In a storytelling performance last night in the Palmer Museum of Art's Lipcon Auditorium, Steve Thunder-McGuire told his audience that a future bicycle ride across Iceland wouldn't be very long, at least in his opinion.

"It's only about 2,500 miles," he said, without a trace of irony.

"Only?" shouted an observer from the back. The crowd, mostly made up of Penn State art students, burst into fits of laughter.

Thunder-McGuire was perhaps the only person in the auditorium who didn't laugh.

It would be the only occasion of the night where he wasn't in on the joke.

Thunder-McGuire, a sculptor and art professor at the University of Iowa at Iowa City, told amusing stories about his bicycle travels for almost two hours to about 100 people who braved the evening's rain.

Subject matter ranged from the faces of dogs to the time Thunder-McGuire accidentally shot snot in a date's eye. Every story was at least tangentially related to the road, with plenty of digs at gasoline-fueled travel thrown in for good measure.

"I got into biking when I needed to find a way to Kansas City for Memorial Day," he said. "Anyone who's ever taken a Greyhound bus knows it's not worth a hundred dollars a trip."

The audience laughed knowingly. The laughter would continue throughout the story.

Thunder-McGuire recounted telling a family member how he'd be making that long trip.

"I said, 'I'm going to ride a bike.' He said, 'Steve, don't be an ass.' "

The trip, more than 100 miles, proved to be dangerous when Thunder-McGuire ran out of food and found himself hungry.

He pulled into a diner on his bicycle, destitute and starving.

"The guy said, 'Kid, where you going?' I told him Kansas City," Thunder-McGuire said. " 'On that thing?' I told him yes. 'No s---. Where are you coming from?' I told him Iowa. He said, 'No s---.' "

The diner employee would then serve Thunder-McGuire the biggest breakfast he'd ever seen, he said.

Thunder-McGuire didn't just tell stories to be funny. He told the audience he got into storytelling as a way to flesh out his sculptures, which lacked something without tales to go with them, he said.

"The artwork I did was incomplete without a story," he said. "If the story couldn't stand on its own visually it needed something more. I started telling anecdotes to anchor my sculptures."

Thunder-McGuire said he gets his stories from the tales of other people. He works their stories into his own to improve them, he said.

"I tell stories within stories within stories within stories," he said. "I do this because life happens this way. There are friends' stories, other friends' stories. You don't say, 'This happened to me alone.' You tell every anecdote you can and make it something new, your own."