Neither snow nor heat stops two-wheeled trek to Vancouver

Stopping for dinner in a small town where everyone knew each other’s names, Nick Vanderkloot and his buddy Robert Vernimmen got plenty of stares — then questions about their spandex shorts and clip-in bike shoes.

It was one of many towns the duo saw this summer where “the only thing that was there was a bar,” Vanderkloot said. But, he pointed out, “some of those places were the best.”

So goes the story of the cyclists’ two-wheeled trek, starting in Vermont, stretching across the northern U.S. and ending in Canada. The pair ventured from Charlotte on May 6, pedaling west through several states and one province before heading north to Vancouver, where they celebrated with family and flew back. In just over two months they covered an average 60 to 70 miles a day — pushing through snow in Yellowstone and 100-degree heat in the Rockies.

Vanderkloot, who lives in Charlotte, only took up cycling in earnest after moving to Vermont a couple years ago. But being originally from the Netherlands, where he said people bike everywhere, he thinks it has always been in his DNA.

Now the 67-year-old calls himself a “smelly biker” and thinks of the whole thing as “very special.”

At the beginning of the adventure, he and Vernimmen, a friend from Luxembourg who flew out to join Vanderkloot, crossed the U.S.-Canada border for the first time near Niagara Falls, biking across Ontario until reaching Michigan near the Erie Canal.

“Being Dutch, I wanted to go to Holland, Michigan,” Vanderkloot said, chuckling. The city was founded in the 1800s by Dutch Calvinist separatists. Before the trip, Vanderkloot learned the Holland Museum had two old paintings featuring relatives of his from the Netherlands. When he finally saw them in person, he was surprised by how well they had been maintained over the years.

The duo would end long days alternating between motels, camping and staying with strangers through a website called Warm Showers (warmshowers.org), which lets hosts share their homes with cyclists for a night.

In what Vanderkloot called a “chance happening,” one family from the website hosted the pair on Father’s Day and invited the two men to a celebration with 25 grandkids. During the festivities the pair met a “half-cowboy,” he said, who “recited cowboy poetry” for them.

The two conquered their hardest climb in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming on a hot day. Rolling into town after their descent through dramatic canyon walls, they noticed “everyone was wearing a Stetson hat. We looked at each other and felt less than manly,” Vanderkloot said.

He found it most rewarding to meet people with different cultural and political backgrounds who were “so kind and generous.”

His wife, Angeline, sees how the trip changed him. “I think he learned a lot about different parts of our country. I don’t think he’s ever seen it in such a real way,” she said.

In Wisdom, Montana, the cyclists dined in a woman’s garage she had converted into a restaurant. “She cooks right in front of you,” said Vanderkloot, and her family members take orders with pen and paper.

Vanderkloot said locals told him the owner, an immigrant from Mexico, had started serving food in her garage after her husband died as a way to make up for lost income. People in town rallied to encourage her to make a real restaurant out of the operation, and they have turned out to support it ever since. 

Vanderkloot left his wallet and passport on a shelf outside the garage, he said, and only realized the next morning. He came back to find them untouched, charmed by the kindness and trust.

“I lived vicariously through him. And it was actually amazing to hear his stories,” said Angeline, adding that her husband called every night.

For now, he is happy to entertain himself by catching up on the hardcover books left behind for his trip.

“I need a bit of time to digest it a little bit,” he said. “It’s so much of a blur.”

Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship, on assignment for The Charlotte News.