Community: Bozeman couple biking across country

By TIM DUMAS Chronicle Sports Writer

Pat and Gerry Goede are a true tandem.

Sean Sperry/Chronicle Gerry and Pat Goede are spending their summer biking across America, starting in Seattle and finishing in Boston. The Bozeman couple will spend most of the summer a few feet apart n Pat staring at husband Gerry’s back or sleeping beside him in a tent.

Ask them their ages and you’ll get this response: “We can only give you our tandem age,” Gerry said last week. “A hundred and three.”

“A hundred and two,” Pat quickly retorted.

It was a polite exchange between these empty-nesters, who have been married for 12 years and have five grown sons (Pat has two, Gerry three) from previous marriages between them.

Without children to raise and summer vacation looming, how will they fill the time? A bike trip across America should do the trick.

Today is Day 3 of the Goede’s journey n on a tandem bike, of course - from Seattle, Wash., to Boston. The pair traveled by car from Bozeman to Seattle on Saturday, one day after Heritage Christian School, where Gerry teaches high school math and science, concluded its academic year. On Sunday, they began pedaling.

They hope to reach their destination by Aug. 15, the day Gerry’s niece is getting married in Boston. By then, the Goedes will have logged 3,200 miles.

The goal of the “adventure,” as Pat calls it, is to not only complete the trek but to raise funds for a scholarship endowment for a future Heritage Christian student.

So if the couple is biking through a small town in, say, North Dakota, hauling a trailer that holds 65 pounds of gear with a yellow pennant atop of it that says “Bozeman,” and hears that inevitable question, Gerry can respond this way:

“Why are we doing this? I teach at a Christian school and it’s always tighter funds there. We just asked God, ‘what could we do that would help the school?’”

The trip has been in the works for more than a year, and the Heritage Christian School Board approved the idea last fall. Since then, Pat has done most of the planning. In February, the Manhattan High School graduate quit her part-time job at a local log home company in order to put together the final stages.

Then again, she was mostly working to help finance the Ride Across America (RAAM).

“We don’t know what will happen,” Pat said. “One of us might get the flu, we might get a hitch in our giddy-up, we might have a wreck. Those are all possibilities.”

The Goedes took up biking in 1997 more by necessity than anything else. Both had bad backs, which meant Pat had to give up running and Gerry had to quit playing basketball. Five years ago, they purchased a tandem bike and have pedaled it up and down the Oregon coast and around Minnesota, a two-and-a-half week ride last summer that is their longest to date.

That trip was roughly 800 miles, close to the distance between Seattle and Bozeman, which is where the couple plans to be next week for a three-day break.

Their current ride is like no other n and not just because of the distance.

When the Goedes have biked over multiple days in the past, they usually take along a van and spend a few days camping. This time, it’s just them and the bike, although their friends - Kevin and Laura Oliver n will be biking along until the foursome reaches Thompson Falls, or roughly 600 miles.

The couples don’t have concrete destinations each day. They’d like to average 70 to 75 miles a day, with a built in day off every fifth or sixth day. That’s if all goes well; all it takes is a nasty head wind or inclement weather to throw things off.

There’s also the trailer that consists of everything from clothes and a tent to bike repair supplies and a stove to consider.

“It’s, ‘point the bike east and go.’ It’s an adventure,” Gerry says. “In some towns, if they don’t have campgrounds or hotels, we’ll have to stop and say, ‘where can we put our tent in this town,’ and get to meet people that way.’ We may just pay somebody to sleep in their back yard.”

And the Goedes aren’t looking to bike on interstate highways n which is illegal in some states -to quicken their pace.

“The back roads, that’s where we’ll meet the people,” Pat said. “That’s where we’ll get down to what we really want to do, and that’s meet and talk to people.”

Most of the fund-raising for the trip itself has been done; any money collected now goes to the scholarship endowment. The students at Heritage Christian n “they think we’re crazy,” Gerry said n have gotten involved by mailing out letters to local businesses.

The RAAM is being sponsored by Henry’s Grandma’s Sweet Homemade Catsup, a company owned by Matt Henry, who is the administrator at Heritage Christian.

While the Goedes have their daily goals in mind, sprinting to Boston is out of the question.

“We’re not competitive riders,” Pat said. “We’ve seen other tandem riders and they’re out there just really hammering it. We just enjoy what we’re doing.

“This is not a race.”

They realize that someone could come up lame and not be able to continue. Then again, there is a certain drive deep down - that “Boston or Bust” sort of attitude - that stokes their passion.

“We plan to complete it, oh yeah,” Pat says. “It would be very disappointing if we didn’t finish it.”

One aspect the couple said it was looking forward to is the time together.

Before starting at Heritage Christian four years ago, Gerry, who grew up in Wisconsin, spent 23 years in either nuclear engineering or financial management. He had two weeks of vacation, and “I had to decompress the first three or four days,” he said.

This one will last up to 10 weeks, with every waking and sleeping moment spent in each other’s company. It’s a scenario neither is dreading.

Says Pat: “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be with.”

Says Gerry: “Spending two-and-a-half months together is such a treat.”

Pat even has the trip boiled down to a microcosm of their lives.

“It’s really a picture of marriage,” she says. “You’re both on this vehicle going someplace, and you have to decide where you’re going and you have to decide that together. You both put in the effort and you have to communicate all the time. If he makes a bad decision, if he slams on the brakes without telling me, we both get hurt.”

So the ride, not the race, has begun. It’s a chance for one couple to take things at a slower pace and see things they may have missed out on if they were in a car. And all this pedaling could make it possible for a young student to attend Heritage Christian School.

“We wanted to make it count,” Pat said, “for more than just our pleasure.”

Tim Dumas is at tdumas@dailychronicle.com and 582-2651.

2 on a tandem

GO ALONG FOR THE RIDE: The Goedes have already started a blog and plan to update it throughout their journey. Access it at http://montanamama-2onatandem.blogspot.com/

ON THE ROAD: The couple has a trailer attached to its tandem bike that will carry the following: a two-man tent, light-weight sleeping bags, some clothes (a change of bike clothes and a change of regular clothes), cooking gear, a stove which boils water in 90 seconds, an inflatable sleeping pad, pillows, food, spare tires, wrenches, tools, and a pump. They have mailed extra tires to Gerry’s parents’ house in Milwaukee, Wis.

THE PLAN: The Goedes would like to average 70-75 miles per day and hope to do 100 one day when the wind is at their backs or the feeling hits them. They figure the trip will consist of 45 to 50 days of biking, with a day off built in every fifth or sixth day.

MORE INFO: www.heritage-christian.org

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