By MORRIS PROKOP
Star Sports Editor

An 80-year-old Edmontonian, Robert “Bob” Fletcher, is traveling approximately 13,500 kilometres over 155 days from Alaska to Panama City on an electric bike.

Accompanied by his long-time friend Wayne Grover, 69, of Edmonton, Fletcher began his ride on July 4 and is expecting to reach the end of his epic journey Dec. 3.

Along his journey, he’s staying in more than 60 Airbnb homes.
The Star reached Fletcher in Whitehorse Thursday.

He and Grover will be riding Evelo Electric Bicycles, supplied by the Evelo company out of Seattle.

“I believe Evelo in French, is bike,” said Fletcher.
“They have been very good sponsors with bikes and batteries, parts and clothing.

“The model is Atlas and one is the production model and one is the prototype, so they’re the first two of their bikes off the assembly line.

“I think they’re looking to get feedback on how it operates and everything like that. So far it’s been very good.
“No issue with the bike. Just an issue with my knowledge of bicycles I guess,” he added.

Fletcher said charging the bikes hasn’t been a problem.

“We have a 2,000 watt generator. If the places we’re staying don’t have power, we start the generator and it takes roughly a little less than four hours to recharge to full strength.

“If on a long ride like yesterday (Wednesday) – from Haines Junction is about 160 kilometres – when we stop for lunch, we have an inverter in the car, so I plug into it while we’re having lunch and that picks up another 25, 30 miles of charge over an hour.

“We have a couple of spare batteries but we haven’t used them yet.”

Kim Voogsgeerd of the Netherlands and Yiota Georgakopoulou from Greece are support staff on the expedition. They are taking care of Fletcher and Grover and are video drone operators as well.

“They are the essential part of the team. All I have to do is pedal. Without them, I couldn’t make it,” said Fletcher.

He explained why he is doing such an ambitious undertaking.
“I’m doing it, first of all, to celebrate my 80th birthday. I wanted to do something a little bit different than in the past, where you just have friends and cut a cake.

“It took me a while to come up with the idea. Once I got it about a year and a half ago, I’ve been working on it.

“The other portion was, lots of times when I’m watching television, they make people to be quite old, like 74 – ‘my grandfathers coming over and I can’t really do anything. We’ve got to look after him’.

trayed as non-active and we need to look after them, so I wanted to indicate to younger generations and even seniors that life doesn’t end at 65. You can keep going and have productive years and be active and keep active for a healthy, long life.”

“I was kind of sitting around after Christmas thinking ‘well, I’m almost 80,” he added. “I didn’t think I would make it. ‘What can I do that’s different?’ I’ve always sort of been an adventure type of person … I was looking for another activity to do and it took quite a while until I watched the series on Apple TV with Ewen McGregor and Charlie Borman, who ride their motorcycles around the world and in the last episode they ride electric Harley Davidsons from the bottom of Argentina to Los Angeles. I said to my partner ‘That’s it. I’m going to ride an electric bike from Alaska to Panama.’”

Fletcher said setting a record is part of the endeavour, but not the main reason.

“It came later … I was out riding my bike and I got thinking ‘I wonder who is the oldest guy to ride a bicycle and how far did he ride a bike?’ I went home and Googled Guinness World Records and found there was a category for the longest motorized bicycle ride. And that had been set at 8,209.2 kilometres and I thought ‘I’ll apply.’ So it wasn’t until maybe September 2021 that I was accepted. But it wasn’t my primary reason for doing it. It was an afterthought.”

Fletcher also explained why he decided to ride from Alaska to Panama City.

“I have a house in Costa Rica, which is not too far, about 1000 kilometres from Panama, if that. I had cycled previously from Anchorage to Mexico City and I always thought I should have kept going.

“We’re not on the same route. I picked a different way to go this time, as much as possible, so new scenery, new people, new countries.”

Fletcher described their intended route.

