“When you roll into town on a bicycle and plan to go out of town on a bicycle, you’re not very threatening.”
That’s one of the first lessons that Mark Milroy, then an abnormally young OCC photography student, learned on his 4,200-mile bicycle trip across the country in the summer of 1977.
Listening to some of his exploits makes you realize how much times have changed, but the things Milroy did were off the beaten path even then.
Riding from town to town from Oregon to New England, Milroy, fellow OCC student Scott Griffith and occasional companions they met on the road camped out in parks, slept in churches and in the backs of bars, squatted in abandoned buildings and even passed a night in the city council chambers of a small town in Kentucky.
With his family back in Costa Mesa and cell phones still years down the line, Milroy would keep his mother, Diana Blaisure, in the loop every few days, whenever he could get his hands on a phone.
“My younger son and I had a large map of the U.S. tacked up in the hall and kept track of Mark’s progress when he would call us,” Blaisure recalled.
Milroy was only 17 when he set off with Griffith, who was only two years older. Unhappy with high school, Milroy took an equivalency test at 16 and left.
Money was tight living with his single mom and he worked at a local machine shop to finance his trip, which, he said, led him to his true passion: photography.
“It taught me exactly what I didn’t want to do in life. The worst day in photo class was better than the best day in the machine shop,” Milroy said.
With his heart set on the cross-country trip, but nobody to go with him, Milroy posted an ad in a bike shop. Griffith responded and only a short time later the two relative strangers took a train from Union Station in Los Angeles to coastal Oregon where they began their journey.
There was no real plan.
The two hopped off the train, took a bus from Eugene, Ore., to Umpqua Lighthouse and set out on the first leg of the TransAmerica Bike Trail (also known as the Bikecentennial), which was designed in 1976.
