Melody Geddes, of Napavine, left, and her friend, Sheila Brunton, of Spokane, pose for a picture at the Canadian Border. Geddes and Brunton took six and one-half weeks to ride 1,953 miles from the Canadian border to the Mexican border this summer.
Sheila Brunton, of Spokane, left, and Melody Geddes, of Napavine, right, pose for a picture while on their six-and-a-half week bike ride from the Canadian border to the Mexican border this summer.
Melody Geddes, of Napavine, left, and her friend, Sheila Brunton, of Spokane, pose for a picture while on their six-and-a-half week bike ride from the Canadian border to the Mexican border this summer.
Sheila Brunton, of Spokane, left, and Melody Geddes, of Napavine, pose for a picture at the Golden Gate Bridge outside San Francisco while on their six-and-a-half week bike ride from the Canadian border to the Mexican border this summer.
Melody Geddes, of Napavine, left, and her friend, Sheila Brunton, of Spokane, pose for a picture while on their six-and-a-half week bike ride from the Canadian border to the Mexican border this summer.
Melody Geddes, of Napavine, left, and her friend, Sheila Brunton, of Spokane, pose for a picture while on their six-and-a-half week bike ride from the Canadian border to the Mexican border this summer.
To celebrate her 60th birthday this year, Melody Geddes, of Napavine, decided it was time to stop looking at the map of an epic bicycle ride that had piqued her interest and just go out and do it.
“You start thinking you’re not always going to be able to do it,” she said of the nearly 2,000-mile ride she completed this summer. “We don’t live forever and you want to do something like this when you can still do it and enjoy it.”
Geddes and her long-time friend, Sheila Brunton, of Spokane, took six and one-half weeks to ride 1,953 miles from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. The ride was inspired by the book “Bicycling the Pacific Coast” Geddes received as a birthday present in 2011. They set out with minimal training but a large set of adventure. And in that time and along those miles they rode only one day in the rain, suffered only one flat tire and spent just one day without a shower.
“It’s kind of amazing. You just don’t know what you can do until you try it,” Geddes said.
Geddes has lived in Napavine for four years, arriving from Newport when her husband, Bob, became general manager for the Lewis County Public Utilities District. Her love of cycling began in the early 1990s when she took a college physical education class in which students could choose the type of activity they wanted to do and log their hours with the teacher.
“I owned a bike and I thought it would be perfect,” she recalled. “I got hooked on it.”
Being outdoors, even in the elements, is what Geddes said she loves about cycling. She said she also believes she took to bicycling, even long distances, pretty easily.
“You just keep pedaling and you can go so far,” she said. “And you honestly see things differently from a bicycle than you would from a car.”
Prior to the border to border trek, the longest ride Geddes had completed was a 10-day trip last summer along Alberta’s Icefields Parkway, which stretches about 144 miles. She rides a few times a week but with a busy schedule, including traveling to Oregon once a week to help care for her granddaughter, she said she didn’t have a lot of extra time to devote to training. So to prepare herself for the epic journey she simply continued to ride as she had and incorporated a few extra hills into her rides.
“I’ve done enough trips in the past to know you can train on the road,” Geddes said. “I wasn’t going to add training but I had a base. It was a challenge in the beginning but it got easier.”
Geddes and Brunton met in Bellingham in mid-July and rode their bicycles to Blaine on the Canadian border to begin their journey. For their navigation they used the guidebook Geddes owned as well as maps from an organization called Adventure Cycling. The trail they followed is considered the Pacific Crest Trail of cycling. The PCT is a 2,650-mile hiking trail that spans from Mexico to Canada. Six and one-half weeks after beginning their bicycle ride, Geddes and Brunton ended their journey on Imperial Beach, California. On the Mexican border.
The cycling duo rode six days a week with a plan to make at least 50 miles each riding day. They generally camped about three nights and then would stay in a motel for a night. They usually camped in state parks but would often look for private campgrounds, which they loved for their laundry facilities. Toward the end of the trip, Geddes admitted, they chose a few more motel stays and a few times they were able to stay with friends and family who lived along the route.
“That was one of my favorite parts of the trip,” she said.
Though they always packed plenty of water, the cyclists usually only carried enough food with them for that day with a few emergency snacks to see them through to the next grocery stop. Geddes said finding provisions was often one of the hardest tasks, especially when they were so eager for rest.
“We kind of pictured being more energetic in the evenings,” Geddes said. “We pictured ourselves playing our ukeleles or taking hikes in the evenings. But we were pretty well spent each night. It was all we could do to get our meals together and get into bed to be ready to ride the next day.”
But despite the fatigue and the sore muscles, Geddes said, they were pleasantly surprised with how many friendly people they met along the way.
“People would come by and talk to us every day,” she said. “They would stop and ask where we were from and where we were going to. They were so friendly and that was a great part of it.”
