a story in the book from Oregon.
“We coasted down the canyon toward Highway 101, hardly having to pedal at all, the road winding slowly as it hugged the mountainside. We made it ten miles before we were flagged to a stop by a road crew in bright orange vests. They told us a massive boulder the size of a pool table had hurtled down the side of the mountain, taking with it a large portion of the hillside and parts of the road. You need to head back up the way you came to where there is a fork in the road, take that detour ‘round to getcha to the 101, said nice Mr. Flag Man. Sorry but how far back is that we asked, deflated. Oh, I’d say about twenty-five miles round, he said, apparently disregarding the fact that we were sitting on bicycles in the freezing rain. Mr. Flag Man explained the alternate route in greater detail, then asked where we had come from. His name was Richard, and he had been working on the job all morning. He had just recovered from a bout of Lyme disease and had a wife and three kids. After 20 minutes of talking, he told us to wait and he would get us through as soon it was safe enough for us to pass. We had made a new friend and shortened our day by twenty-five rainy miles on muddy, slippery roads. It took an hour and a half to get around the landslide but was far better than the alternative.”
I picked this story as I have had nearly a dozen conversations with a Mr. Flag Man (or Woman) over the years discussing where they want me to ride; in front of the line of cars, in back, on the company lead-vehicle or directly through on a different route. I have always had a good dialogue that kept me going safely, once with the same guy on two different stops. Fortunately, I never had to walk through a landslide on a road trip though I once had to walk an alternate route on a trail when a flood tore out a gravel road on an off-road trip.
Joy Ride became less of a joy as the journey went south of the U.S. border. The “adventures” that ranged from life threatening due to traffic on narrow roads to near daily discomforts from heat, humidity, long hours in the saddle, steep mountainous terrain and finding places to stay were exasperating. If I was a thinking about riding the western hemisphere, this book might deter me from making the trip. I would say that many readers of the book would find the bike trip that Kristen and Ville did as adventurous but certainly not a trip to emulate. Why spend months suffering on a bike? Certainly, on any lengthy bike tour, there will be days that do not go well due to the unpredictability of weather, bad information, wind, mountainous terrain or simply bad luck as in having multiple flat tires. However, many of the repeated bad days encountered by Kristen and Ville seemed to be self-inflicted due to the planning of each day and their finances. As a result, they had to be helped on many occasions by local citizens of the countries they passed through. True, the local citizens were generously helpful, but I think many wanted to help Kristen and Ville because they desperately needed help.
As a general statement of why Kristen and Ville needed help, I will point to their planning. They would ride late into the evening in hopes of finding a stealth camping spot so as to not be seen. Sometimes this worked, sometimes they had to ask someone in front of their farm if they could camp there (and usually were also fed) and sometimes they were on a crazy narrow road with lots of fast-moving traffic including trucks in the dark because they didn’t find a suitable spot. On one occasion Ville was “thrown out” of a motel because he tried to negotiate a $9 hotel rental in Peru.
“We are not staying here he (Ville) said in a huff. They want way too much money. How much was it I said. Nine dollars he says. But Ville…I’m pretty sure we are almost through town. Don’t worry KG, we will find something. After about ten more minutes of climbing and passing only a few buildings, we saw an old couple. He asked them if there was a hotel or somewhere safe where we could camp. Ah, the man exclaimed. He told Ville he owned a small apartment building. Ville accepted. He showed to a room that was more like a broom closet. No bathroom or kitchen, it was big enough to fit only our bikes and our tent, which we had to set up because of the number of spiders crawling everywhere. As we walked across the rotting and broken floorboards, I glanced up at the ceiling where the paint was peeling and hanging, which also looked as if it may cave in at any moment. The room was so pungent with mold and gasoline that it was a bit hard to breathe. As soon as we erected our tent, I stared hard at Ville. Nine dollars, huh.”
Throughout the ride in central America, Kristin wrote about harrowing rides on narrow roads with lots of traffic. There was mostly, but not always, an upbeat tone to the writing early in the book. However, very noticeable, starting in Peru, it seemed that Kristen’s writing of the trip changed. The ride became less joyful for her and more punishing. Below is an example of her description of a ride into a town. Other writings in this section of the book include riding in darkness, torrential rain, mud, powerful headwinds, painful body parts and overwhelming fatigue.
“The thirty-five-mile descent, quite literally and figuratively, went downhill. First, the pavement disappeared, then dogs began attacking us as we passed, then the gravel got deeper, followed by washboard on the road that chattered our teeth, all while Peruvian drivers flew unnerving close to us in little Hondas and Toyota station wagons, as if training for the next Fast & Furious film. The buffs we pulled over our mouths saved us from about seven pounds of dirt in the lungs, and our sunglasses had to be constantly wiped of dust, making it nearly impossible to see. On the descent, we passed an exorbitant number of crosses and memorial sites: pictures, sodas, candles, and memorabilia, that are left along the roadside to honor those who have perished there.”
Overall, I enjoyed the positive moments Kristen and Ville described in Joy Ride. There were many paragraphs of pure joy due to the company and/or the kindness of strangers. The writing was good and gave a clear description of the tenacity it takes to do a bike trip of that length. Bike travel is never without some discomforts that with planning and the ability to alter plans as needed, discomforts can be minimized — Joy Ride had too many discomforts described along with too many harrowing life threatening events in the book for my taste, though that did make for a more exciting book. For the reader of Joy Ride, remember that the book is about the stories of one couple and their ride of a lifetime.
Joy Ride, Author: Kristen Jokinen, Copyright: 2023, ISBN: 978-0998825751
Hawthorne Books, Portland, Oregon, Hawthornebooks.com
