A Bremerton grad goes on to see the world from two wheels

Denise LaFountaine is a 1981 graduate of Bremerton High School, where during school she was on the cross country and basketball teams and a cheerleader and left with a curiosity and personality that has driven her to see the world. Actually, "driven" is the wrong word. She has hiked and biked. And biked, and biked some more.

Now 61, LaFountaine is at home in Bremerton staying with her mother in a bit of temporary respite from seeing the world with a bike, tent, and only the necessary equipment and food to survive numerous journeys to South America, Central America, Cuba, and all over Europe.

Maybe she has taken after her father, Robert LaFountaine, who lives in Seabeck and has climbed many of the highest peaks in the world. At 85, Robert still makes one hike a week into the Olympics or Deer Park in Sequim.

Then, again, it is probably because LaFountaine is her own boss, her own person, and who can’t be denied seeing the world and its peoples and wondering why they are who they are.

She started riding a bike when she was in high school. Sometimes in a skirt. She didn’t get a car until she was 35. A bike was better. She could be closer to the land, she says, to nature and people who lived on the land.

LaFountaine had a job at the YMCA in Bremerton when younger, and didn’t feel like college. (Though she much later would get a degree in anthropology from the University of Washington).

“I didn’t have plans,” she says. “I didn’t want to just go to Seattle, or stay here, and get a podunk job that wasn’t interesting.”

She saved her money and purchased a one-way ticket to Europe.

“When you are young, plans aren’t black and white. Europe, oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” she says. “I just wanted to go as far as possible and have a new experience. As they say, ‘ignorance is bliss.’”

An aunt lived in Spain, so she could go there and live. She packed up a tent and sleeping bag and off she went.

"I had no money,” she said. “I hitched all over Europe (with a fellow traveler from Brazil, Eunice Schueler, for a while) and did odd jobs.”

She worked in the fields, avoiding the immigration police while emmeshed in oranges and watermelon on the Island of Crete, where she also washed dishes in a restaurant.

Her second year she met a guy from Texas – John Lenihan – and they started traveling together from Munich, Germany to Istanbul, Turkey. Lenihan applied for a job in Istanbul and while waiting for his interview to end she was approached and asked if she wanted to apply for job teaching English.

"The job didn’t last too long," LaFountaine said. "I had no idea what I was doing."

She wound up going to Austin, Texas, with Lenihan for two years. She eventually broke up with her traveling partner – but didn’t want to go back home.

"That would be too easy," she said.

So she spent nine months going overland by bus to Latin America – Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Brazil.

She saw a military coup in Buenos Aires, Argentina, got typhoid fever in Bolivia and was robbed three times, she says.

"In a dictatorship all kinds of crazy stuff happen," LaFountaine said, telling stories from Argentina. "Lights go out, military police come into my room, bombs go off. It’s just scary. Prices soar and drop."

She came back home and collected her degree in anthropology in 1991, then headed straight to Merida, Mexico, working for one year with the Mission of Friendship Catholic Mission as an education promoter in Mayan Villages and in the poor neighborhood of Merida. She worked in a Guatemalan refugee camp in the Mexican state of Campeche, running a house for special needs children until 1994.

And then, the epic bicycle trips began.

The first of what is now 11 came in 1997, when she pedaled for six days from Banff, Alberta to Jasper, Alberta, in Canada. Three years later she made a ride around Cuba (at one point being violently jerked off her bike, which was stolen). The trip took a month from Havana to Santiago.

Then it was bike trips to Spain and Portugal for six weeks, and a 10-day ride in Idaho that went through the Selkirk Mountains of Canada.

What are the odds she and her dad would meet in the weirdest of places? In 2016 Robert was in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world, visiting a friend. Who would arrive three minutes after he did?

"You got to be kidding me," says Robert as he recalls the story.

His daughter was completing a bike ride from LaPaz, Bolivia to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego. She was planning to return home, but started the family time with dad a little early.

"We spent three days together, hiking around the island, went swimming and having a fun time," says Robert.

LaFountaine changed her trip plans after that. Instead of returning home to Seattle, where she housesits and works (when not traveling) for the Renton Technical College in the College and Career Pathways Department, she biked 2,000 miles more up the Atlantic coast of Argentina, to Buenos Aires, and then to Punta del Este, Uruguay, for a total of 6,000 miles and six months of biking.

Next was a bike ride to Barouche, Argentina, over the Andes Mountains to Chile, and then down to Carretera Austral in Patagonia. That added another 2,000 miles in two months.

In 2019 she rode from Bremerton up to the Yukon and Northwest Territories on the Dempster Highway, all the way to the Inuit town of Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean. Her presence in the Yukon was life changing. She had a spiritual awakening, which will be the topic of a book she is planning to write.

When she completes the book she will join her uncle George LaFountaine, who has written 20 books, three movies, two plays and has directed, among many other things, all the stuff the comedian Bob Newhart did as well as Jerry Seinfeld and Richard Nixon’s inauguration.

During the COVID-19 pandemic LaFountaine was riding across the state when she got caught in wildfire smoke and had to be rescued by her brother, Kevin.

She also has biked the 2,500-mile Continental Divide Mountain Bike trail from Canada to Mexico, in 2021, and the next year rode 2,000 miles in 2.5 months through the Alps region of Europe ‑ Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy.

In 2023 she rode from North Cap to Bergen, in Norway, and then over to Denmark, Sweden and Germany, ending in Hamburg, Austria, three months later.

What inspires Denise and the LaFountaine family to do exciting but dangerous things?

"She has quite a family," says Bob Becker, a retired Bremerton coach and teacher, and a cyclist. "I didn’t know she did long distant bike rides until a couple years ago when she gave a presentation to the West Sound Bicycle Club." Last weekend she was with that group again, sharing about her adventures across Norway.

"I don’t know what drives her, but she keeps going,” says father Robert LaFountaine. "We are all proud of her. I guess we like adventures."

You can say that again.

"I go for long rides," says Becker, who a year ago became the oldest person, at 85, to finish the 152-mile RAMROD ride around Mount Rainier. "But she does all-summer rides."

To read more go to LaFountaine’s blog at  www.dispatchesfromalongandbumpyroad.com.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Denise LaFountaine left home to discover the world, and hasn't stopped