An impending hip replacement might cause most people to slow down a bit in life, but for Kevin Ogden, 68, it was the impetus to do the exact opposite writes Mary O’Brien. The retired American airline captain is just back from a three-month solo bike trip that took him across the United States from west to east, from Seattle Washington to Washington DC. Throughout his lifetime Kevin’s love of outdoor pursuits and adventure has brought him up in the skies, across seas and over land, all around the world. His late wife Comhairle, from Bishopstown, brought him to Cork and home is now Kinsale – not too far from Comhairle’s family – and Cork/Kinsale is where four of the couple’s five children have also settled.
Born in Iowa and raised across the Midwest as the son of a corporate family, Kevin’s passion for flying began soon after cutting out a five dollar introductory flight coupon from a flying magazine. He was also a longer distance bikepacking enthusiast, at a time when that meant cycling while actually wearing a pack on your back! After working part-time at a local grocery store to fund flying lessons and, soloing at 16, “pretty much before I could drive,” he earned his private pilot’s license at the age of 17, and entered the US Air Force on a university scholarship, graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering.
After pilot training in Texas – flying the T-37 and T-38, including one supersonic flight – he was assigned to fly the C-130 Hercules at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. The role involved tactical airlift such as airdrops, airlands, and formation flying, with rotations covering South and Central America, Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Kevin’s only combat experience came during the US invasion of Grenada, which he described as chaotic. “Every unit in the States was sending people down there. We almost sank the neighbouring island of Barbados with men and material!”
He spent his final two years with the Air Force taking part in special operations, single-ship, night-vision-goggle missions under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) utilising terrain masking where available. “It was a much more survivable role in any near-peer scenario,” he explains.
Kevin left the Air Force in 1986, around the same time the industry was deregulated under the Reagan administration. Faced with a big drop in pay – as it would take seven years to work back up to his previous military salary with the added job insecurity brought on by airlines folding or merging – Kevin left the US and joined Saudi Arabian Airlines as an instructor for their new Airbus A300-600, the first wide-body, two-man, glass-cockpit aircraft.
After becoming enamoured with the lifestyle in Jeddah – which wasn’t difficult as it offered perks such as a tax-free income, free accommodations, worldwide standby travel and a vibrant international community – what was supposed to be a two-year stint turned into eleven years. “Diving in the Red Sea, Hash House Harriers desert runs, dinner parties, four-wheeling in the desert – it was an extraordinary place and we were essentially the only tourists,” he shares.
It was at one such party in 1993 where Kevin met his beautiful wife Comhairle O Donnchadha, a full of life and fun-loving doctor who would “light up the room”. She was working as a physician at the military hospital in Jeddah. While they apparently shared little in common except a love for fun and adventure – “When I asked what her hobbies were, her answer was ‘Well, we go down to the Bishopstown Bar,’” recalls Kevin, laughing – they had an instant attraction. “It was like meeting someone you feel you have known your whole life,” he shares. After a whirlwind, three-month courtship, they got engaged, and married the following year.
“We flew to New York for the ring, then to Boston to meet my mother, before heading to Ireland to meet Comhairle’s family. I then spent the flight to Dublin trying to write on a napkin and memorise the Irish names of her siblings and parents!”
On arrival in Cork, the plan was to have a get-to-know-you period over three days for Kevin and the family, followed by the proposal. “But there I was, pulling the bags out of the back of the car and ‘Doozy’ (the affectionate name Comhairle’s father had for her) came out and said ‘come on Kevin, grab the ring, I’ve got them trapped in the oifig’,” shares Kevin with a laugh. Up until that point Comhairle’s family knew only that “a friend” was visiting, so it was quite the surprise, but none-the-less he received an incredibly warm welcome from this extraordinary family.
Around 1995, while they were still in Saudi, and Comhairle was expecting their first son, Aodan, Kevin – having done several yachting courses in the UK – purchased a Freedom 32 Hoyt that had survived Hurricane Hugo and been neglected for five years. After restoring it, he sailed it from the US to Ireland with his wife’s brother, Seamus, uncle Gearoid (a priest), cousin Donal, and a friend Peter O’Gorman in a 26-day crossing that turned into quite an ordeal.
Problems arose almost immediately. “We had to deal with a clogged fuel filter from algae, a broken steering chain due to electrolytic corrosion, and a leaking fuel tank that had been cross-threaded during cleaning,” explains Kevin. “I spent the better part of the first two weeks of the voyage with a tool belt strapped around my waist fixing things.”
After drifting up the gulf stream and through days of Greenland fog, south of Iceland they encountered a double low-pressure system with force nine-plus winds and waves up to 50 feet. “It was like looking at the Himalayas, completely white, and row after row of mountainous waves with the occasional bearded rogue wave moving at a 90-degree angle,” shares Kevin. The wind was so strong it blew apart his handheld anemometer. “Water gushed through the rudder stock, requiring bilge pumping every 45 minutes.”
At one stage, becalmed off Newfoundland, they were seven days behind the schedule set by Comhairle’s uncle Gearoid, a Fenit parish priest. They were under pressure as press and others were due to meet them on arrival, but the storm and stronger winds soon made up the lost time.
Following two or three weeks with virtually no contact with anyone, and hearing Concorde pass overhead each day with its trademark double sonic boom, Kevin used a handheld VHF airband radio to contact a passing British Airways Concorde at flight level five five zero. After establishing, to the great surprise of a BA crew member, that they were indeed a sailing yacht crossing the Atlantic, Kevin passed on phone numbers. When the Concorde arrived in New York, the crew did actually call the family members to let them know they were safe.
