Tough Tour: He Pedaled 4,235 Miles in 68 Days

When Eric Antebi was younger and his teachers asked him to write an essay on how he spent his summer vacation, he wrote about his big day at Disneyland or the family trip to New York or Hawaii.

This year, the 15-year-old Corona del Mar High School junior will have something far more exciting to write about if one of his teachers drops an end-of-summer essay assignment on him.

“I hope they do--I’ll blow them all away,” he said with a grin, seated in the living room of his family’s Big Canyon home in Newport Beach Wednesday afternoon.

Last week, Eric finished a cross-country bicycle trip that covered 14 states and 4,235 miles in 68 days.

The dark-haired, solidly built teen-ager was the only Californian in a group of 11 high school students--eight boys and three girls--who made the trip, which began July 1 on the Atlantic shore in Sandy Hook, N.J., and ended last Thursday on the Pacific coast in Florence, Ore.

Tours for Youths

The excursion, which included two adult leaders, was sponsored by Student Hosteling Program, a company based in Conway, Mass., that organizes bicycle tours for youths in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Wednesday, Eric described how he rode his 16-speed bike, loaded down with 60 pounds of food, water and camping equipment, through withering 100-degree heat in Kansas and numbing 35-degree temperatures in Wyoming.

He rode through head winds in Kansas so strong that he was blown off his bike. He also took refuge with the rest of the group under trees during a hail storm in Yellowstone.

In the process, he wore out four tires (“I just wore them down to the bone”), one pair of leather riding gloves and a pair of biking shorts (“The clothes are probably going to be burned; I took seven showers the whole trip.”)

David Antebi, Eric’s father, who owns a Huntington Beach clothing store, said: “He’s really not an avid biker, but he must be strong as an ox. For a young person to accomplish this type of trip at his age and show himself that he can push himself beyond what he thinks he is capable of. I’m confident that whatever life throws at him down the road, he’s certainly not going to be a quitter.”

The endurance-testing odyssey through rural America--which, Eric said, cost about $3,000 a person, including air fare--left the teen-ager feeling both proud of his accomplishment--and a little deflated.

‘A Little Lonely’

“I went through so much excitement for the entire trip, I kind of feel like something’s missing,” he said. “I was with these people every minute for nine weeks, and you kind of come home feeling a little lonely.”

Eric, a straight-A student who wrestled and played football in his freshman year of high school, took a summer bicycle trip through New England to Quebec, Canada, two years ago.

That 30-day, 700-mile trip merely whetted his appetite for something bigger.

Eric conceded, however, that he had second thoughts a few weeks before the cross-country trip began:

“I was really worrying, thinking, ‘I can’t ride 100 miles a day.’ I just didn’t think I could do any of this. I thought, ‘Is there any way to get out of this? Maybe I’ll break my leg. Maybe the Soviets will attack.’ ”

The day before he was to fly east to begin the trip in New Jersey, Eric came down with a sore throat. But by then he had decided he really wanted to go, so off he went, armed with antibiotics.

It wasn’t until two days after he left that his family learned that he had strep throat. But Eric said the first day of the bike ride was so rough that it didn’t matter whether he had sick or not.

“The first day, you’d get off your bike for lunch and just say, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t ride anymore.’ Then the leader would say, ‘OK, let’s go!’ It was just hard to hear you had to move again.”

The group rode from sunup to sundown, averaging 75-100 miles a day. The riders were hampered by rain the first two weeks. The toughest riding, Eric said, was in Kansas because of the heat and head winds, but by then he was in shape.

Riding through the Kansas flatlands was also mentally tough, he said, because it was so monotonous.

“You could see grain elevators for miles in the distance and they would not move,” said Eric, who took to counting telephone poles to break the monotony.

It wasn’t until they hit Montana, about 40 days into the trip, that he felt as if he and the others were actually going to make it: “We only had two more states to go.”

Eric learned to loathe the Continental Divide, which they crossed nine times riding through Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

He also grew to hate breakfast, lunch and dinner, when the daily fare became more monotonous than riding through the Kansas flatlands.

The bicyclists ate cold cuts every day for lunch, he said. “We’d look at cold cuts and want to die right there,” he said. He’s also no longer fond of Pop Tarts or Fig Newtons and vows it will be a long time before he eats canned stew, spaghetti or ravioli again.

Eric said that finally reaching the Pacific Ocean after 68 days of pedaling “was really incredible.”

Despite the fog and icy water, they all dove into the ocean to celebrate. Later, Eric said, “it kept hitting me: I actually did it. I biked across the country--4,235 miles in 9 1/2 weeks.”

“I think I did this trip for the same reason most people do it,” he said. “While you’re doing it, it’s really hard work, and you feel you’d rather be anywhere but on your bike. But when it’s over you can say, ‘Look what I did.’

Most people will never even get close to this. It’s something I can tell my grandchildren.”