“We started in North Pole, Alaska (about 23 kilometres south of Fairbanks). I didn’t even know there was a place called North Pole. Some of my Facebook friends suggested that sounds like a better place to start than Fairbanks, Alaska, so we started there and we also decided that we would collect donations for Christmas presents for the children in Panama and the North Pole and Santa Clause’s house and everything there tied in with that and I think we got about $1200 in donations now. It made a better story I think, starting at the North Pole.

“Down through Alaska, Yukon, down through Eastern B.C. and then into Vancouver, down the Pacific Coast of the U.S. – Washington, Oregon, California – crossing at Tijuana into Mexico and not going down the Baja (Peninsula), as most people do, but going down the western side of the Sea of Cortez to Matzatlan, Puerto Vallarta, into Mexico City and … into Oxaca and then into Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama and stopping in Panama and maybe taking a six-month break until seasons change in South America and hopefully carrying on about a year from now through South America. It is in the back of my mind. If I survive this one,” he added.

Fletcher said the journey has been good so far.

“The weather has been unpredictable. We started with the heavy smoke from fires and 30, 32 C degree weather and then we crossed the border and we picked up a lot of very cool weather – rain, wind. We had a couple of bad days with headwinds and cold weather, like six degrees, seven degrees and then yesterday, coming in here, we had a tailwind and came from Haines and (had) a pretty good ride yesterday. Hoping the weather gets a little warmer.”

Naturally, Fletcher is expecting to encounter some obstacles.

“Obviously, the weather is going to be an obstacle as we get farther south, particularly in the Northern Mexican Sonoran Desert. It’s gonna be hot for three or four days at a time through there.

“There’s gonna be some problems on border crossings I would believe, with language and documents … that will be a problem to overcome and we’ve got to have patience because it’s going to take two or three hours at some borders to get across with all the information that they want.

“We’ve got a problem with our drone. We won’t be able to take that into Nicaragua. We’ll have to figure out what we’re going to do with it.

“I hope we don’t have any mechanical problems,” he added.

There are people on his support team if they do encounter problems.

“We have Kim, who will be leaving us in Vancouver. She has already done the rest of the Panama Pan-American Highway down to Argentina so this filled in a map on her globe of where she hadn’t been. And Kyle Walker form the Chicago area is joining our team. He is also very handy with fixing things. He’s also a media video drone operator as well.

“And Evelo, we can be in contact with their support team … as long as we’re in North America, they can get us parts quickly. I’m not sure about what happens when we cross into Mexico but we have spare parts. They’ve given me an extra motor and stuff, in case we need it and they will guide us through anything that we encounter.”

Fletcher doesn’t seem too worried about running into criminals or government troops.

“I’ve been through most of those countries and haven’t really had a problem, although a lot of times the police will stop you looking for bribes I guess, but I’m more worried about the bears at night up here than I am down there.

“But I know there’ll be some instances. And as we get to Tijuana, we pick up a girl from Columbia who’s Spanish-speaking, with a Mexican driver’s license, who will hopefully be able to sort some difficulties out for us with on the border and if we meet protests of some kind.”

Fletcher said the expedition isn’t totally sponsored and doesn’t come cheap.

“It’s a good chunk of money coming out of my pocket but I do have some sponsors – Evelo; Airbnb is providing somewhere around fifty per cent of our accommodations. That helps a lot. Sean Rourke, Nesbitt-Burns financial wealth planner, the Bank of Montreal, they provided a chunk of cash. The drone sponsors, they gave us the drones.”

“So I’m gonna say $40,000. That’s for accommodation, meals, gas.”

Fletcher added “I’m writing a book called ‘Octogenarian Odyssey: Trading my Sofa for a Bicycle Seat’ and it’s about motivating people to get out of their comfort zone and try something different. It doesn’t have to be bicycling. It might be walking. It might just be traveling. Whatever they can do to get off the sofa and try something new. It’s part of the motivation of the book.”