BEDFORD, Mass.--Some people will do anything to get to their reunion.

Undeterred by traffic, his partner's injury and a pair of high-friction tries, 71-year-old Dale O. Hiestand biked 1,830 miles over 34 days from his home in Cooper City, Fla. to a 50th reunion in Cambridge.

"We're awfully tired, "he said as he disembarked from his bike with his best friend and riding partner, Kenneth G. Coleman, age 69.

Fifty years ago this year, Hiestand was a U.S. Navy midshipman in training at Harvard Business School. Today, he returns to the Business School campus to rejoin his 1945 training class.

The program enabled Hiestand to complete one year of the Harvard Business School's MBA program in eight months on an accelerated track. After the war, Hiestand returned to Harvard to complete his business degree and graduate with an MBA in 1947.

Hiestand, who is 71 years old ,began his journey across the East Coast at the end of April with Coleman, a friend he met in 1987.

The cycling partners met through an advertisement Coleman had placed in a national biking magazine in 1987 looking for a companion for a bicycle tour of Yugoslavia,"taking time to smell the roses."

His curiosity piqued, Hiestand responded to the ad by phone, and two weeks later visited Coleman California.

"Later on he came to Taxes and did a weekend ride with me and a 150-mile charity ride with me, and we've been riding ever since," Hiestand said.

"We never did go to Yugoslavia because the country fell apart, but we stayed friends," said Coleman.

The pair have taken other cycling trips together, including one in China (but not along the Great Wall, Hiestand said). But they still waited to do a transnational trip in America.

"When he decided he wanted to do this trip, no way we weren't going to do this together," Coleman said.

The pair of veteran bicycles departed by bike from Cooper City, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, and traveled continuously, with only rest stops for sleep and a quick stop in New York City. On the way, they traveled through Hermosa Beach, Fla., Savannah, Ga., Charleston, S.C., Kitty Hawk, N.C. and Cape May, N. J.

The two friends chose the scenic route, biking up the Gold Coast through Vero Beach, off the coast of Cape Hatters in North Carolina and up the Del Mar pennisulla off the coast of Delaware. "We kind of avoided the major cities," Coleman said.

The friends did not bicycle all the way: they hitched a ride with a pickup truck as they crossed a tunnel near the Chesapeake Bridge.