Where I Slept in the Trans Am Bike Race

by Felix Wong | 20 Jul 2015

Below is a list of where I slept or camped during the 2015 Trans Am Bike Race.

In summary, I stayed in hotels 11 times, slept on a bunk bed in Newton Bike shop 1 time, and stealth camped a dozen other times behind guard rails on gravel, off road on grass, on concrete at churches, or on/under picnic tables.

Musings on Sleep

My initial strategy was to ride a couple hours past sunset and wake up before sunrise, resulting in 4-5 hours of sleep. Surprisingly, despite normally needing 8 hours of sleep each night, I managed this pretty well for the first couple weeks of the race and only overslept my alarm a couple times. However, by the third week when fatigue and injuries racked up, I was oversleeping and needed to rest a lot more. Thunderstorms and being cold also kept me in my bivy sack much longer than planned.

Motels along the Trans America Bicycle Trail averaged about $70 (including taxes), which was not cheap when you consider I often only stayed in them for 4 hours. But they provided a decent place to shower, do laundry in the shower or sink, recharge electronics and get a few hours of sleep. They helped conserve energy especially when it was cold outside. Towards the end of the TABR I found myself being able to wake up in them much easier than outside, when I had a tendency to oversleep my alarm.

Most nights were warm enough that I only slept inside my 32-degree down sleeping bag once or twice before shipping it back home in Newton, Kansas. But there were a couple nights when I was cold to the point of shivering; both times were during thunderstorms inside a bivy sack which apparently wasn’t very waterproof and got saturated.

I first learned that the bivy sack wasn’t very waterproof on the night before my 40th birthday. I got caught in a thunderstorm and with no lodging nearby, I decided to hunker down for the night in the bivy underneath a picnic table behind a gas station. At the time, I thought it was a brilliant idea.

It was raining so hard, however, that plenty of water still dripped onto the bivy sack through the slats of the table, saturating it. I ended up wet and cold during that night.

Sleeping Regrets

My most regrettable decision regarding sleeping came the next day—ironically, the night of my birthday. Some folks associated with Crazy Larry’s Hostel (including Larry himself) in Damascus, Virginia were at a nearby Cowboys convenience store where I had stopped to resupply at roughly 8:30 p.m. I talked with them for a little bit—even had a photo taken with Larry—and they suggested I stay at the hostel for the night. I declined because I wanted to ride further as there were still a couple of hours of daylight left.

I only got 13 mile farther down the road to Konnarock when it started raining again. I pulled over for the night, setting up my bivy sack underneath a tree in darkness. I stayed in the bivy sack, shivering all night and not getting great sleep, until emerging from it just after 7:00 a.m.

Right across the road was a park. Only 20 meters away was a clean, dry, and certainly warmer porta-potty that I could have taken refuge during the night if only I had seen it.

So instead of getting good night’s sleep inside Crazy Larry’s—or at least staying drier and warmer inside the nearby port-a-jet—I wasted a lot of energy shivering all night inside the bivy sack that was not nearly as waterproof as advertised.

A couple of nights later and less than 250 miles from the finish, I made another questionable sleeping decision. I stayed inside the Colony Hotel in Waynesboro, Virginia, from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Less than two hours after leaving the hotel, I had to pull over and take yet another short nap on concrete at Mt. Zion’s Baptist Church in Greenwood. An after that (and only 11 miles further) as the sun was rising, I had to pull over again and sleep on grass in White Hall.

From there, I rode the final 210 miles without sleeping, needing a whole 24 hours to do so. A few hours after finishing in Yorktown, I hailed a taxi van to take me from a McDonald’s to a Courtyard by Marriott, where I slept a full night after walking over to a nearby bike shop for a cardboard bike box, and disassembling and packing up my bike.

I flew back to Colorado to Colorado the next day.

Scariest Sleeping Moment

As I described in the comment section below, there was only one night when I encountered people. It was after midnight, and I had decided to sleep on the wooden deck of a church in Chavies, Kentucky.

The neighbors—who were quite far away—must have seen my lights or heard me, because then one of them started yelling, “Hello, is anyone out there?” I didn’t reply, hoping they would just go away.

A few minutes later, there were two of them at a safe distance with flashlights and rifles. “Sorry, cyclist!” I replied with my hands up. I was dressed in lycra cycling gear, so it was obvious I was telling the truth. “I just pulled over for the night.”

“Oh, phew,” the guy replied. He was friendly “That’s a relief.”

He then said I kind of gave them a scare, but they figured that they had probably given me quite the fright too.

In truth, I never felt truly threatened or scared. But it was interesting, for sure!