The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Woman’s bike trip to focus on housing

‘App economy’ job prospects booming
Updated 4 min. ago
GE to hire 5,000 veterans, add 400 new manufacturing jobs
Updated 16 min. ago
Kasich wants 100 gigabits per second state network, smarter smartphones
Updated 23 min. ago
Benefit dinner held for girl who died in car accident
9:17 a.m.
Groundwater monitoring well offers clues to the health of local industry
7:29 a.m.
> More headlines

11:54 AM Wednesday, January 6, 2010

On June 18, Courtney Curtner of Miami Twp. plans to climb aboard a bike in Boston, Mass., and she won’t be done peddling until Aug. 24 when she sets foot in Santa Barbara, Calif.

It’s an ambitious ride, to be sure, and one that stretches 3,703 miles through the heart of America.

But Curtner, who only got serious about riding last summer, sees it as the perfect way to spend a healthful summer and do some good at the same time.

The trip is sponsored by a group called Bike & Build. They sponsor cross-country bicycle trips which benefit various affordable housing groups such as Habitat for Humanity.

With seven seasons under their belt, Bike & Build says it has donated nearly $2.5 million, spent more than 63,500 hours building, pedaled more than 4 million miles and involved more than a thousand young adults.

Curtner said she found out about the organization through a comment she posted on an Internet blog. “I posted that I was interested in biking across the country,” she said.

Someone suggested Bike & Build as the perfect way to do what Curtner wanted and to do some good at the same time.

Her friend and biking partner, Ryan Schepers, thought it was a good idea, too. Laid off from construction work, Schepers signed up for the trip.

Each has to come up with $4,000.

“It’s kind of a hefty cost but it all goes toward the trip,” Curtner said. “We’ll actually get $500 that we can contribute to any affordable housing cause that we might want to.”

She said she would probably give that money to the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity and get some building experience either this winter or next spring.

Curtner just finished her associates degree in fine arts at Miami University — Middletown. She plans to start majoring in biology at Wright State University this month.

Curtner, a Miami Twp. resident, is a 2004 graduate of West Carrollton High School.

Schepers graduated the same year from Miamisburg High School and resides in West Carrollton.

Fairly new to biking, Curtner said her longest distance in a single day is about 80 miles. Next July, she’ll face a 98-mile day near Amarillo, Texas. “It will be a bummer,” she said.

On July 7-8, the group of 28 cyclists will pass through the Dayton area.

Curtner said she’s never been further west than Chicago so the majority of the trip will be in new territory for her.

She said her mother, Kathy Kosicki, supports her efforts. At first, a few of her friends didn’t believe her and a few thought she “was a little bit crazy.”

But now they’re excited to see what kind of pictures she takes on the trip. Photography is one of Curtner’s hobbies.

“I’m most excited about being able to see everything from the seat of my bicycle,” Curtner wrote on her Bike & Build profile. To read more or to donate towards her trip, visit www.bikeandbuild.or/rider/3865

“I’m pretty pumped,” Curtner said. “I would get on my bike right now if it wasn’t 30 (degrees).”

“It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.”

Contact this

columnist

at (937) 696-2080 or williamgschmidt@verizon.net.

HEREABOUTS WILLIAM G. schmidt

Share this article