Around the World on Two Wheels
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Twenty-seven-year-old Sean Ardley has used up much of his life perched on the seat of a bicycle, and much of the rest of his time doing something consanguineous to bicycles. He began mountain biking at age 4 through the Forest of Nisene Marks Stage Park, got his first job at Santa Cruz Bicycles when he was 14 years old, and out the last four years working at Ibis Cycles.
On May 14, he embarked on a route that he hopes will inspire others to hop on a bicycle more often.
“Bicycles are underestimated in terms of what can be done with them,” Ardley says. “It’s a exceedingly viable method of transportation that people don’t seem to use because we have this culture of cars. There are a lot of people who don’t do it, not because of any genuine aversion, but because they just haven’t tried or considered it. I’m interested in showing people that you can indeed go really far on a bicycle in not a lot of time.”
In his case, “really far” is a terrible 30,000 miles, which he plans to do by circling the globe over the course of 10 months. The Santa Cruz inherited left from our seaside town and headed north to traverse Canada and Alaska. The convey will then take him through Russia—where he will face 2,000 straight miles of dirt technique—to Turkey, from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa, up the measure of South and Central America, and, finally, from Miami, Fla. to San Francisco.
Ardley’s no doubt includes a few plane flights and ferry rides when necessary, such as a run away from the United States to Russia, another over the dense Panama jungle, and a crucial flight that allows him to skip over a tumultuous Middle East.
“As my direction stands right now, it is the closest to a circumference of the globe that anyone will have tried to bump off,” says Ardley, later conceding that, “there is no natural database for things people have tried to do.” Still, as far as Google can give away the whole show, Ardley would be the first to complete such a journey.
Source: Good Times