By sheer coincidence, I arrived in St. Joseph on the very same day the annual Pony Express re-ride was beginning. Every year, a relay team of horses and riders re-enact the mail route, and they’re able to do it in the historically accurate time of ten days. It had taken me 24. The rider who would start it off first began doing the Pony Express re-ride at the age of 15, and she was now in her 20th year. Her horse was nearly equally experienced.

Aside from a few minor things like wearing jeans, the riders were doing it by the same means, and with the same minimal gear, as the original riders. They were even correctly using small horses and riders. I liked that. Us little squirts need to be recognized for our good qualities more often.

The Wild West represents the last part of history before the 2nd Industrial Revolution, essentially the last pre-modern period. Before trains, photographs, telegraph, and when almost everything was still hand-made. A new, modern era was already taking root in the northeast, making the Wild West the last gasp of a way of life which had persisted for millennia. As we float down the river of time, it raises the question: What parts of our current human experience will soon become irrelevant and forgotten, and what will last?

I wonder what the future holds for bikes. Everyone grew up with a bike. Everyone’s had an experience with a bike, or has a bike story. Bikes are universal, and they’ve been around for over a century. How long will they persist?

With the ride concluded, it was wonderful to spend an evening in the company of four friendly people who were into gravel biking. Hours of easy, fun conversation about something we all enjoy. When you’re into a niche interest, you don’t often have that experience.

It was 110 km (70 miles) from St. Joseph into Kansas City, and there would be a vicious headwind all day. Absolutely sick of fighting it, I thought about asking my hosts if one of them worked in KC, or at least nearby, and could give me a ride part of the way. As fortune would have it, they were already going to give their friends a ride to the train station downtown, only eight miles from where I was headed. I happily came along.

Thanks to a family friend, I had a place to stay in KC for a couple days, before I met up with my brother, who had coincidentally planned a trip to KC on the same weekend. How cool was that! I got a chance to meet some of his wife’s family, and then he gave me a ride home.

I had originally planned to spend the 2nd half of summer hiking the Washington section of the Pacific Crest Trail, but decided against it. I was due back at school on August 1, which is unusually early. As a result, I’d have less than a week in between the Pony Express and the PCT, almost no time to train and prepare. Alternatively, I’d need to hike 500+ miles in about 24 days, which I could do, but I’d spend the entire hike stressed out about time, which wouldn’t be fun. And it’s supposed to be fun.

Instead, I decided to spend the summer working on personal projects, which included:

• Write these journals!

• Make a video of the ride

• Build a website for a friend’s catering business

• Write a proposal to Salsa/Surly Bikes about touring bikes and gear

• Do some prep work for the school year

• Stir up interest in a high school marathon club

• Train for marathons this winter

• Have a social life (optional)

In the end, I can’t recommend the Pony Express Route. It wasn’t the worst, but if you want to do an off-pavement tour, there are better choices. Of the three I’ve done, Western Wildlands takes first place, Great Divide is a close second, and Pony Express is a distant third. The scenery is only OK, and the ride itself isn’t that fun either.

The western half involves pushing the bike too often; people do bike tours because they like riding bikes, not pushing them. The eastern half needs to simplify the route instead of including hundreds of superfluous turns, as often as once per mile, forcing riders to stay glued to their phone all day. That’s neither fun nor historically accurate.

The guidebook isn’t particularly great either. There are a handful of blatant inaccuracies, like indicating Sacramento is at 4,000 feet (1,200 m) of elevation, when the correct figure is 26 feet (8 m). Describing the surface as entirely paved between point A and point B, when it’s actually unpaved on three separate intervals between A and B. For each of the five sections, the length would be listed as (for example) 472 miles on one page, then 466.6 miles two pages later. That’s not a big enough inaccuracy to matter, but c’mon. People are being charged for this.

I don’t enjoy trashing the Pony Express, because the people who put it together (particularly Jan Bennett) obviously made a lot of effort. All those hundreds of unnecessary turns? Someone wrote those down and mapped them out. And they hired a talented graphic designer for the guidebook, even if the information it contains is wrong.

But I’m glad I did it. I’m happiest when I’m on a hike or bike trip. If I see something which looks interesting, I can stop what I’m doing and check it out. I can take a day off whenever I want. I can sleep in. I can finish up early. No one tells me to stop what I’m doing and work on their problem. When I talk to people, they take me seriously and act interested. No one ignores me, interrupts me, or talks over me. Unfortunately, none of those things are true in my everyday life, particularly in my profession.

The running/hiking/biking version of me is the “real me,” or at least one of the better versions of myself. At least 90% of my time is spent being “teacher me” or “online me,” and I don’t like either of those people as much. Sometimes I almost forget about the “real me” who hangs around with friends and is fun to be around. These days, I don’t get enough opportunities to be that person. At the end of summer, I have to stop being Coyote and go back to being Mr. Landauer again.

So what’s next? Summer 2025, I’ll probably finish the PCT; it would be best to give that hike its own summer. In 2026, there’s a push to re-create the famed BikeCentennial of 1976; it’ll be the 50th anniversary!
I’ve reached a point where there aren’t any remaining stateside tours which interest me much. From now on, I’d like to do more international touring. But after falling in love with bike touring in the United States, thanks to 20,000+ American miles, this can be my swan song; one last great American bike tour before I ride off to faraway lands.

I’d love to do a tour or a hike with someone, but it’s hard to find a partner. They’d need to:

1. Have as much time off as I do. Most people don’t.
2. Enjoy hiking/biking as much as I do. Most people don’t.
3. Like me. Most people don’t.

I’ve said it before, but it’s not always what you have to do that makes it hard; it’s what you have to give up.