After 15 days, 10 flat tires and 1,100 miles, Nate Bartlett showed up for his freshman year at Northwestern soaking wet.
The McCormick freshman biked from his Massachusetts home through New York, Ontario, Michigan and Wisconsin before arriving in Evanston, just in time to start his NU career. Bartlett and his 50-year-old father reached campus on Sept. 8, the day before the student’s Project Wildcat backpacking trip began.
“I like biking to get places, and I thought it’d be cool if I biked to school,” said Bartlett, who created a blog to chronicle the trip.
They “weren’t trying to be ‘green’ or anything,” but were “just doing it for fun,” Bartlett said.
The trip included 13 days of riding and two days of visiting relatives, he said. His mother met the bikers in Wisconsin to celebrate the end of the ride and bring the freshman’s belongings to campus.
Bartlett is the only member of the Northwestern Cycling Team to take such a trip, said co-president Adam Stehura.
“It’s a great story,” the Weinberg senior said. “Riding from Massachusetts – that’s pretty insane. So I mean, that sounds like a good way to transition from high school to college.”
Preparation included 900 miles of biking during the summer and mapping out a route, Bartlett said. Still, not everything went according to plan.
“We had seven flat tires in one day, ” the freshman said. “And we ran out of spare tubes and had to figure out how to get to a bike store.”
They eventually used GOOG-411, Google’s toll-free telephone information service, to find a bike store 10 miles away. Bartlett used his dad’s bike to go to the store and back, he said.
Overall, the trip was a success, said Bartlett, adding that spending time with his dad was his favorite part.
“I love riding with him any time,” he said. “That trip was a really great bonding experience, and I wouldn’t give it up for the world.”
The freshman said he would recommend biking to school to anyone who has the capability to do it. He said the most important thing is to find a companion biker.
On campus, Bartlett is already active in many student groups. He served as a sound production engineer for the movie “Song Tree” and participates in Communications Residential College’s Radiothon. But his most important activity is the cycling team, which he called “pretty awesome.”
“He’s great,” Stehura said. “He’s got some enthusiasm for the sport, and that what’s we like to see.”
For short rides around NU, Bartlett said he uses a different kind of bike: a “magic wheel,” which the freshman described as “a bicycle wheel with a shell top, two places to put feet on the bottom and a little training wheel behind.”
“It turns heads,” said Bartlett, who said hasn’t quite mastered it yet.
So will this active cyclist be biking home for Thanksgiving?
“Probably not,” he said.
