Into the Blue

During the van ride back from the peninsula’s cowboy capital, Santa Cruz, Buettner surprises me by saying, “I never cared about bicycles. I did [the bike treks] because I knew they would get attention.” In fact, Buettner says, he was a below-average athlete growing up in St. Paul’s North Dale neighborhood. “I sucked at hockey, baseball, swimming . . . I was OK at cross-country,” he says. He wasn’t a travel junkie early on either. His father, a teacher in South St. Paul, would take him and his brothers (Dan is the oldest of four) on a two- to six-week vacation every summer, usually to a place such as Montana or the Boundary Waters. Now he says all those painful, disease-plagued miles across four continents—broadcast on CNN and covered in all the papers—were basically a Guinness-sized publicity stunt.

Buettner is unabashed. He says he grew to love cycling and world travel and being acknowledged by fans as the heir to Will Steger’s education/exploration legacy, but in 1987—when he was a twenty-six-year-old University of St. Thomas graduate who had worked at the Twin Cities Reader for a year and at National Public Radio for a couple more—he got on his bike with his brother Steve and a couple of guides and did that AmericaTrek 15,536-mile bike ride from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the southern tip of Argentina because he believed he had “stories to tell” and had to create them away from home. And, evidently, the farther away the better. “I was just going to go someplace else,” he says. Now, after a two-month itinerary that includes Singapore, Chicago, the Bahamas, Los Angeles, New York City, Costa Rica, Virginia, and Mexico, with stops in Minneapolis between trips, an older, presumably wiser adventurer/storyteller claims that for him a vacation would be staying home for two weeks.

But home is two places. Since 2001 he’s had a well-known relationship with model Cheryl Tiegs, and the couple flies back and forth from Tiegs’s place in Los Angeles to Buettner’s home on Lake of the Isles a couple of times a month. Talking to Tiegs, you get the sense that Buettner is much more comfortable in Hollywood than Ponce de Leon would have been. “He is so popular here in LA,” she says. “The first thing people ask me is ‘Where’s Dan?’ I’m like, ‘What about me?’ ” The California lifestyle suits Buettner, but, according to Tiegs, he hasn’t relocated because he’s very close to his three children, two of whom still live with him, and because “he’s a Minnesotan.” In Minneapolis, the couple enjoy quiet dinners at Cafe Brenda, Buettner’s favorite restaurant; in LA, they hang out with an environmentally conscious circle that includes members of the Global Green group and actor/activist Ed Begley Jr. Recently, Steger has been staying at Tiegs’s home—in fact, Tiegs was instrumental in introducing Steger to a Hollywood producer who’s putting together a documentary on the latter’s global-warming crusade. “They’re just a wonderful couple,” Steger says of his friends. Even in LA, the couple stays active: Sixty-year-old Tiegs is an avid hiker, and Buettner has befriended a group of entertainment lawyers who take long weekend bike rides to Malibu. “Dan is very gregarious,” Tiegs says. “He always finds someone who is interesting.”