
 
 
 
 One night this past August, Jeffrey Tanenhaus, a corporate-event planner, checked out a Citi Bike from a dock near Gramercy Park and began a journey to cross the country on the blue, one-piece, aluminum-frame utility bike. “Riding a Citi Bike in New York was always the highlight of my day,” he says from Albuquerque. “Both my job and the lease on my apartment were ending, and I couldn’t stomach the thought of getting ‘just another job.’ I was out of options in New York, and I thought of the great American road trip: What if I scaled up and used a Citi Bike?” 
 
 How did you choose this particular bike? I can usually tell within ten seconds if a bike is good or not. It’s like dating. The brakes are a good indicator, as is the ease of pedaling. A good bike is like cutting through warm butter, while a bad bike is like cutting through stale bread. When I saw this bike, I could tell right away it had only been on the street for a few hours. 
 
 Did you have a route in mind? I didn’t expect to get very far — down the Jersey Shore at the most — because these bikes aren’t meant to travel long distances. I tried to stay on as much flat ground as possible. I found these paths called Rails-to-Trails, which are old railroad tracks that have been ripped up and turned into biking and hiking trails. I just kept discovering more and more vehicle-less flat trails. I go about 40 miles per day. Right now, I’m traveling the Bike Route 66, which, like the highway, ends in Santa Monica. 
 
 What will happen to the bike? I would like to get it back to New York and return it to the ecosystem from where it came, but I can’t bring it on a train, so I’ll have to take it apart, box it up, and then rebuild it. But I first want to make it to the last part, to California.I checked out my bike on the last day of my annual membership account. I was charged $1,200, the maximum amount, which I thought was fair. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| Apparently, it’s not just Big Apple motorists who hold a grudge against Citi Bike users, as a Manhattan man found out the hard way while riding one of the two-wheelers cross country. 
 
 Jeffrey Tanenhaus, who quit his job as an event planner in early August to embark on the Citi Bike trek, saw the ride take a bloody turn in Oklahoma this week when he was punched in the face by a bike-hating pickup driver. 
 
 Things had been going smoothly until he stopped to update his Instagram account on the side of a “very quiet road” around 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Tanenhaus told The Post. 
 
 He noticed a pickup truck slow down as it came up behind him and, having grown accustomed to being a roadside curiosity, Tanenhaus assumed the motorist wanted to ask a few questions about his bike, which has a New York license plate affixed to the front. 
 
 “But the guy just starts launching verbal abuse at me — how much he hates bikers, and I need to get off the road — a lot of expletives thrown in there, a seething rant about bicyclists,” he said via telephone Wednesday. 
 
 The pickup driver then sped off. “[It was] the first time hostilities had been exhibited in the whole time riding,” Tanenhaus said. “I wasn’t even in his way.” 
 
 He was still standing dumbfounded next to his bike when the pickup suddenly returned. 
 
 “He comes back, straight towards me,” Tanenhaus said. “I knew it was going to be bad. I thought he was going to try to run me over — he pulled up again and started cursing at me.” 
 
 The bully then “got out of his truck and punched me in the face,” Tanenhaus said. 
 
 The motorist knocked over his bike, spouted a few more curses and sped off again. 
 
 Luckily, another driver saw the tail end of the fight and took the bleeding biker to the hospital, where he received four stitches for a busted lip. 
 
 He’s staying in Tulsa as he recovers and said the cycling community there has been welcoming. 
 
 “I’ve had a good experience,” he said. 
 
 Despite the setback, Tanenhaus is determined to finish his epic trip. 
 
 “It was an unfortunate incident, but I’m not going to let it taint my experience here so far,” he said. 
 
 Tanenhaus, who took the maximum $1,200 fine for not returning the Citi Bike, has already traveled nearly 1,780 miles — and may end up in San Diego instead of Los Angeles, as he originally planned, because of weather concerns. ||||| Before he biked across the country, he was just one of New York City’s thousands of commuters. Four-and-a-half months later, Jeffrey Tanenhaus has finally reached California – on a New York Citi Bike. 
 
 Tanenhaus began his cross-country journey on Aug. 6, leaving his job as a corporate event planner in Manhattan. 
 
 His daily commute took him from downtown Brooklyn to Times Square, the best part of his day, according to Tanenhaus. 
 
 “I was always expecting my job to get better, or to get a different job or for something to come along. When it didn’t, I ended up leaving in early August,” he said Saturday from Blythe, California, during a phone interview 
 
 The 2,700-mile journey spanned 17 states and cost Tanenhaus the $1,200 late fee charged by Citi Bike for exceeding the maximum 45-minute limit. 
 
 Despite the sometimes grueling conditions Tanenhaus has faced, he is satisfied with the overall journey. 
 
 “It’s been the most amazing thing that I’ve done in my life,” he said. “On a bike it’s been incredibly rewarding and I’ve had to go slow so I’ve been able to go places that travelers wouldn’t normally stop.” 
 
 Tracking between 30 to 65 miles a day, Tanenhaus has seen presidential homes, national monuments and the sights along historic Route 66 – something Tanenhaus, a part-time tour guide, has enjoyed. 
 
 “I learned about things like the Underground Railroad and the Civil War in high school history, but when you’re actually riding through the history, you absorb it a lot better,” he said. 
 
