Bicycle tour turns into adventure in litigation
A challenging, yearlong journey called Odyssey 2000 thrills many riders but leaves dozens of others with more than sore bottoms
Sunday, January 28, 2001
By Katy Muldoon of The Oregonian staff
Surely, these two cyclists were not on the same trip:
"It was a hostage situation. He had our money, and he was saying: 'If you don't like it, go home.' "
"I had the time of my life. I would sign up again."
Oh, but on the same trip they were.
A trip called Odyssey 2000 -- 18,500 miles, 44 countries, 366 days -- which began Jan. 1, 2000, with 246 riders spinning and grinning at the head of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif.
When it ended in the same place this Jan. 1, just 58 riders remained, an investigation was under way in Washington state, and about 50 riders had signed on to a class-action lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court against the tour's operator, Tim Kneeland & Associates Inc. of Seattle.
For riders, including Bruce Thompson, 41, of Golden, Colo. -- who said he felt held financially hostage -- and Judy Montague, 52, of Southeast Portland -- who had the time of her life -- the memories of Odyssey 2000 are as fresh as road rash. Their world's-apart attitudes offer glimpses into the ocean of emotion that swells still among those who endured and those who abandoned the physically, mentally and logistically ambitious but arduous trip.
Among those trying to come to terms with the outcome of Odyssey 2000 is Tim Kneeland, 55, the tour company's president and chief executive officer. A former U.S. Air Force survival instructor, he has led cycling adventures since 1980.
He knows that some of the riders, who paid $36,000 apiece to travel the world with him, left the tour disappointed and angry. He realizes that some were incensed at the tour's no-refund policy and others dumbfounded when the tour ran out of money in November in Singapore; those who wanted to complete the trip, riding through New Zealand and Hawaii, would have to pay another $3,000 apiece.
Firsthand, Kneeland witnessed complaints over travel arrangements, food, campgrounds, lines for bathrooms, illness, absence of medical staff and the ride's exhausting average pace of 79 miles a day, five days a week. He listened as the adventure that he and his partner, Karen-Ann Sutter, dreamed up in 1993 disintegrated, some nights, into a free-for-all of gripes and accusations by cyclists who said they weren't getting what they paid for.
But Kneeland says he warned riders before they embarked that Odyssey 2000 would be no luxury cruise. He told them that among all other human traits, flexibility would prove most critical to enjoying the journey. And, he says, the brochures and fliers for the tour, which formed part of the contract with riders, suggested that the company would tack on a surcharge if fuel and transportation costs increased beyond reasonable inflation rates.
"I don't think people can fly to New York without a hassle," Kneeland said in a recent telephone interview from his Seattle office. "How can they expect to travel for a year and have everything go perfectly . . . ?
"There are a lot of people who went on that ride and loved that ride. And there are a lot of people who are so angry. . . . It's a shame."
Thinking positive Micki Mallory and Erik Estrem occupy the camp that loved their Odyssey 2000 experience. The two Portland-area riders were featured in an article in The Oregonian in December 1999, shortly before they set out on Odyssey.
Back then, Estrem, a systems architect for Hewlett-Packard in Vancouver, Wash., arranged a leave of absence from his job, sold his van and most of his possessions, gathered his pennies and all he could borrow against his 401(k) plan. Mallory, a trade logistics specialist for Nike, left her job. She withdrew the cash she had saved to buy a house and used it, instead, to pay her way on Odyssey 2000.
Avid outdoor athletes, they ran, kayaked and steered their mountain bikes over muddy Northwest terrain to prepare their lungs and muscles for the two-wheeled marathon ahead.
Anticipating the challenges inevitable in traveling on a rigorous schedule with such a large group, Estrem entered the adventure ready to roll: "I'll have fun no matter what," he predicted in 1999. "I'll never regret it."
In mid-January, home in Sherwood only a few days after his year away, Estrem's ultra-positive tone had not wavered.
"It was the best year of our life," he said.
