LIVINGSTON COUNTY

Adventure traveler embarking on bike trip around the planet

Jennifer Eberbach
Livingston Daily
Long distance bicyclist Bill Saint-Onge breaks for lunch on steps outside of a church in New Brunswick during his 2012 approximately 10,000-mile trek across eastern Canada. His next trip will take him around the globe.

When long-distance bicyclist Bill Saint-Onge turns 70 on Christmas Day, he likely will be somewhere in the desert west of El Paso, Texas. 

Saint-Onge will still be riding on his 71st birthday. 

He is gearing up to embark on a 14-month bicycle ride around the world in early December.

He plans to ride through more than 25 countries, circumnavigating the globe by bicycle and a few plane rides, with camping gear in tow.

"I have a dreadful fear of being retired and watching TV all day. That's driving me to get out and do this stuff, and to show people in their 70s they can do it, too," Saint-Onge said. 

In Europe and central Asia, he'll be joined by an adventurous traveler, Diane Goettlicher, 67, of Fair Oaks, California, for about six months.

Goettlicher, who has taken two other long-distance journeys with Saint-Onge, will join him in Portugal in March and probably turn back somewhere in Asia. 

From Palm Springs to Texas and beyond

His route — he has tweaked it several times — has him beginning and ending in Palm Springs, California. 

Along the way, he'll ride along the southern U.S. border with Mexico, across Texas and the Gulf states and south to Tampa, Florida, where he will jump on an airplane to meet up with Goettlicher in Porto, Portugal. 

The pair will bike cross Europe, passing through Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria.

They plan to continue into central Asia, including Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan.

More countries on Saint-Onge's planned route include Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Australia and New Zealand. 

Saint-Onge said many people who ride around the world do it in phases, with trips home in between.

"My original plan was to do this as a staged ride in a period of four years," he said. "My previous trip to India and Asia was going to be the first stage, but then my bike got wrecked (by a vehicle) in India and that put me back to ground zero. At my age, I decided I've got to do it in one gulp."

After the wreck, he continued his trip through southeast Asia but not on bicycle. Despite the incident, India is the country he is looking forward to cycling through the most.

"I find the place the most fascinating place I've been to," he said. "The first time, I was all up in the north. ...The southern part has less people and more cultures. It's a complex country and I want to see more of that."

Finding a passion and a partner for riding

Saint-Onge lived in Hamburg Township and the Brighton area, raising his two children there, for about 25 years before retiring to his birthplace of Alpena.

He's loved outdoor adventures, like winter camping, wilderness canoeing and kayaking, his whole life.

In 2012, he biked about 10,000 miles in Canada. It took him more than six months.

Bill Saint-Onge and Diane Goettlicher take a break from bicycling in Newfoundland in 2018. She will join him for part of his upcoming ride around the world.

Goettlicher said she first met Saint-Onge on a ferry when she was coming back from hiking in Alaska. He was returning from a bike trip.

Being a semi-retired professional painter and metal artist provides her time to take long trips.

"We had both been out in nature for a long time," she said. "We were both sleeping on the couches in a front cabin and woke up and started talking."

After his bike got hit in India, he told her about his change in plans to stop riding but continue traveling.

"That was the genesis of our first trip together. Had his bike not gotten hit, I would have stayed in California. We went to Thailand and Vietnam, and we had a really good time," she said. 

Last year, the pair rode bicycles from Alpena to Newfoundland, Canada.

"That was my first long cycling trip. To tell you the truth, I'd rather be backpacking, because it's safer, not on the roads, but I really liked it," she said. 

She said she's completed what hikers call the "the triple crown," hiking three of the country's major trails, the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail.

"They all took me about five months each," she said. 

"Bill's a good planner, I'm not. I just like to go and I don't like to micromanage the planning, but a trip of this magnitude needs someone with his proclivity for planning," she said. 

Bill Saint-Onge has his bicycle packed with gear and ready to go for his upcoming around-the-world trek, Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2019.

Saint-Onge's son Ben Saint-Onge said his father has always loved being in nature.

"When he was 12 or 13 years old, he would make my grandmother drive him out to the woods and leave him there," said Ben Saint-Onge, 28, a University of Pittsburgh graduate student.

"He's very connected with nature, and with him getting a little older, because of his lifestyle, his knees are quite bad. He took up bicycling so he could go to remote places and it would be easier on his knees." 

He decided not to seek a Guinness record

Saint-Onge's original plan was to go for a Guinness World Record.

"I wrote Guinness," he said. "At the time, there wasn't a topic for the oldest person to circumnavigate the planet by bicycle."

He said he corresponded with Guinness World Records for about a year, fine-tuning what would be required of him.

"Then, when everything was all wrapped up, I decided I couldn't do it like they wanted me to," he said. "I wrote them a letter and I withdrew."

He said following their rules would be "to oppressive."

"That's not why I'm going out there to do this," he said. "One thing that I thought of as oppressive was their guidelines. You had to go east or west, you can't backtrack ... so, you end up charting a straight-line course around the globe. I like to take detours and go in the opposite direction and visit a city."

Since withdrawing from a Guinness World Record attempt, he's changed his route.

"It's got to come from your heart," he said. 

He said the route he planned for a world record attempt covered flatter terrain.

"I've been going back and rerouting into more mountains, like in Basque Country in northwest Spain, and then probably in central Asia, like in Tajikistan, and then heading east out of Thailand into Cambodia. The terrain is kind of tough there," he said. 

They'll share their travels, 'road angels' on social media

Saint-Onge and Goettlicher plan to document what he calls "road angels."

"People passing in cars will stop and give you water and food, sometimes let you set up a tent in their yard," Saint-Onge said. "We'd like to showcase these people across the world. We pass through a lot of rural areas. We pass through a lot of Muslim countries, and we want to recognize people for their acts of kindness and post this stuff and have people see that the world is not filled with maniacs with bombs."

He'll do the writing and she will take photographs. 

He said they plan to post about their journey online, at longhaulrider.com and on Facebook. 

Saint-Onge also set up a GoFundMe online fundraiser to help with travel expenses, at www.gofundme.com/f/cycle-the-world-for-the-record

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Contact Livingston Daily reporter Jennifer Timar at 517-548-7148 or at jtimar@livingstondaily.com. Follow her on Facebook @Jennifer.Timar99 and Twitter @JenTimar99.