Journey of a lifetime: Graham man makes cross-country bike tour
A year-and-a-half-long bike tour took Graham native Steve Holman on a journey across the country and provided an opportunity for him to make connections and see sights few will ever experience. Traveling through back highways, interstates and dirt roads, Holman has made his way back home to Graham.
The journey started in March 2021, with 1,712 miles covered in the first month of the tour. His motivation for starting the trip was to live life to the fullest after finding out about his health condition.
“I found out I was sick, got diagnosed and (...) my decision to the whole thing, (...) after reading about it and being stressed and all this, I just said, ‘Dude, I’m not going to treat this, I’m just not. I don’t even want to deal with it.’ That was my whole game plan. I was 47 years old and I’m like, ‘Dude, why even? Why bother going through all this?’ So (...) I said, ‘You know, I’m not going to treat this. I’m just gonna go out. I’m gonna live my life to the fullest expectations,’” he said. “I was trying to find the biggest adventure that I could possibly come up with and I came up with this. I built a bike and off I went. (I had) never really ridden a bike before, (but) had a tent, gear, everything.”
Along the way, Holman decided to document his journey on the short-form video service TikTok. On the service he has amassed a following of over 8,000, with 86,500 likes spread across the videos on his channel stevendcoleman1974.
“I never really was a social media kind of person, so to speak, but I just started making videos and telling people my story. Then, all of a sudden, it started growing and I really wasn’t expecting that,” he said. “The whole TikTok thing (...) I didn’t even realize what I was doing, but I was telling a story. Every day, I was telling the story of a journey that wasn’t stupid, it was real life. You know, everything that I experienced, the hard times, the good times, the bad times and people just connected to it and they just thought it was amazing.”
For the full story, see the Wednesday, Oct. 5 edition of The Graham Leader.
