Over at Palm Beach Bike Tours, Ken was kind enough to mention The Spokesrider in a post about “Charlie Hamilton’s Baseball Bike Tour.”
What he mentioned was my historical-themed bicycle tours. But what he might not know is that I, too, got started with a tour to baseball parks. The above map is one I made for a talk that I gave back in early 2001.
Charlie Hamilton rode to a ball game in each of 30 Major League ballparks. It took him 11,741 miles of pedaling and 6 months to do it. You can read all about it on his web site. Along the way he raised over $19,000 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and five years later is still accepting donations for it.
My ride was more modest. I rode to 14 ball parks in the Midwest League — Class A Minor League baseball. I did 2,000 miles of pedaling in a little over three weeks. It helps that these ballparks weren’t spread over the entire United States like Charlie’s are. The map above shows my route. I started in Battle Creek, went south to Fort Wayne and worked my way around the league, across Lake Michigan (by ferry) and back to Battle Creek.
I had ideas of doing other minor league bicycle tours after that one, but I got distracted by the Black Hawk story. Just before the tour I had read Alan Eckert’s book about him, so in between ball games I rode to some of the sites of the 1832 war. Some of the main ones I knew about at the time are marked on the above map. A red square shows the location of Black Hawk’s home at Saukenuk (now Rock Island, Illinois). A yellow square between Davenport and Burlington shows where Black Hawk crossed the Mississippi in April 1832. The yellow starburst just south of Rockford is where the fighting started on May 14, 1832. That’s the date that I used to connect the old school in the previous post to the Black Hawk story.
The other starburst was an incident that came to be known as the “Indian Creek Massacre.” I thought I had written at least a couple of posts about my ride to the Indian Creek location in 2004, but the only one I can find is here.
Why no photos from 1996? One reason is that a friend had recommended a little point-and-shoot camera, which I had wanted to get so I could leave my relatively heavy Nikon FM at home. It was a big disappointment to see how all my photos turned out. It was partly because of the lack of skill and experience on my part, and partly because it just wasn’t a very good camera. Fortunately the camera didn’t last long. After that trip I carried my Nikon FM with me on every subsequent trip, and I started getting some usable photos. I carried it until 2003, when I went digital.
When I got home from that ride in 1996 I started to read in the local histories about some of the places I where I had ridden in Michigan and Indiana. I learned that the Black Hawk war had involved Michigan, too. All three of the events at the locations marked in yellow had created a big scare when the news got to Michigan. I still haven’t got to the end of the bike ride destinations that are related to anecdotes and reminiscences about them.
Wow, every time you scratch a story, another story pops up under it.
I guess that’s why so many of my postings morph off into war stories that really don’t have anything to do with the primary topic.
In the old days, an editor would have lopped off those off-topic musings.
Reminds me of my first newspaper job out of high school. One of my jobs was to edit the copy stringers (named because freelancers were sometimes paid by the inch and you’d keep track of the length of their columns by measuring them with string) sent it from their small towns.
The editor came to me one day and told me to take a lighter pencil to two of our stringers who would meander all over the place in their accounts of community comings and goings. “The stuff that write between the news is better than the news.”
With age comes wisdom. It took awhile, but I eventually learned what he was talking about.
Hi, Ken. I had no idea that’s how the term “stringer” came about. And those of us who have trouble sticking to the topic have got to like your old editor.