My dad and I rode our bikes from Toulon to Alta today on the Rock Island Trail, stopping at Coop’s Place in Princeville to eat lunch. It was a beautiful day for a bike ride. My dad and I have been taking bike rides together since I was old enough to ride. In fact, I must have been only eight or nine when we started going on long rides because my brother was still home and all three of us would go.

I still remember my dad and brother riding way ahead of me on their big three-speed bicycles while I, on my typical single-speed dirt bike, huffed and puffed and tried to keep up. If I started getting too far behind, they would stop at a corner and rest while I caught up, then start riding again as soon as I got there — so I got no break! My mother always told them they were mean to me. I lived through it somehow. 😉

After my brother left home and I got his old bike, my dad and I would take bike rides around Peoria and go by places that he remembered from his youth. We saw the house he grew up in at the corner of Ravine and New York. He would tell me how the streets over there used to be brick, and how he’d find pennies in the cracks between the bricks and take them down to the corner store and buy candy with them. He’d show me the alleys he took when he walked to school. We rode by White school where not only he and his sisters went, but his parents as well.

My favorite ride was when we rode all the way downtown and took a ride on the Julia Belle Swain, the paddle boat that used to be in Peoria before the Spirit of Peoria. Afterwards we ate lunch at Sears, as they used to have a little deli counter in the entrance off of Water Street.

On the way back home, we would often stop by my grandmother’s house for iced tea. Sometimes we’d stop by another relative’s or friend’s house instead, and it was always fun to tell about all the places we had ridden and catch up on things.

Now we don’t ride in town much anymore. We mostly ride on the trail. Today we toured the old CB&Q depot at Wyoming because it was open; that was cool. We still have fun talking about current events, and not so current events. Since we’re riding on an old abandoned rail line, my dad told me today about how he took the train from Peoria to New York and Washington, DC, when he was a boy with his dad and saw Danny Kaye and Señor Wences live at a theater in the nation’s capital.

We only go on a ride two or three times a year. I always look forward to it and make it a priority. My oldest daughter is starting to beg to go on bike rides with me now. Maybe we’ll carry on the tradition to a new generation.

But when she gets tired and falls behind, I’ll let her have a break before we take off riding again.