Biking for Habitat for Humanity
Chester residents Mary and Sam Mirabito greeted the couple outside Restaurant de Village with a large banner sign stating, “Welcome to Chester Marcia and Michael Biking for Habitat”.
“I knew Marcia because we were roommates at Vassar College in New York, that’s why Mary and Sam came to Chester for the weekend,” Mary said.
Marcia said they roomed together during their senior year but first met in a freshman history class.
In addition to visiting friends, Mike said, “we thought wouldn’t it be fun to ride our bike up the driveway of our son in Ohio so that our grandsons could see us in a different light.”
According to the couple’s online journal, their grandsons, Charlie, 4, and Jack, 2, clapped as the couple biked up to the house.
The Maddens also visited their other sons and grandsons in Colorado and Georgia.
The couple, who recently celebrated their 35th anniversary, financed the trip themselves but is asking friends and family to donate at least 1 cent per mile for 5,000 miles to Habitat for Humanity so the couple can help build a Habitat House in Pierce County and two more houses in Guatemala.
Estimating $20,000 has been raised so far, Mike said he was unsure of the specific number since the money gets sent directly to Habitat for Humanity.
Mike recently retired as Executive Director of the Pierce County, WA Habitat for Humanity office but started out as a volunteer for the organization 15 years ago.
Mike said the couple will be leaving on Easter Sunday 2007 with 15 others to take a ten-day trip to Guatemala to start construction on the two houses.
The couple has been biking since April 29 and hopes to finish in October.
When asked about the difficulty of such an excursion, Mike said that it “was easier than we thought.”
Mike said he used to bike to work and his wife biked several times a week so training for the trip mostly involved doing weightlifting at the gym.
Taking the most amount of time, Mike said, was making decisions on what type of bike to ride and what to bring.
“We spent a lot of time researching the type of bike we wanted,” Mike said.
After deciding to purchase a tandem bike, the couple decided to take a GPS unit, cell phone, laptop, and only a few changes of clothes requiring them to do nightly laundry.
The couple traveled through eleven states and some of their adventures included traveling on the Oregon Trail, seeing the vast farmlands of Twin Falls, crossed the Continental Divide twice in Colorado, traveled old Route 66, and biked the Erie Canal Bike Trail in New York.
The hardest day for the couple, Marcia said, was at the beginning of the trip when they left Denver to head to southeast Colorado in 106 degree heat with high humidity.
After climbing a total elevation of 115,041 feet and averaging 50 miles a day, the Maddens were happy to arrive in New England.
The couple took the ferry from the southeast corner of Rhode Island to Block Island.
According to their journal the couple called the island “a vacation paradise with bike friendly roads, long stretches of beach, lobster rolls, and awesome vistas in all directions.”
After leaving Block Island, the couple biked into Connecticut and enjoyed traveling the back roads with views of the water from New London to Chester.
Mike is originally from Greenwich and said “it’s great to come back to see the greenery, beaches, shoreline and good food, because some places we were at didn’t have good food.”
Marcia complemented the state’s stonewalls, foliage, flowers, and specifically mentioned the beautiful color of homes on River Road in Essex.
The couple experienced true hospitality in Essex when they asked a man who was busily pruning his bushes for directions to Chester center.
Not only did he give them directions but put his shears down and invited them into his house for water and juice.
“We will be seeing more people on this leg of the trip than the other legs,” Mike said, adding they planned to visit another one of Mary’s former roommates in New York City, stop in New Jersey to visit friends who used to live in Tacoma, and see Mike’s former college roommates who live in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
“With only a month to go it’s get nostalgic,” Marcia said, adding her and her husband felt the trip so far was “better than we dreamt it would be.”
To read the couple’s journal or donate to Habitat for Humanity visit www.tpc-habitat.org/1000friends.php.