“We were probably the slowest vessel in the Atlantic talking to the fastest,” laughs Kevin.
Against all odds however, they did reach their destination, Fenit, County Kerry, on schedule with a following gale blowing them past Mount Brandon and homeward into the bay into the midnight hours.
It wouldn’t be the last adventure for this boat but that’s someone else’s story!
After the birth of their first son in Saudi, Kevin and Comhairle moved back to Ireland in early 1998, where Kevin joined TransAer, a charter airline based out of Dublin and various other European bases. The company initially based him in Manchester and then eventually Gatwick, as Comhairle wished to do a course in London. Around 2000, Kevin developed a heart problem that grounded him for about a year. Shortly after becoming medically re-qualified however, his airline entered receivership but, as luck would have it, another UK based airline purchased the company’s assets and he was re-employed within two weeks. Then of course came the dot-com crash and 9/11 with its still reverberating effects. The day following 9/11 Kevin piloted a surreal football charter flight to Athens with “chillingly empty skies”. “We didn’t hear one other aircraft on ATC frequency and saw no other aircraft with the exception of a single US Air Force AWACS passing under us over Germany,” he adds.
“After 9/11, everything changed…there were a lot more security measures,” he shares. “With locked armoured cockpit doors, you couldn’t bring nervous passengers up front to calm their fears anymore. It took some of the fun out of the job for me.”
In 2012, Kevin returned to a captain’s position with Saudi Arabian Airlines based in Jeddah, with the whole family – which numbered five children by then, including twins. Comhairle worked as a consultant in general practice and the children attended the local international school. “They were going to school with the elite of Jeddah, who had their own aircraft, palaces and so on, so we really had to do our best to keep them grounded,” says Kevin.
One by one, the children returned to Ireland for school and college.
Then in 2020, with the children all at home in Ireland and the year before Kevin was due to retire and move back to Kinsale with his family, tragedy struck. After a sudden and brief illness, Comhairle, age 55, passed away. “She was my very best friend, and there will certainly never be another like her,” shares Kevin.
Since then he has kept busy, having taken up a part-time job with the Atlantic Flight Training Academy based at Cork airport as a multi-crew co-ordination instructor, and tries to stay active swimming or cycling most days. He enjoys hiking, camping, skiing and mountaineering and, while an Achilles problem has had him sidelined from those activities for the past eight months, he is working assiduously to rectify that and get back to some of the passions that he really loves.
His recent TransAmerica trip – on an 18-speed Gates Pinion German VSF bicycle (a ‘B bike’, as he calls it: a biological bike, not an E-bike) – took him east across Washington, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and part of West Virginia, before arriving back in DC.
Carrying bear spray for the Idaho and Montana mountains, and, for part of the journey, a pistol his friend Mike brought from Montana, Kevin started with the Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail, a nearly 300-mile long non-motorised rail-trail in Washington State that follows the historic Milwaukee Road route from Cedar Falls to the Idaho border, through the scenic landscape of the forested Cascade Mountains. Throughout his journey he availed of the hospitality of Warm Showers hosts where possible but for the most part camped out.
His son, Aodan, joined him for a week in Idaho and Montana, and his old university roommate Mike, now 72, accompanied him on a 650 Suzuki motorcycle from Idaho to South Dakota, leapfrogging ahead to scout campsites.
In the Black Hills of South Dakota, Kevin experienced the sacred history and traditions of the Native Americans with a memorable stopover in Mission SD for the Fourth of July in the Rosebud Indian Reservation, home to the Sicangu Lakota Oyate (Burnt Thigh Nation), one of the seven sovereign council fires of the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation).
After crossing Nebraska on another rail trail, the Cowboy Trail, he arrived into Iowa where he took part in the Des Moines RAGBRAI, (Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) – a seven-day ride from the westernmost part of Iowa to Dubuque on the Mississippi River on Iowa’s Eastern edge – with up to 40,000 other cyclists. In this “river of cyclists” he was also joined by his younger son David, older daughter Armelle, and his younger brother Eric.
The hardest stretch of the trip, embedded in his memory, was the Midwest, with endless straight roads, corn and soybean fields, 15-20 mph headwinds, 40-degree heat, and “corn sweat humidity. “In Illinois my shoes filled with sweat within two hours. I had to remove them and ring out the water from my socks regularly,” he shares. “I filled three water bottles five times on that one day with rehydration solution and finally had to book a cabin to recover. Dangerously close to heat stroke, I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted in my life.”
At one point, Kevin’s brother Eric took action to lighten his load, appearing with a carbon fibre racing bike to exchange with the 50 kilo loaded touring bike that Kevin was on. For the next few days, in and out of Chicago, Kevin enjoyed the pleasures of lightweight cycling, flying along.
The final and most rewarding stretch in his epic journey took Kevin along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal trail from Pittsburgh to DC, a 334.5-mile non-motorised trail “Stunningly beautiful, immaculately maintained, what a way to end the trip,” he says.
Now back home in Kinsale, he is already thinking about another bike trip next year, which may take him through Eastern Europe to Istanbul or perhaps along some wine river in Europe. “Who knows where…on a bicycle the world is your oyster.” he adds smiling.
The hip replacement will have to wait!
