To Alaska by way of Oneida

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The Harrison family from Mt. Vernon, Ky., with their quint bicycle.

The typical route from Mt. Vernon, Ky., to Alaska wouldn’t include a stroll through Scott County, but then the Harrisons aren’t your typical family.

The Harrisons — Bill and Amarins, and daughters Cheyenne, Jasmine and Robin (ages 3, 4 and 6) — are traveling from their home in Kentucky’s Renfro Valley to Alaska, and they’re doing it as it has never been done before: On a quint bicycle.

“It’s all about simple living and living your dreams,” Bill Harrison said. “If we can do this, people can do whatever they want to; they can live their dreams.”

The Harrisons have been nicknamed the Pedouins — derived from Bedouin, a desert tribe that traditionally lived in tents.

“The nomadic lifestyle has always been in our blood,” said Harrison, who lived in a number of U.S. states and abroad before settling down in eastern Kentucky.

And like the Bedouins, the Pedouins’ primarily lodging is a tent that is among the little gear they are carrying in a small trailer towed behind the 14.5-ft. bicycle. (The family doesn’t always stay in a tent. Sometimes they stay in more permanent lodging. As they passed through Scott County, they spent Thursday night — which just happened to be the Harrisons’ wedding anniversary — at the Oneida Guest House.)

The family trip began on Aug. 1, when they departed their Renfro Valley home for the trip that will eventually land them in Fairbanks. By Wednesday (Aug. 5), the family arrived in Oneida, creating quite a stir when their bright yellow bicycle rolled down the “Four Lane” section of Alberta Street. Bright and early Thursday morning, it was back on the road again, and by Saturday, the family had arrived in Harriman and was ready to leave U.S. Hwy. 27 and turn east.

It’s all part of a 7,000-mile journey that will allow the family to explore most of the United States before winding up in Alaska sometime next year — August 2010, if all goes as planned. Once there, they will spend a year in Alaska, learning the local traditions and customs, before pedaling back to the continental U.S. and arriving in Kentucky sometime in 2012.

And while traveling 7,000 miles across the continent might seem a daunting task with three young children aboard, Bill Harrison shrugs it off.

“Risk-taking is what made America great,” he said. “It wasn’t politics or religion. It was the risk to move beyond the next curve of the river or the next mountain.

“It’s been amazing the number of people wo have told us that we’re an encouragement to them,” he added. “And if more people could learn to take risks and live their dreams, this would be a better world.”

As for the kids, “they love it,” Harrison said. “They’re still kids, and every day our six-year-old says, ‘Are we in Alaska yet?’” he added with a laugh. “I say, ‘no, baby, we won’t be in Alaska until next summer. So we still have to go through fall, winter and spring, and then we’ll be there.’”

The Harrisons’ children are home-schooled, and the trip gives them an opportunity for rich learning experiences,” Harrison said.

“On the road, lessons to explore and discover are plentiful,” Amarins Harrison wrote on the family’s website, pedouin.org. “We will learn subjects from social studies to science, language arts and mathematics to health and safety on a hands-on basis.”

The oldest Harrison daughters will keep a daily journal of their trip.
Adventure is a way of life for the Harrisons, who had an out-house and lived in a tent for several months while they were building their home in Mt. Vernon. They moved there shortly after their marriage.

“I drove down to the Grand Canyon in my old truck and met Amarins (a native of The Netherlands) and we got married,” Harrison said. “Then we wound up in Mt. Vernon.”

The couple actually have six children, but the three oldest aren’t making the trip.

“They think we’re crazy,” Harrison said. “But so do half the people I meet. Everybody back home (in Mt. Vernon) thinks we’re nuts. But then they thought the same thing when we pulled up in my pickup truck eight years ago. They gave us a week until we packed up our tent and went back to wherever we came from. But we built our house from scratch and stuck around.

“I knew they would have a pool going around when we decided to do this, so I stopped by to ask them what the pool was and they gave us a month until we head back home with our tails between our legs,” he added. “They first said we wouldn’t make it to Tennessee but they finally conceded that we might last a little longer.”

The family rolled into Tennessee last week, and will soon be in North Carolina (from there, it will be down the Atlantic Coast to Florida, then through the Deep South, Texas, and into the Southwest, and up the Pacific Coast to Canada).

The plan to bike to Alaska came to fruition after planning earlier this year.

“I decided that it’s time,” Harrison said. “I’m 48. If I wait any longer there won’t be nothing left of me, and if the girls get any bigger I won’t be able to drive them on the bike.”

So why a bike?

“Amarins always wanted to bike the spine of the Rockies,” he said. “Our goal is to make the pass in New Mexico before winter sets in.

“We thought about taking a horse and wagon but didn’t know how we would feed the stupid thing,” he added with a laugh.