April 9, 2026
by Tom Ewing
Kevin Hume of Columbia, Missouri was just 21 when he rode across the United States as part of the Bikecentennial. He began in Oregon, and spent 82 days riding to Yorktown, Virginia. Echoing the vision of Bikecentennial organizers, the trip gave him a view of America “as it really is.” Hume was an assistant group leader, so he had some training, but still found the first few days to be really hard until he rode himself into shape. His group of about a dozen riders averaged sixty miles a day, with the longest day a 90 mile trek. The group spent nights in Bike Inns (often church basements or club houses). The hardest parts of the trip were the mountains, with the highest sections in the Rockies but the “steepest and hardest climbs” in the Ozarks and Blue Ridge Mountains. Favorite memories of the trip, according to Hume, included an ice cream cone in Eminence, Missouri, Fourth of July in Eads, Colorado, and “the people I’ve met” and “the places I’ve seen.” A map publised in the same August 20 issue of the Columbia Daily Tribune traced his route across the country from Oregon to Virginia.
A photograph of Hume in the local newspaper shows him wearing a “Virginia is for lovers” T-shirt (presumably a shirt he acquired at the end of the trip, as he admitted that he “got tired of the same four t-shirts all summer”). This advertising slogan was adopted by Virginia in 1969, about seven years earlier, and appeared frequently in the Bicentennial year of 1976. An advertisement published extensively outside of Virginia in spring 1976 declared “more America to the mile. Virginia is for lovers.”
The slogan currently appears on the tourism website on Biking in Virginia, with a photograph of cyclists on a dedicated rail-to-trail route.
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