SIERRA VISTA — Moses had his staff. Noah had his ark. Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem.

In his own humble, less chronicled way, Robert Jones has his bicycle.

He’s ridden the Tour de Tucson, taken on the Sedona Century Bike Tour and competed in the Tour de Tahoe, just to name a few. He recently returned from his greatest undertaking so far: a 2,000-mile self guided tour of Europe.

He considered carrying a GPS, but decided he would rather carry a map and ask for directions.

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“I got lost all the time,” the Lutheran pastor, currently between assignments, said. “People I met and asked directions would say ‘I can’t imagine biking 2,000 miles.’ But they knew their area, and they could help me with their piece. It’s these little pieces together that allowed me to do it. It’s a great faith thing.”

For Jones, cycling is a time apart from the world, a time to reflect, to search, to punch in to do God’s work.

His life of cycling started in Sierra Vista when Jones was in junior high when his seven-mile paper route took him around the Village Meadows part of town.

While working on his undergraduate degree at the University of Arizona in the mid-1970s, Jones used his bike for all of his travel around Tucson. His bike moved with him to St. Paul, Minn., where he went for Lutheran seminary. It was his third year of seminary, after he was placed in a church as an intern, that he had to break down and buy his first car, an Audi Fox.

Jones, 52, has been around enough to know the bike-friendly cities in the U.S. He’s fond of Denver, St. Paul, which has a unified system for biking, and even Phoenix.

“They converted the canals into multi-use trails,” he said of Phoenix. “You can bike across the entire valley and rarely have to cross the street.”

Jones spent 15 years as a pastor in South Dakota, where the climate was a challenge to the avid cyclist, before moving back to his home state where he worked at a Lutheran church in Cottonwood for five years.

But he had his sights on places further than Arizona, and even further than the U.S. Soon after his stay in Cottonwood, he was off on sabbatical to Israel in 2005. While studying in Jerusalem, he attended the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, which conducts services in English.

Despite the mountainous terrain, Jones biked all over East and West Jerusalem during his stay. He had access to a mountain bike from the institute, and used it as his own spiritual tool when he took a day to ride around the Sea of Galilee, stopping along the 40-mile ride to read from his Bible and meditate.

While he was there, a bike tour of Italy he was scheduled for fell through, so he arranged his own trip on a tour of Germany. Jones made his home base at the Augustine monastery of Erfurt, where Martin Luther practiced monkhood and set out on daily travels from there.

He saw the sights of Wittenberg, a town closely associated with Luther, and rode to Eisenach, the birthplace of Baroque composer J.S. Bach, among many other places.

After returning to the U.S., Jones was eager to go overseas again. He applied for several international positions, including Beijing, Brussels, Salzberg and Lithuania. He was appointed a two-year stay at a church in Vilnius, Lithuania.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “The weather is miserable. Culturally, it’s a neat place. They love American gospel and they have all sorts of folk concerts.”

Jones said he was only frustrated during the long dark nights of winter and more rain than he was used to, but he made the best of it.

“You can ride when it’s raining or wet,” he said. “You just have to bundle up. It’s not as fun, but you still get out and do it.”

During his stay in Lithuania, he biked more to keep in shape and commute to work than to tour the countryside.  When his time with the International Church in Vilnius came to a close this past summer, he decided not to come home right away.

Instead, he took the next two months to ride across northern Europe, spending the majority of the trip on his bike and planning his route on the way to visit friends.

From Lithuania, he ferried across to Sweden, where he rode west until he ferried again over to Germany, where he went south. Instead of heading to France, which he knew to be expensive, he flew to Dublin and cycled through Northern Ireland.

He made it over to England next, where he first stopped in Liverpool to visit all the usual Beatles tourist spots. From there, he biked to Derby along the Roman Highways, then to Stratford on the Avon outside of London, where he left his bike in the hands of his friend Stephen Thomas, who he had met at the church in Vilnius. He rented a bike and made his last leg to Avon. From there, he took a cruise through Iceland and Newfoundland back home to the States.

Jones arrived on Sept. 28, having completed his 2,009-mile ride in 50 days, which he said were 40 days of actual cycling and 10 days of visiting with the friends he stopped to see along the way.

“In my work and handling stress, If you push hard in cycling, when you relax, you really relax. ” Jones said. “Part of it is communing with God, especially when touring. There’s a lot of time.”

His first big race after finishing up his tour of Europe was the Tour de Tucson in late November, where he rode the course in 6:43:54, earning silver for finishing between six and nine hours.

Jones rides his bike daily, usually traveling about 60 miles, what he considers to be just about the perfect distance. He’s already itching to go back overseas. He’s still got France and Italy to see at some point soon.

“You see the world in a different way,” Jones said. “If you’re traveling just 60 miles a day, you see the world much differently than you do at 60 miles an hour.”

Read more about Jones’ journey in his cycling journal here.

Herald/Review sports reporter Liz Manring an be reached at 515-4682 or by e-mail at liz.manring@svherald.com.