Alumni Profiles

One day when Barbara Allwork Seigert '53 was in her 40s, she called her husband and asked him to come pick her up. "I had ridden 12 miles on my bicycle and I thought I should be in the Guinness Book of World Records!" she recalls. The thought of riding her bike home, for a total of 24 miles, was inconceivable.

Today, at 71, Siegert thinks nothing of riding her bike 2,400 miles from San Diego to St. Augustine, Fla., as she did in March of this year. "If you can ride around town, you can ride across the country," she says. "You just take it one day at a time and connect the dots."

If you follow the dots backward in Siegert's life, you come to the point in the early 1970s when she started biking. "After my fourth child entered kindergarten," she explains, "I started to feel the freedom to ride my bike around the block." As a French major at UNH in the 1950s, she never considered herself an athlete, although she did play field hockey and basketball.

The next dot came when her three children were out of the nest and Siegert and her husband, Richard, started biking together. They biked across the country twice from east to west and three times from north to south, in addition to trips in Europe and Canada. She even wrote a book called Bicycle Across America, published in 1996. (The back cover quotes sports writer Jackie MacMullan '82: "Snap on your helmet and enjoy the ride with Barbara Siegert!")

After her husband died in 1998, Siegert thought she was done with cross-country bicycle trips. But when two friends, Dick and Susan Voght of Bow, N.H., proposed one, she leapt at the chance and started to prepare as best she could in a New Hampshire winter--climbing up and down 500 steps a day on the UNH campus.

The threesome flew to San Diego and on March 1, they set out, riding an average of 50 miles a day. They had their share of obstacles to overcome--heat in the Southwest, mountains in Texas, flat tires, and most bothersome of all, a steady headwind as they crossed the Florida Panhandle.

Dies Park near Jasper, Texas: Susan Voght, left, and Barbara Allwork Seigert '53, right.

But the rewards far outweighed the difficulties. They met many people in small towns along the way. They stopped to look at wild flowers and to take pictures of funny signs--like the entrance to the "Rust N Peace" ranch, surrounded by ten rusting vehicles. The cyclists were often accompanied by herds of sheep, goats, cows or horses--even a camel--following alongside the road. At the end of the day, the trio relished haggling over the price of their motel room, which they discovered is almost always negotiable.

Food never tasted so good--whether it was a heap of crawfish cooked up in a big pot on a Louisiana plantation or just a can of Vienna sausages in a motel room. But their staple was iced tea and the local Tex Mex cuisine. And so it was fitting as they crossed the desert in the Southwest--eating many a chili pepper and looking a bit red themselves--that they christened themselves the Red Hot Chili Peppers Cycling Team.

Siegert doesn't have any more long trips planned at the moment, but says, "I would go tomorrow if someone said, 'Let's go!'" ~

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