Estrem, 30, and Mallory, 35, kept friends and family abreast of their adventures from a Web site they updated on the road, complete with a travel diary and photographs of the two of them in Mexico, South Africa, Norway, Switzerland, China and elsewhere. The address is www.worldriders.com.
Reading their entries, rich with descriptions of the world's sights, sounds and scents, it's easy to see they kept not only their adventurous spirits but also their senses of humor. One photo from Baja shows seabirds perched high atop painfully spiny cactus. The caption reads: "These birds can relate to a 90-mile day on a bike seat!"
The two Oregonians, however, know that others traveled with more difficulty and varied expectations.
"At the end of the day, we'd say, 'This was the greatest day,' " Estrem said. "Someone else who rode the exact same route would say, 'This was the worst day.' "
The flip side Those "worst-day" riders have plenty to say.
Many have vented angrily and for the most part anonymously on a Web site, www.odyssey2003.com, whose title page reads: "Tim, I want my $36,000 back!"
Matt Newcomb, a 25-year-old programmer working at the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica, bought the Internet domain name and invited cyclists to submit comments. He was one of three riders kicked off the tour for behavior that organizers deemed disruptive to the group.
Newcomb figured the Web site would infuriate Kneeland; the tour operator has plans for more round-the-world tours and intended to call the next one Odyssey 2003.
He was right.
"I think it's really mean," Kneeland said. "I think it's inaccurate."
Interviewed by e-mail from the South Pole, Newcomb said, "It started becoming obvious that there wasn't a heck of a lot of planning."
Newcomb described a long day at a Mexican airport, during which organizers discovered they couldn't fit all the cyclists and all their gear onto two chartered jets. The gear was left behind and cyclists had to wait a couple of days for their bikes to catch up with them in Costa Rica.
He complained of bad food in South Africa, of poor directions in France, of ride staff members who would dismiss cyclists' concerns or berate those who had difficulty keeping up with the group.
"They mistreated more than one person on this ride," Newcomb said, "and after awhile I just refused to take it anymore."
Others felt equally miffed.
Bruce Thompson, for instance, says the bike tour's staffers abandoned him three times in Odyssey's first three weeks, including once when he was sick along the road in Baja, and once while climbing Costa Rica's 11,171-foot Cerro de la Muerta -- Mountain of the Dead.
Many Odyssey riders remember that day as among the ride's most brutal. Cyclists dubbed it "Mountain of Death Day" as they slogged higher and higher, through drenching rain and sleet until darkness began to fall.
Thompson and more than 40 other riders, some of whom were concerned they had hypothermia, asked organizers for sag support, or vehicles to transport them to camp, because they were cold, wet and exhausted. Instead, a staffer "yelled at how out of shape we were and told us to get back on the bikes and ride. We just all said, 'No,' " Thompson said. "She just got mad and drove off."
Eventually, the cyclists found their way to camp after they hired a flatbed truck to carry their bikes.
"We weren't equipped well enough to handle that day," Kneeland said. "What we should have done, in retrospect, was arrange for more transportation up toward the summit. That was a day we all learned from."
Lessons of the road Kneeland discovered early in the trip that Odyssey riders pedaled into the adventure with expectations, desires and physical abilities as diverse as the world itself.
Over two decades, he has led numerous rides across the United States and from Canada to Mexico. On those trips, 80-mile days were common and participants had their sights set on riding every mile.
He knew the 80-mile-a-day target was aggressive. But what he didn't fully anticipate was that for many Odyssey riders, making the mileage was less important than seeing the world.
Riders regularly went off-route, staying behind in towns they wanted to explore or moving ahead via car, bus or train, connecting again with Odyssey days or weeks later.
"Maybe five or six people actually rode every mile," Kneeland said. "Motivation was not as keen or as high as it might have been."
In some cases, he found that irksome: "If they didn't ride 2,000 miles, it was a fairly clear indication they weren't interested in riding their bike around the world."
