By Reg Ankrom

QBC Member

If there is a well-kept secret in biking tours, it’s the “Around Illinois Back Roads (AIBR)” ride, hosted each year by the Joliet Bicycle Club.

For this rider, the week-long ride was a lucky find after “Bike Illinois – Land of Lincoln (B.I.L.L.) was cancelled.

Fielding approximately 120 riders, with about 40 percent of them dropping off after the first four days, this is a ride where lines are unheard of. It is a ride of conveniences:

• Gotta go? There are plenty of toilet stalls at every stop. Clean. And papered. (Organizers brought along plenty of squeezably soft Charmin, prepared for the possibility that a service stop was unprepared.)
• Hungry? There’s a continental breakfast – hot and cold cereals, donuts and rolls, juices, milk, coffee, and surprise goodies – every morning. Organizers also provide excellent and filling meals, all suited to bikers, on four of the seven evenings.

Each day’s cue sheets pointed to local eateries, quick stops and favored establishments, like Austin’s Doghouse in Morrisonville, which featured the ride’s best French toast and the largest amount of bacon in a single order of any stop. But there’s a lot of countryside riding, you say. No problem. SAG stops with a variety of snacks and drinks are strategically placed on each day’s route.

• Sweaty? Well, this year has been unusually cool so that wasn’t much of an issue. But stops at schools and parks had excellent shower facilities with water as hot as you could stand.
• Breaks? How about a layover day at the halfway point in Springfield during which you could choose from a full menu of planned activities? Members of the Springfield Bicycle Club offered tours of some 20 Lincoln and capital city attractions. Other SBC members led rides of various distances, up to a metric century, through and around Springfield. Maps were available for those who wanted to explore on their own. Some did individual rides. Others chose to remain at the host site, Lincoln Land Community College, to take advantage of an excellent and spacious library, computers, exercise facilities, or get some extra Zs.
• Accommodations? Most riders chose to camp at the stops, community colleges, state parks and fairgrounds. A few spent each of their evenings at nearby motels, and the organizers provided shuttle service for them. Overhearing a rider asking a local where he could find a payphone, JBCer Dale Bormet insisted that the rider use his cell phone to make the call. But he had a couple of calls to make, the rider answered. Make all you want, Dale replied.
• Specialties? How about arranging to have “Big Ed” the Grimebuster along for the entire week to provide a fresh towel, comfortable chairs with built in beverage holders and bike detailing each day? Ed was pretty easy with libations for those interested, as well.

A special attraction of this ride is that the JBC hires a wrench for the full week. The labor for any needed repair or maintenance was free of charge to the riders. And there was no job too big or small for this guy, Randy. For example, you’d see him adjusting brakes on a Cannondale tandem each day for Bubba and Jean each day. He’d repair flats, run new cable, tune wheels, replace brakes and pads, adjust shifting, and so on. And driving his coal black pickup, which pulled his air-conditioned camper, he’d search you out on the road the next day to assure that the bike was running well.

Route planner Bill Lang of the Joliet Bicycle Club and his crew organized excellent routes – scrambling for even better routes when summer construction required a change. Surprised by a road-milling project near Lincoln Land in Springfield that made the cobbles of France look like glass, Lang rerouted the tour’s riders along a Rails-to-Trails path between Springfield and Rochester. Riders called it a highlight and Lang said it would be on subsequent trips. JBCers usually were out ahead of most riders each day to make sure that the road markers were visible.

With only a handful of hills, the route, overall, was undemanding. Headwinds every day, however, made up for the lack of climbs. As the tour headed south, stopping at Oglesby, Morton (where a fundamentalist church’s baptism in the local swimming pool made the evening interesting), and Springfield, riders were challenged by southerly winds from 10 to 15 miles per hour. Hopes for tailwinds on the return were dashed when a cold front shifted the winds from a northerly direction at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. Here, Lang’s route planning – numerous smaller east and west sub-mile turns, made even these challenges interesting.

Best thing about the ride were the riders. They were a friendly bunch who took their time starting and finishing each day’s ride. With only a few leaving early, most riders looked forward to getting together for conversation as much as for breakfast. They made up a somewhat narrow demographic band – several teachers and counselors who were getting in a final ride before returning to school, several retirees and others nearing that destination, professionals (including a dentist who knew that G.V. Black had fathered modern dentistry in Jacksonville), a truck driver, the training director of an international corporation, a copy editor for a suburban newspaper, among them. A favorite was a surprisingly strong pencil-bearded rider named “Canada Bob,” who the week before had ridden what he called a hellishly hilly North Dakota tour. And to meet a schedule, he rode some 150 miles on the second-to-last day to get his truck at the tour’s destination.

Brenda Alberico, who teaches at College of DuPage in her spare time, chaired the AIBR ride. With a decidedly Type-A personality, she was ubiquitous throughout the ride.