Former Rochester teacher, an avid bicycle rider who has pedaled tens of thousands of miles, has just published third edition of his bike tour guide

By Mike Costanza

A bicycle’s wheels can sing of adventure as they hum down the road — for those who listen.

“It’s different when you’re on the road on a bicycle,” says 67-year-old Harvey Botzman, author of seven guides for bicycle touring in the greater Rochester region. “You’re accessible to everything that’s on the side of the road.”

Botzman, a native of the Bronx, one of New York City’s five boroughs, first gave vent to his wanderlust at the age of 11, when he and some friends pedaled up a local route.

“We did the Bronx River Parkway to Kensico Dam,” he says. He put 44 miles on his old-style coaster bike that day — though he kept it from his parents.

“Sometimes, 11-year-olds and 12-year-olds and early mid-teens want something secret,” he says with a grin.

In later years, more exotic places drew Botzman — and longer trips.

After graduating from college with teaching credentials, he spent 1966 through 1969 with the Peace Corps, stationed in Butere, Kenya. Teaching high school in the African town gave Botzman the chance to feed his desire for adventure again, this time with a trip across the continent. Racketing down rudimentary roads aboard buses and other forms of public transportation, he came to know local peoples in ways unavailable to most regular tourists. Though some places lacked accommodations for visitors, those living there often shared their homes and meals with the stranger from the US.

“People would bring me back to their houses, which were not necessarily anything more than a round or square hut with a dirt floor and no windows,” he says. “They many times did not accept even a gift of going to the market and buying something.” Botzman said he did not encounter too many problems on his routes — some areas were dealing with civil unrest and were unsafe for ground travel. In those infrequent times, he took to the air, he said.

“I did kind of get stuck in Timbuktu,” he says. “The winds come up and the sand comes through, and you’re in the middle of a sandstorm and the plane can’t get in.”

Returning to the States, Botzman attended graduate school in Rochester, acquired a master’s degree, and eventually took a job as a substitute teacher for the Rochester school district. The modest pay left him with cars that were not in the best of condition. “They’d break down,” he explains.

Botzman began using another form of transportation—a $25 bike he’d bought at a Monroe County Sheriff’s Office auction—in place of a car. Pedaling to a teaching job, he’d change from his bicycling clothing to that appropriate for the classroom. “Occasionally, the PE [physical education] teacher would let me shower,” he says.

Botzman was casting about for a way to spend his summer vacation at the end of a school year in the late 1970s, when an idea hit him. “I said, ‘Well, let me go ‘round Lake Ontario,’” he says.

Loading his bike with panniers — essentially saddlebags — filled with camping equipment and supplies, he set off to travel the 600 miles of Ontario’s shoreline.

The experience of coursing around nnrest of the world, was exhilarating.

“It felt something new; something where I was totally free,” he explains, still carrying some of the wonder of that first trip in his voice. Without the restrictions imposed by automobile travel, he found himself able to get closer to all around him.

“There’s nothing standing in the way,” he explained. “People and other things, including animals, are accessible to you.”

As in Africa all those years ago, the people he encountered opened their doors to him.

“I was meeting people, and they’d offer me a place to stay — a backyard, or someplace else,” he says. “They’d communicate with me.”

Since that adventure, Botzman has pedaled tens of thousands of miles on a multitude of long trips. He’s circled most of the Great Lakes, toured the Finger Lakes, and cycled the length of the Erie Canal and the east and west coasts of the U.S., to name just some of his trips. Along the way, he began writing about his travels for bicycling newsletters and other publications, and giving workshops on bicycle touring.

After bicycling 1,800 miles from Maryland to Florida in the early 1990s, Botzman hit on the idea of publishing a guidebook for long-distance bicyclists. He formed his own publishing company, Cyclotour Guide Books, and published his first book, Long Distance Bicycle Touring Primer, in 1995.

“That was actually a small manual I gave as part of a talk about how to bicycle tour,” he says. The touring manual, which Botzman wrote on public library computers, formed the first 50 pages of each of his next six books on bicycle touring.

Botzman’s latest book, “‘Round Lake Ontario: A Bicyclists Tour Guide, 3rd Edition,” details the delights of circling the lake by bicycle in a form that takes the guesswork out of the trip.

Want to know the best routes around the lake, the equipment you may need for the trip, the foods you might carry, and the places to spend the night?
They’re all in there, along with maps, suggestions for sightseeing, and little bits of information about the route that you can’t pull from a map. Most might not know, for example that the Canadian villages along the wine route from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Hamilton, Ontario are known for their bakeries, or that BWI — Bicycling While Intoxicated — is a felony in Canada.

Botzman has also held or holds positions in a variety of non-profit organizations concerned with bicycling down through the years. He has served on a state panel on bicycle tourism and on various committees of the Rochester Bicycling Club, and is on the board of the New York Bicycling Coalition.

“He seems to be an independent thinker,” says Richard Desarra, an avid bicyclist who got to know the author in the 1990s. “He seems to, for years, have done a lot for bicycling.”

One cause close to Botzman’s heart is that of making Amtrak regulations more bicycle-friendly, so that those who ride full-sized bicycles in New York state can more easily travel by rail to the places in which they want to ride.

“I like traveling with public transportation,” he says.

Unfortunately, only one train that travels through the state, the Lake Shore Limited, is capable of carrying full-sized bicycles — and those only under conditions that limit their use off the train. The train travels daily from Chicago to New York City.

“They have to be boxed, and they’re carried in the baggage car,” says Karen Managan, president of the Rochester Bicycling Club.

Botzman and Managan assert that these restrictions discourage bicyclists from traveling the state by train, and thereby tourism. Both have supported more bicycle-friendly rail storage regulations, Botzman going so far as to give written comments to the state Department of Transportation. Managan says that the author has been involved in many such causes.

“He has been on several committees, like that of the New York Bicycling Coalition, pushing for anything that’s bike-related,” Managan says.

Now retired from teaching, Botzman doesn’t have any health problems, and continues to put long miles on his bicycles. He puts about 30 miles a day on local roads, just while running errands. When on long trips, he’ll cycle 50 miles or so, set up his tent, and use a laptop to update his books or work on other projects. Inevitably, he hears the refrain that has echoed through his journeys.

“I still hear, ‘I wish I was doing what you’re doing,’” he says. To that, he has an answer: “Why don’t you?”

About 13,000 have bought Botzman’s books online.