Washington  – Ryan Bowen arrived safely Sunday in Washington after completing a six-week, 5,000-kilometre bicycle tour in honour of Barack Obama, set to be inaugurated Tuesday as the first African- American president of the United States.

“Why did I ride? Well, the bike’s the best way to get around,” Bowen, 22, joked as he mounted his red bicycle for the last leg of his journey into the capital from Arlington, Virginia.

Bowen’s goal, though, was less to see Tuesday’s inauguration than to celebrate the history-making event.

Some three dozen riders joined Bowen to cycle the final few thousand metres across the frozen Potomac River. Some of the riders had just learned of Bowen’s endeavour that night, organized by a local bicycling group.

Bowen’s own decision to ride coast-to-coast was relatively spontaneous, too: “I decided to do this a week-and-a-half after Obama was elected.”

Most people mounting a cross-country tour spend months or even years planning and organizing their effort.

Before starting out on December 2 from Los Angeles for Washington, Bowen said that he had never ridden more than some 30 kilometres at a stretch.

During the journey, he averaged 135 kilometres per day and actually reached the US capital city two days early, beating his deadline of inauguration day.

Gliding along a bike path in the jet wash of Reagan National Airport, bicyclists were bundled up against Sunday’s near-zero- Celsius weather.

Bowen said the previous day’s ride was his coldest on what was a tour of mostly Southern states, enjoying mostly mild conditions despite his winter passage.

Embracing Obama’s infectious message of hope, Bowen’s bicycle bears signatures from people who helped and inspired him during his continental journey, including a London woman whom he met in Texas and who planned to ride her bicycle to Singapore after returning to England.

Along the way, at least 20 other riders accompanied Bowen on different legs of the tour.

“The bike is a powerful vehicle in itself,” Bowen said, marvelling at the fellow cyclists of all ages and walks of life, whom he met on the road. “This is pretty easy for a
22-year-old.”

Bowen, who is black and native American, said he was inspired by a kinship he feels with Obama, sharing both mixed-race heritage and “white” upbringings, in Bowen’s case with an adoptive family.

Bowen, a photographer and massage therapist, is also a recent graduate of Los Angeles’ Occidental College, where Obama started his own undergraduate studies before transferring to Columbia University. In his final year, Bowen mounted his own political campaign and was elected Occidental’s second black president of the student body.

Riding into the city to join hundreds of thousands of revellers assembling for Sunday’s celebratory concert at the Lincoln Memorial, Bowen recalled misadventures including a collision with a Jeep in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and good fortune gleaned through a network of supporters, organized online through the grassroots website BikingForObama. com.

Bowen and his colleagues, including filmmaker Albert Vazquez and support driver Eleni Polakoff, spent some nights camping, but with minimal planning were able to find shelter in churches and with private hosts who heard of the adventure en route.

Compared to the well-oiled campaign that won Obama the White House, Bowen’s bike trip was a seat-of-the-pants operation. But he did take one lesson from Obama’s machine: using 21st-century communications to build an instant network of supporters.

Wired with earphones and a Blackberry, particularly in the final days of the project, deft outreach efforts by Bowen also caught the ear of Washington’s top bicycle advocate, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, who represents Portland, Oregon, a city that has become nearly synonymous with bicycle commuting in the last decade.

Bowen is himself a native of Portland, where he attended high school, but became a cyclist only at college in California.

Meeting at the Jefferson Memorial, Blumenauer, co-chair of the Congressional Bicycle Caucus, led the last leg of Bowen’s journey with a tour of the National Mall and pedalled past the stage of Tuesday’s inauguration at the US Capitol.

Capping off the highlights of Bowen’s trip, Blumenauer handed Bowen a ticket to Tuesday’s inauguration.

“This isn’t why I did this,” Bowen said, accepting the gift to witness Obama’s oath of office. “This is the icing on the cake, the cherry on top.” (dpa)