PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Sphen Johnson’s revised bike tour may be somewhat less epic than originally planned, but she hopes pedaling 1,200 miles around her home state will still be a rewarding journey and a way to raise awareness of her brother’s rare illness.
Johnson, a 21-year-old Caribou native, departed from Portland last Sunday, intending to bike more than 3,000 miles to Portland, Oregon, to raise awareness and research funds for neurofibromatosis, a genetically driven disease her 17-year-old brother Kaleb suffers from, with tumors growing throughout nerve tissue.
Johnson left Harbor View Park and took the Eastern Trail, paralleling Route 1, to Biddeford, then headed northwest toward the New Hampshire border. But on her second day, it became clear her route had problems.
“All the way up to New Hampshire, I just kept hitting dead ends and turnarounds. There was one point where I went down a road for like 9, 10 miles, and I got to the end and it was a dead end,” Johnson said, taking a break on the first day of her new ride from The County to Kittery and back.
Johnson left her hometown of Caribou on Thursday morning and was passing the Fort Fairfield-Presque Isle border on Route 1A in the early afternoon. She was aiming for Houlton by nightfall — roughly 60 miles in one day, with dozens of miles of modest hills and a few really steep ascents.
Johnson made it to Mars Hill, about halfway to Houlton, and camped at the home of a couple who heard about her trek, said Cindy Johnson, her mother.
The rest of her route will follow much of the coast on Route 1 to Kittery. On the way back north, she’ll go through the Androscoggin Valley, central Maine, the Katahdin region along Route 11 and then the St. John Valley back to Caribou.
Along with biking for her brother, whose tumors are not considered cancerous but still have had complications, Johnson may have another motivation: a jar of homemade blueberry jam donated by a woman she met while struggling to find New Hampshire.
“She is only to open [the jar] after she completes her trek,” Cindy Johnson said of the woman’s instructions.