The day Kitsie Schelter turned 56, she did something more exerting than blowing out birthday candles. She began a 3,400-mile bike trip across the country, raising $10,000; the proceeds went to Planned Parenthood — Southeastern Pennsylvania.
Katherine Converse Schelter, CW’63, CGS’95, signed up for the organized, five-week trek, because, “I didn’t know if I could do it at all. I couldn’t imagine what it actually was.” The hardest part of her journey from Seattle to Asbury Park was riding against a relentless, 30 m.p.h. headwind in Montana. “You even had to pedal hard to go downhill,” Schelter says. But she never took the support van.
Two weeks after returning to Philadelphia, where she owns an interior design and international travel business, she was pedaling across New York state and New England. “I missed it terribly,” says Schelter. “What biking gave me was a goal and an itinerant community. We were like a little nomadic tribe.”