By the seat of their bikes

“When you roll into town on a bicycle and plan to go out of town on a bicycle, you’re not very threatening.”

That’s one of the first lessons that Mark Milroy, then an abnormally young OCC photography student, learned on his 4,200-mile bicycle trip across the country in the summer of 1977.

Listening to some of his exploits makes you realize how much times have changed, but the things Milroy did were off the beaten path even then.

Riding from town to town from Oregon to New England, Milroy, fellow OCC student Scott Griffith and occasional companions they met on the road camped out in parks, slept in churches and in the backs of bars, squatted in abandoned buildings and even passed a night in the city council chambers of a small town in Kentucky.

With his family back in Costa Mesa and cell phones still years down the line, Milroy would keep his mother, Diana Blaisure, in the loop every few days, whenever he could get his hands on a phone.

“My younger son and I had a large map of the U.S. tacked up in the hall and kept track of Mark’s progress when he would call us,” Blaisure recalled.

Milroy was only 17 when he set off with Griffith, who was only two years older. Unhappy with high school, Milroy took an equivalency test at 16 and left.

Money was tight living with his single mom and he worked at a local machine shop to finance his trip, which, he said, led him to his true passion: photography.

“It taught me exactly what I didn’t want to do in life. The worst day in photo class was better than the best day in the machine shop,” Milroy said.

With his heart set on the cross-country trip, but nobody to go with him, Milroy posted an ad in a bike shop. Griffith responded and only a short time later the two relative strangers took a train from Union Station in Los Angeles to coastal Oregon where they began their journey.

There was no real plan.

The two hopped off the train, took a bus from Eugene, Ore., to Umpqua Lighthouse and set out on the first leg of the TransAmerica Bike Trail (also known as the Bikecentennial), which was designed in 1976.

They had no itinerary: Each day they would wake up, eat breakfast, strap their tent, camping stove, and other gear to their bikes and ride. Around mid-day they would pause to think about which nearby towns would make a good resting place for the coming night and when they arrived at their destination they would often go straight to the local police station to ask the cops where they could camp for free without being hassled.

They also got tips about the locations of the best campgrounds and hot springs and which diners had the best berry pie from other cyclists going the opposite direction on the same route.

“We adopted a philosophy that we didn’t want to pay for a place to stay unless we had to,” Milroy said.

This philosophy led to some of the boys’ most memorable adventures.

When Milroy and Griffith rolled into a small town called Hazard, Ky., for instance, the officer at the police station was less than helpful and kept stonewalling the pair’s attempts to find a free place to sleep.

After a number of unsuccessful efforts to get him to come around, Milroy pointed to the city council chambers next to the police station and the officer surprisingly acquiesced.

“I guess I wore him down. It was the path of least resistance to get us out of his face,” Milroy reflected.

The two set up shop and before they left they took a picture of Milroy sitting with his feet up on the mayor’s desk, trying to look official.

At another stop they knocked on a farmer’s door in Idaho and offered their labor in exchange for sleeping in his front yard.

The fact that they were such a novelty in the tiny towns helped them earn people’s good favor, Milroy thinks, and they were welcomed and shown warm hospitality much more frequently than they were shunned.

Milroy, nearing 50, now lives in Washington state with his Orange County sweetheart Mary McAleer where they are successful architecture photographers. They built their business up in Costa Mesa and worked there for decades before selling their Westside shop and moving north in 2005.

“I think the times have changed. I guess I find in my work that 30 years ago I could ask my way into a building and shoot and people were generally accepting and fine with that, but now I find people want to know what you’re doing and what you’re going to use it for and they want releases. People are a little more paranoid and aren’t as open,” Milroy said.

“That said, I think you could have basically the same experience today.”

The trip gave Milroy an abundance of confidence and an ability to be thrown into all sorts of situations and respond undaunted, he said. A prerequisite for fun on the ride was the ability to deviate from the plan of action and not be too set on having a certain experience or ending up a certain place.

Asked about the highlights of the journey, Milroy said they weren’t easy to define.

“All the places that didn’t even have a name on the map; just seeing countryside was the nicest,” he said. “Everyone looks forward to the highlights, but often times it was the quietest places that were the loveliest.”