On any of my long-distance bike rides, the whirl I took around the Grand Illinois Trail (600 miles), the sweep up and down the Katy in Missouri (443 miles), or finally last week’s aborted attempt to circle Lake Michigan (250 miles), I had my share of fears and doubts. On this last one though, these…
Last night in my Econo Lodge motel room, here in Oconto, WI, I peeled a thick rubbery section of skin from the bottom of my surgically repaired left foot. “Uh, oh,”, I thought. I wrenched it in front of me to get a view of the bottom of the foot, which didn’t really work. I…
I intended to use this trip to meditate on fear. To that purpose, I was far from cheated. I was flabbergasted by own dread, how each evening it reached a pitch and subsided somewhat in the morning when the looming, practical necessity of checking out a motel room or my AirBnb lodging forced that down…
When you think of Wisconsin, what do you think? Cheeseheads, cheese curds, the Packers, Governor Scott Walker? Naw, you meant to say red barns. It’s the ferrous oxide (iron) that was mixed with linseed oil, milk, and lime that made the barns rust colored according to this WideOpenCountry article, Why Barns Are Red. I reckon…
I had just departed from the Motel 6 in Glendale, WI (Milwaukee for all intents) when I came across these specimens from the animal kingdom, live, cage-free, wild turkeys! I was not in the hinterland. I was in a ‘burb of Milwaukee and there they were. It’s absolutely a fact that no charity ride should…
Alex Wilson founded West Town Bikes, using bikes as a vehicle [pun intended] to better the quality of life for young people on Chicago’s West Side. It hasn’t always been easy. Only as recently as 2020, the pandemic all but wiped him out, forcing Alex to take himself off the payroll and fire over half…