George Christensen, a 55-year-old bike messenger, likes to set challenges for himself. In 1975 he sat through every inning of every game in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. In 1991 he made 73 deliveries in one day, a record for Chicago bike messengers at the time. Last spring he attended 70 movies in 12 days.
As a kid he was always saving his allowance for something, but didn’t know what. He wanted a better bike than the one-speed his parents gave all their kids but wouldn’t spend his money on the Schwinn Varsity ten-speed he coveted. “My brother, who’s two years younger than me, he bought the Schwinn Varsity,” he says.
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Since then he’s biked up the “world’s most dangerous road” (a one-lane mountain path in Bolivia), across “America’s loneliest highway” (Nevada’s Highway 50) three times, and over various “highways from hell,” including some in Cambodia. In 1984 he cycled across New Zealand and Australia, including the Nullarbor Plain, a 750-mile stretch of treeless desert. In 1986 he rode 900 miles from Chicago to New Orleans in mid-January, hoping to get into the Super Bowl. He couldn’t get a ticket and wound up watching the game in a bar. Afterward he headed off to Mexico. In 1989 he rode 7,000 miles in South America, from Medellin, Colombia, to Tierra del Fuego. Along the way he crossed Chile’s Atacama Desert. “It was headwinds that hold for 3,000 miles,” he says. “It was the first trip I’d done where I thought, jeez, this is one I don’t want to do again. I’m not enjoying this.” But he’s proud that he made it.
He says he’s never had trouble finding a place to camp. “The one great lesson I’ve learned, the one true axiom, is there’s always a camp spot awaiting you,” he says. “Something is going to turn up.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
