The TransAmerica is the original. Adventure Cycling Association mapped it in 1976 for the US Bicentennial, and it remains the definitive cross-country cycling route — 4,228 miles connecting the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic through the full geographic diversity of the American interior.
The route doesn’t take the straight line. It threads through 10 states with deliberate care, routing cyclists over the Cascades, across eastern Oregon’s high desert, through Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley, over the Wyoming Rockies, across the wheat plains of Kansas, through the Ozarks of Missouri and Kentucky, and into the Blue Ridge of Virginia. You’ll climb the Continental Divide multiple times and end by dipping your wheel in the York River at Yorktown — the traditional finish.
The TransAm is designed around small towns. It avoids interstates and bypasses cities, threading instead through communities where the warmth toward touring cyclists is genuine and the cycling culture runs deep. Grocery stores, diners, and motels appear at the right intervals throughout. Most cyclists ride west-to-east to follow spring across the continent. The Kansas section is the psychological crux — 600 miles of wide sky and rolling plains that break some riders and forge others.