Wellington » He's not exactly the breeze, but he does keep blowin' down the road.
Without a tail wind, Tony Adams averages only 3 mph.
That's been his story for the past eight years. The 43-year-old Eagle Point, Ore., native has pedaled his custom recumbent tricycle and trailer pretty much nonstop from coast to coast and back again - not to mention border to border - through snow and heat, rain and wind.
He has been to the Golden Gate Bridge. He has seen Niagara Falls. He has pedaled down the Florida coast. He has watched the sea waves crashing at Galveston. Mount Rushmore? Sure. The Grand Canyon? Yep.
"I prefer to ride the bike … the freedom of riding the bike," Adams said. "I see so much more on a bicycle than someone can see in their vehicle. To experience it. To Feel it. To watch the animals go by."
Now he can say he has crossed the Salt Flats, too. It took him four days to pedal from Wendover to Tooele. He hit town on Thanksgiving Day, where an EMT crew pulled over and served him a hot turkey dinner.
"That was nice," he says. On this day, along U.S. 6/U.S. 191 near this central Utah city, an inquiring passer-by offered two bottles of water when Adams told him his supply had frozen solid.
Adams has ridden through 41 of the contiguous 48 states and plans to pedal across the rest. And when he's done, he will just keep pedaling.
"I'm out to meet new faces and find new attitudes and a different concept of reality," he says. "I'll be traveling on a bicycle the rest of my life."
For 15 years, he worked various jobs in a traveling carnival before embarking on his great bicycle trek. Now he's even more intimate with the road.
The intrepid cyclist says he has camped by the side of the highway in temperatures from 7 below zero to 110 above. He almost never sleeps indoors. Although he did stop at a shelter in Helper after Highway Patrol troopers and Carbon County Sheriff's deputies urged him to get off the road during a blizzard-like storm.
"People were calling them, saying they thought I'd be killed," Adams said of the treacherous road conditions.
He carries his gear on a long three-wheeled trailer he designed and built that is capped off with a fiberglass Thule luggage box. Fully loaded, the rig and its rider weigh in at about 600 pounds.
Top Ramen is his caloric mainstay. Adams cooks the noodles with a small backpacker's stove. This time of year, he has to melt the ice in his water bottles first.
Cold winter temperatures make dehydration every bit the challenge it is in summer.
He doesn't drink alcohol. His only vice, he says, is cigarettes.
"I just like a smoke before I start up a big hill."
Adams would like to smoke a pack a day. But right now he can't afford it. He's down to four cigarettes and only has a couple of bucks in his pocket.
Every so often, the wandering cyclist has to stop and earn a little money. Even during such respites, he sleeps in his tent.
"I don't mind donations, but I have to work, too," he explains. "I'm not a thief. I'm not out to hurt anybody."
Adams spent several of his last dollars on a new tube at Fuzzy's BicycleWorks in Price. But it turned out to be a pretty good deal. The proprietor, Fuzzy Nance, threw in a pair of gently used Sorrel winter boots.
"He showed up here in some sandals wrapped around some wool boot liners," Nance recalls. "I had some old Sorrels, so I hooked him up."
Along the highway between Wellington and Green River, semitrailer rigs whiz by inches from his shoulder, sometimes splashing up waves of slush. He says he's used to it. And snow in the forecast doesn't seem to faze him, either. His feet are warm, anyway.
"I just came over Soldier Summit, 7,400 feet, in a white-out," he says.
Adams is on his way to Albuquerque -- via Moab, Monticello, and Colorado's Cortez and Durango -- to find a brother he hasn't heard from in several years.
He doesn't have a cell phone. He doesn't stop at Internet cafes to check e-mail. He doesn't even have a CD player. And he says he doesn't have time to read books.
The tireless cyclist does, however, posses a transistor radio that he listens to in his tent after a long day pedaling.
Beyond New Mexico, he's not sure. Maybe he'll head toward Minnesota and Wisconsin. At the rate Adams travels, he figures he'll get there around springtime.
His mother, Emma Adams, confirms her son's travels.
"He's one of kind," she said in a telephone interview from Eagle Point. "He has his own goals. I'm proud of him."
Adams' odyssey is leading somewhere, although he's unsure exactly where that may be.
"I'm searching for answers," he says. "But I haven't found 'em yet."
So he keeps on pedaling.
