When I was twelve years old, my father came home from work one night and proclaimed that we were going to buy bicycles. He and I were going on a bicycle trip.

“Okay, Dad,”

I told him. As we drove down to pick out bicycles, my dad told me that he had met a guy named Bevil Hogg, a South African who owned a bicycle store in Madison, Wisconsin. Bevil was looking for someone to invest in his store. I had my mind on a new bicycle and didn’t really pay any attention. We bought two bicycles, some bicycle packs and a few maps, and my dad announced that the following week we would be riding from Beaver Lake, our home, up to Fond du Lac and back.

It is a beautiful ride through the hills and valleys of the Kettle Moraine region. I don’t think that I had ever ridden my bike more than ten miles in one crack, and now we were going to ride seventy miles in a single day. I don’t remember much about this trip, with the exception that I crashed going over some railroad tracks, and that we were on a really busy road for the last few miles of Day 1 when a semi came past me and almost blew me off the road. On the second day of our two-day journey, we stopped at a bar outside of Monches. I drank root beer, and my dad had a couple of beers before we got back on the bikes and headed home. We had a great time.