3,000-mile bicycle trip was blessed from the start.

When Mark Hoenig left Cleveland on the 3,000-mile bicycle trip that ended a week ago in Lomita, his parish priest blessed him and his bike on the parking lot of St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church.

Someone must have been listening.

Except for an initial few days of rain and a tender posterior and back as he adjusted to long hours on the road, Hoenig--23 and 6-foot-2 of slender, muscled cyclist--says the 33-day trek was a dream of good weather, spectacular scenery (he shot 25 rolls of film) and hospitable people. The trip raised $1,500 for a Franciscan charity.

“It was a lot of fun, so lovely, and there were no misfortunes,” said Hoenig at the home of his aunt and uncle, Bill and Mary Belle Hoenig, where he arrived Aug. 20 to find a finish line and a flag-decorated driveway greeting him. He also got a surprise greeting from his girlfriend, Sue Hartman, who had flown out from Ohio.

Friends, relatives, strangers and priests along the way put him up overnight--one woman in Indiana set off in her car to find him when she heard he needed a place to stay.

A group of priests took him out for a Chinese dinner and relaxation at a mineral hot spring. “We sat around and soaked for the evening,” he said.

At the Grand Canyon, he made friends with four German cyclists. “We cooked steaks at night,” Hoenig recalled. “They tried to teach me German and we sang songs from ‘The Sound of Music.’ ”

Riding late at night on the Mojave Desert, he experienced the full spectacle of the Perseid meteor shower. “I saw 55 shooting stars in an hour and one came down (seemingly) next to me,” he said with delight. “It was the neatest thing--a big white and blue flash in front of me.”

The toughest things he encountered, Hoenig recalled, were head winds that cut his speed in half and made going “harder than climbing a hill.” But there also were the thrills of 50- and 60-m.p.h. downhill runs and the triumph of making it up one 6-mile, 7% grade ahead of some speed cyclists who were not carrying any gear. Hoenig was carrying 60 pounds.

He didn’t fall once, he said, but he did have to patch 25 flat tires.

“I used my last tire patch and my last traveler’s check 25 miles from here,” he said. “It couldn’t have been better.”

A distance biker who trained for the trip with 50-mile rides to and from work as a lab technician at a hospital, Hoenig began thinking about the cross-country trip five years ago. But when the time came, he decided to make it more than a pleasure tour by raising money to train Franciscan priests to serve in missions in Honduras and Costa Rica. Friends, church people in Cleveland--and even some along the route who read of Hoenig’s trip in local newspapers--pledged more than $1,500.

His inspiration was Father Loren Koziol, the founder of the missions, who died of cancer in May.

“I recall his sermon at our church,” he said. “He was a powerful speaker and I could tell he was a faith-filled person and he had a great influence on me.”

Hoenig went back to Ohio last week--sitting aboard a jetliner. He starts medical school Monday at the University of Cincinnati. He plans to do medical work at Koziol’s missions.

“This was my last hurrah before getting into the studies,” he said.