Kneeland said that of the nearly 250 Odyssey riders, a dozen were "hard-core complainers" and "four to five dozen people shouldn't have been on the ride," because their expectations and the travel experience the company was able to deliver just didn't mesh.
"Some of those people -- they used negativity as a lifestyle," Kneeland said. "I thought cycling wouldn't draw those kind of people. But it did."
Odyssey's toughest lesson, however, came at the end of October in China, when Kneeland informed riders that the increases in fuel costs had pushed the tour to its financial breaking point. Enough money was left to get riders to Singapore at the end of November, but there they had to decide: Accept a plane ticket back to Los Angeles, or pay $3,000 more to complete the last legs of the trip, which would take riders through New Zealand, Hawaii and back to California for the culminating ride in Pasadena's Jan. 1 Tournament of Roses Parade.
Fury followed.
As of last week, so did 19 formal complaints to the consumer protection division at the Washington attorney general's office; a spokesman there said the office is still accepting and examining complaints.
They came from such customers as Emily S. Toby, an Oregonian from Independence, who wrote: "I paid for a 366-day bicycle ride and will get a 330-day trip because the trip organizer is insolvent. . . . He has provided no substantiating information about the budget or any finances and refuses to do so."
Gary Hoffman, a medical doctor, said in an e-mail complaint to the attorney general that he was ejected from Odyssey 2000 "because of my criticism of what I felt were inappropriate accident prevention procedures." Hoffman told the attorney general that the ride's full-time staff did not include a doctor; tour literature implied there would be one.
Over the course of the year, several riders broke bones; one man lost his lower leg as the result of a collision with a tractor-trailer rig in Sweden; respiratory ailments and sinus infections ran rampant, at times, through Odyssey camps.
"That's the one thing I wish we could have done," Kneeland said. "It would have been great for people to have an MD the whole time."
But, he added, "a doctor has very little bearing on the success of a ride."
Kneeland's company faces an investigation, too, by Washington's Department of Licensing.
Under a state law that went into effect in 1996, the company was required to have a seller-of-travel license while it collected money from those buying a spot on the tour. Kneeland's company obtained the license in March 1999 but began accepting Odyssey down payments several years before that.
To add to Kneeland's worries, on Dec. 22, 10 days before the ride was to end, six cyclists filed a class-action suit in King County Superior Court against Kneeland, his company and Karen-Ann Sutter, his partner.
"He promised something that he couldn't deliver," said Mark L. Fleming, attorney for the plaintiffs.
Kneeland's response: "I think we delivered more than we promised. . . . We were willing to risk it, and we did."
Hitting the brakes As riders wheeled into Singapore just before Thanksgiving, at least 120 of them wore black ribbons as a symbol of mourning that the trip was rolling to a close more than a month early for those who chose not to pay the extra money and continue.
"We were very divided at the end," said Judy Montague, who recently married a Portlander and moved to the Sellwood neighborhood. "We were very sad. It popped our bubble for sure."
But Montague, a two-time breast cancer survivor, refused to let November's disappointment discolor a year on the road that, for her, was a celebration of life. She does not intend to join the class-action suit.
"My memories of Odyssey," she said, "are very much how I want my experience to end -- very much on a positive note."
Others, including some of the 17 Oregonians who pedaled Odyssey 2000, share her upbeat spirit. Arnie Young, 51, of La Grande, who paid the $3,000 to finish the ride, said that for him, it unfolded "exactly as advertised," though the number of riders with serious complaints surprised him.
"I didn't want to go around the world complaining," he said. "And I didn't want to listen to others complaining. So, for me, that was the low point."
Kneeland, meanwhile, is planning his next round-the-world bicycle tour -- one with fewer riders than last year's and one in which riders won't be asked to ride more than about 60 miles a day.
He knows, however, that the anger and animosity that plagued Odyssey 2000 still rages among riders looking for legal recourse.
"There's not going to be anything more difficult," he said, "than what we just went through."
You can reach Katy Muldoon at 503-221-8526 or by e-mail at katymuldoon@news.oregonian.com.