Kathleen Ventura, 31, started planning her bike ride across the US in 2011.
"We didn't even have bikes!" she remembers. "When we decided to rid, it started with micro actions — and first, we had to get bikes."
She and her husband Brock Delinski, 33, were living just outside Chicago at the time, her working as an account executive in sales at Groupon and him working as an operations supervisor for a waste-services company. They had their hearts set on an extended period of international, nomadic travel and figured a cross-country adventure, where they spoke the language and knew the currency, would be a good place to start.
Ultimately, they ended up biking over 4,200 miles in around five months. Ventura spoke with Business Insider to share the victories, challenges, and costs of traversing the US on a bike.
The spring of 2012 was full of change for Ventura and Delinski: They got married in March, their Chicago lease was up in May, and they left for their marathon ride on June 7.
Before they set off, they spent a month living with Ventura's parents in order to stockpile a few paychecks' worth of savings. Between a year of saving and planning, selling their cars and furniture, and the last-minute influx of cash, they had about $50,000 saved for their bike trip and whatever came next.
Using maps from the Adventure Cycling Association, they plotted their way through the TransAmerica Trail, starting in Yorktown, Virginia and ending in Astoria, Oregon.
"When I say maps, I think people think I was on trails," Ventura says. "We were on streets and roads and in some cases, the interstate." The maps the nonprofit association provides describe not only the route, but also an elevation chart and notification about local cycling-friendly resources.
"They'll say in this town there's a grocery store, in this town there's fuel," Ventura says. "The route we took was the most established, so they could be like 'There's a grocery store in this town that lets cyclists camp in the backyard, or this church will let you use the kitchen and take a shower for a donation.' We were able to plan based on that."
"I felt like the whole thing was like a video game," Ventura remembers. "Every day was a new day with new challenges: dogs trying to bite you, headwinds trying to knock you over, 105 degrees."
They carried a small camping stove and most days would make ramen or other noodles along with some vegetables, for nutrients. Most nights, the pair would pitch a tent — in a campground out west, or in a church, or in a city park in a small town, where they were usually lucky enough to find outlets to plug in their phones.
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