Our Cross-Continent biker friend, Julie

We also got to see our new friend Julie, who we hosted via CouchSurfing just before we left Virginia. Julie completed a trip across the US of A on her bike ! Starting in Brooklyn, she traveled south to Blacksburg, where she caught the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail. I did not know this trail existed until she rolled up our driveway that day. The trail less than a mile from our house, and runs through Blacksburg!
The trail happens to run from Blacksburg to Portland! However, she took the trail less taken, and pedaled to San Franciso to visit a friend, and then got a rental car to tour up the West Coast to see, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, etc. So it was very cool to see her and discuss the trip on either end of her journey, which just so happened to correlate to either end of this vast continent and basically the terminal ends TransAmerica Bicycle Trail and either end of our journey! Here is a map of the trail. The gray line is a simplified version of her path where she veered from the trail.
Also of interest, she ran a Blog of her own, Spoke N Words, documenting her journey, complete with descriptions of the small sleepy towns of which the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail runs through, beautiful pictures, and videos shot from her bicycle! Needless to say, her Blog is a much more interesting documentary of a trip across America than ours. Haha. It was interesting to read her blog in comparison to ours as we were taking a very similar path, but making a very different journey. And see different perspectives, and experiences as we traveled through many of the same areas.