When teachers retire, many spend their time relaxing at home or focusing on their hobbies. One retired teacher’s hobby took him around the whole country – on two wheels.

Steve Ellis, retired math teacher and substitute, biked the border of the United States this past March until August with his wife, Nancy Ellis. The two started in Florida and rode around the entire border on a tandem bicycle.

“It was a fantastic way to see the country,” Ellis, who retired in 2012, said. “Being on a bicycle is total freedom. You don’t have any responsibilities other than food, water, and finding someplace to sleep every day. You get to meet a lot of people and talk to people from different parts of the country. It’s really cool how most people are very caring and they’re interested in you and want to talk to you.”

Ellis and his wife biked from March 15 to August 29 with a break to visit Ellis’s father, who was diagnosed with cancer and passed away.

“My dad got cancer when we were on our bike trip, so he was going for some radical chemo,” Ellis said. “On July 18, we were in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains in New York and we got a call that he had a massive heart attack and that he died. We had to get a ride back to the airport and get a flight back to Minneapolis. [My dad] was my biggest fan, he  had made a big chart and was tracking us every day, and we would call him every day. He would tell everybody about our trip. It put a damper on [the trip], but I know he’s in heaven, so I’m okay.”

In addition his father’s support, Ellis also has support from his three daughters.

“Our daughters made us a little book with each state, so as we went into a state, we would open up this book and pull out this card they made for the state,” Ellis said. “On the back of [the card], they wrote letters to mom and dad so we could stay connected with them in a sense.”

The letters from his family helped Ellis stay mentally tough throughout the trip, but he also stayed tough because he has learned to be mentally strong from multiple year of biking, dating back to 1976.

“Bike riding is sort of like cross country running; It’s a lot of mental strength,” Ellis said. “You have to be mentally tough to do it, it’s not all physical.”

Ellis had to show his mental toughness several times throughout the trip, especially dealing with severe weather.

“When we were in Northern California, Oregon, and Washington, we had a ten day stretch of rain, and that got tiring because you would almost be freezing and you had to watch that you didn’t get hypothermia,” Ellis said. “We had to be careful. But there wasn’t a day we were totally exhausted. If we were really tired, we would ride a half day and stay in a motel.”

Despite the weather difficulties, Ells had some encounters that taught him how great his life is.

“The most rewarding part was meeting people and being able to help people,” Ellis said. “People were down and out with no food, and we were able to help. You think there are poor people in third world countries, there’s poor people in the United States, and they live in ways that are like, ‘it’s not the United States.’ You really feel sorry for them. Meeting people like that made me realize we have to be thankful for what we have.”

Stories with Steve:

• “In Montana, my wife and I tried to go to church whenever we could, and one day there was a town 50 miles way that was a little bit bigger, so we thought it should have a church. So we got up early, and as we left the camp ground, a double tanker gas truck passed us and this mountain lion comes out on the road right after the truck. He didn’t hear us behind the truck, but he’s right in front of us, about 50 yards. He’s walking across and all of a sudden he sees us. He looks at us right in the eye, and I didn’t know what to do. The time went by really slowly, but all of a sudden he took off. It was as if the Lord had told him, ‘you’ve already had breakfast, get on with your life.’ But then for the next 50 miles we were riding awfully fast because mountain lions track their prey, so we thought he’d be tracking us, but we made it okay and made it to church on time.”
• “One time, we broke down on a mountain and we called up a bike store. They came out 40 miles to fix our bikes and found out they had the wrong part, drove back out to their store 40 miles away, and came back, fixed our bike, and only charged us for the part. It was really, really nice of them. We gave them a good tip though, because we knew how hard it was for them to do.”
• “On the trip, we saw two herds of wild boar that were out in the road with us. One was at our campsite, and one we had to drive through on the road. We scared them off. We also saw a big 300 pound bear. We scared him; he took off like a race horse.”
• “One day, we went shopping for Under Armour. There had been a big storm, and so we walked to this store to get some ice cream and there was this big rainbow. You know at the end of the rainbow they say there’s this pot of gold. So we came out of the store and that rainbow was coming right down into the parking lot of that store. I’d never seen that happen before. And guess what had happened, somebody has thrown all of their change in the parking lot, quarters, dimes, and nickels, and it was just sitting there and my wife and I picked it up. I think we got about $7-$8 in change that we got to use for our trip. It was our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
• “We rode a lot of ferries on the trip because there were a lot of places you had to cross open water. When we got off of one, as we started riding, I went to hit the brakes and I realized I’d lost my brakes, they were just shot. So we rode about six miles to the nearest town, and we tried to see if there was some transportation that would take us 25 miles to a town where there was a bike store. We tried for two hours to find a ride on a bus or something. We couldn’t find a ride, so finally my wife said, ‘Steve let’s just go for it. We can make it.’ So we did that 25 mile trip with no brakes.”