 No cross-country journey for man or machine is complete without a tune-up, and Tanenhaus’ Citi Bike was no exception. Even with a set of new tires, new pedals and a new seat, Tanenhaus plans to return the bike back to Brooklyn, though he is unsure how to finance the trip. 
 
 “I’ve spent enough time on this bicycle – it’s someone else’s turn. I’m happy to return it back to the bike-sharing system,” he said. 
 
 Tanenhaus plans to complete the last leg of his journey in mid-to-late January, finishing at the Santa Monica Pier, the official end of Route 66. 
 
 “Just Wi-Fi, water and a working bicycle and I’m able to go across the country,” he said. “Some people can’t even make it across town without [their bike] breaking but I’ve made it 2,700 miles.” ||||| There were many times that he almost gave up, but the intrepid New Yorker who checked out a Citi Bike in Gramercy Park for a journey across the country has finally hit California. 
 
 Jeffrey Tanenhaus, who grabbed the ride from a dock at the East 20th Street and Second Avenue on Aug. 6 and headed west, has biked more than 2,700 miles in the past 4¹/₂ months. 
 
 In his travels, he has dealt with intense winds and snow, mind-numbing interstate highways and a raging motorist who punched him out in Oklahoma. 
 
 “There were times when I wanted to quit, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to turn around,” said Tanenhaus, who paid the maximum $1,200 fine for not returning the Citi Bike. “I had to keep going.” 
 
 Now he’s safely in the Golden State. He crossed over from Arizona near Blythe, Calif., this week and plans to spend the next month hanging out in Joshua Tree National Park and making his way to Los Angeles, where he hopes to arrive by mid-January. 
 
 The worst challenge Tanenhaus faced was wind, which hit 40 mph as he pedaled across the Southwest and sometimes forced him to get off and walk the bike. 
 
 “It’s a shock to ride a whole day and not see anything and not feel like you’re getting anywhere,” Tanenhaus said. 
 
 He ended up hitchhiking in one especially nasty windstorm. 
 
 A couple rolling by with an empty horse trailer let him throw his bike and gear inside and drove him more than 100 miles to Albuquerque, NM. 
 
 “It was very humbling to stand on the side of the road with a sign that said ‘west,’ ” he recalled. 
 
 There were other days when it would snow or barely get above freezing. 
 
 “I was wearing two pairs of socks on my hands, and my feet felt frozen,” Tanenhaus said. 
 
 He didn’t do much camping, because he didn’t have the proper gear for freezing weather. 
 
 Instead, he usually relied on the kindness of strangers who let him spend a night or two on their couch or in their RV. 
 
 Tanenhaus did take one break from his odyssey. He left his stuff with a friend in Albuquerque for two weeks around Thanksgiving and flew back to New York to be with family and friends. 
 
 In October, Tanenhaus suffered a wilting setback when a crazed driver in Oklahoma screamed at him for riding his bike in the road and punched him in the face, sending him to the hospital. 
 
 After that run-in, he made it through the panhandle of Texas, then hit the brutal weather of New Mexico and Arizona, where it was frequently below freezing. 
 
 “This has been a very challenging stretch, especially the Texas panhandle, and New Mexico, where it’s been very difficult on the bike,” Tanenhaus said. 
 
 “The landscape is pretty intimidating, desolate and stretched out. In New York, there is a Duane Reade every two blocks, but out here, I can go 40 to 60 miles without seeing a store, much less a place to sleep.” 
 
 He has done a bulk of the ride along historic Route 66, at times pedaling out on the shoulder. 
 
 “Out here in the West, sometimes there is no other road,” he said. “It’s not very scenic, but that’s where the roads are.” 
 
 Through it all though, the Citi Bike held up. 
 
 “It’s a pretty sturdy bike,” he said.
– What does it take to get from New York to California? "Just WiFi, water, and a working bicycle," Jeffrey Tanenhaus tells WNBC-TV. The New Yorker rolled into the Golden State at the city of Blythe last week after riding 2,700 miles across 17 states—mostly along historic Route 66—on a distinctive blue Citi Bike he checked out in Manhattan on Aug. 6. Citi Bike is a fee-based bicycle sharing system. Speaking to New York magazine from Albuquerque this month, Tanenhaus said his job as a corporate event planner (to which he used to commute on a Citi Bike) and his apartment lease were both ending, and he "couldn't stomach" getting "just another job. I was out of options in New York, and I thought of the great American road trip." But, he tells New York, "I didn't expect to get very far—down the Jersey Shore at the most." Along the way to California, Tanenhaus saw the Washington, DC, sights; the Grand Canyon; and the gravesite of Col. Harland Sanders (think KFC), among other things. In the Southwest, wind and frigid temperatures were a challenge. Gusts up to 40mph forced him to sometimes push the bike, the New York Post reports. Strangers helped out, providing rides and allowing Tanenhaus to couch-surf or bunk in RVs. In October, Tanenhaus had to detour to a hospital after an angry Oklahoma driver punched him in the face. And he took a break in November, flying back to New York for Thanksgiving. Tanenhaus tells the Post that he plans to knock around Joshua Tree National Park for a while, and then reach Santa Monica, the end of Route 66, by mid-January. As for the bike, Tanenhaus has been billed $1,200 by Citi Bike ("which I thought was fair"). He tells New York he wants to get it back to the "ecosystem from where it came," which means disassembling it and taking it back to NYC on a train. (This bike ride down the Atlantic coast ended with a man being murdered.)