On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 2/1/2023
Club Tours: a History
At the end of last summer’s club tour, we were lounging around in our last camp, decompressing after a week of awesome rides and sometimes stressful challenges. (We had more than our share of Murphy’s Law on that tour, as reported in this space a few months ago.) One of the participants, who has done several past club tours, tossed out the thought that it would be nice if we had a history of all our past tours, all gathered together and organized in one place…a book or a web site or something.
At that moment, I was pretty much wrung out by the past week, not only by the fairly challenging riding but also by the accumulated worry and stress related to the crises that almost wrecked our tour. (They didn’t wreck it, but it took a lot of work to keep it from imploding.) So I had just enough energy to agree that, yes, a history would be nice. But not enough energy to take it any further. Not then, anyway.
However, after my bike crash in September, I was mostly holed up at home, recovering from my assorted injuries, and had a lot of time on my hands. At which point that idea of a history came back to me. I had the time and, what’s more, I had most of the documents and records from the past tours…the information needed to pull together the history. I spent an enjoyable and rewarding couple of weeks gathering all the documents together and collating them into a finished product.
Now then, here’s my reservation about this column: will anyone except past participants on these tours be interested in a history about them? Kind of like a high school yearbook: who would find that interesting except the kids in your own class? Or like a slide show or photo gallery from someone else’s summer vacation. We’ve all had to sit through a few of those. Okay, I get all that. But I’m forging ahead with this anyway because I’ve convinced myself there might be something of value for a larger audience in at least noting the creation and existence of this history…if only in putting forward the idea that such tours are possible.
We all know it’s possible to throw large wads of money at professional caterers who will shepherd us through a swank biking adventure in some far-off corner of the world. But how many cyclists know we can also organize our own tours, with a little help from our local bike club? That’s at least in part what this history is about…not just documenting each specific tour but also explaining how we got into the business of cooperative tours.
I’m not going to pound out a lot of copy here discussing all that. The history does it quite well. The club has put up a history page with a link to the “book,” which is a 149-page pdf (a rather hunky file of about 20 MB). 47 official club tours are covered, dating back to 1995. There is also a chapter on unofficial tours—dreamed up and organized by club members for club members—and there are at least another 40 tours mentioned there. There is an introduction, where I explain how we got started on club tours.
Each of the 47 official tours gets somewhere between one and four pages of coverage. There are over 350 photos illustrating the tours. But that’s not all. Wherever possible—which means most of the time—there are links to other documents about each tour or to articles that appeared elsewhere about certain tours, sometimes in these BikeCal columns. All of those additional blocks of copy add up to around 1200 pages of lore about the various tours, including maps, profiles, route sheets, more photos, and descriptions of each stage…around 270 stages so far. (We will update the history with new tours as they happen in the years ahead.)
Most of the more recent tours also have links to Ride With GPS routes for each stage. If you feel so inclined, you can download the maps for all those stages and do your own exploring. Or use what we’ve created to organize a tour of your own within your own club or with your best biking pals. If you get that far, I’ll be happy to answer questions that you might have about how we do this.
That’s pretty much the whole message I want to push across this time around. If this piques your interest, the big pdf is there, waiting to be downloaded. Open it in Preview and use your down arrow to scroll through it. I doubt anyone is going to read or even lightly browse all 149 pages. But a quick spin down all the years, past all the tours, could be fun, stopping here and there to dig a little deeper into some of the tours that grab your attention. With spring just around the corner, perhaps this stroll down Memory Lane will inspire you to think about some nice tours you can do in the sunnier months ahead.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net