The Bluegrass and Beyond

Our plan was to ride Kentucky from top to bottom, but Mother Nature had other plans.

Storms on Friday forced organizers of the Governor’s Autumn Bicycle Ride Across Kentucky to cancel the first day’s journey — 60 miles from the Ohio River at Carrollton to Frankfort.

A few brave souls did it anyway. “We came to ride, so we rode,” said John O’Cull, a Vanceburg dentist. He and three buddies arrived in Frankfort soaking wet.

The other 65 of us started Saturday morning from the Grand Theatre in downtown Frankfort. The annual ride began in 2004 to raise money for the Grand’s restoration. This year, it became part of Gov. Steve Beshear’s “adventure tourism” initiative.

We spent Saturday night at a church camp near Campbellsville, where a truck had ferried our luggage. We left from there Sunday morning and finished the ride by dipping our wheels in Dale Hollow Lake on the Tennessee line.

Saturday’s ride was 90 miles or so; Sunday’s was 70 or so. I say “or so” because some of us missed a couple of the orange Gs that had been spray-painted on the road to mark turns, so we unintentionally enjoyed a few extra miles of Kentucky scenery.

We avoided big highways whenever possible. Many roads we traveled barely rated mention on a map.

The rain stopped early Saturday, but most of the weekend was cloudy, cold and breezy.

I never know how to dress when biking this time of year. I was burning up in a light fleece jacket as we climbed a big hill Sunday on Little Cake Road in Adair County, but I felt good a couple of miles later as we passed Bearwallow Cemetery. Then I was cold as we flew down a hill on Bull Run Lane.

Only two hills got me off my bike: One was Saturday, too soon after a delicious lunch of fried chicken, corn and apples that I wanted to keep. The other was a steep, milelong climb Sunday. I made it three-fourths of the way up, but I had to stop long enough to get my heart out of my throat so I could resume pedaling.

I enjoy the camaraderie of riding with old friends and making new ones. I also like the challenge of going from place to place under my own power. Bicycle touring is like hiking, only the scenery changes faster. By the end of a long ride, my legs are burning and my butt is getting numb, but I feel as if I’ve accomplished something.

Kentucky always seems more beautiful when viewed from a bicycle. There’s nothing between you and the passing landscape. The only noise is your own heavy breathing as you go uphill and the smooth spin of your freewheel as you go down.

After Sunday brunch at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, we saw a chapel designed by architect E. Fay Jones, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s a piece of world-class modern architecture that you don’t expect to find in small-town Kentucky.

Most of the ride’s sights were more subtle, and 15 miles an hour was slow enough to study them.

Tire swings hung from front-yard trees, and wood stoves were getting back to work. There was a hint of smoke in the air, and long stacks of split logs waiting to be devoured.

Golden tobacco hung from barn rafters. Amish buggies sat parked in sheds. Pumpkins were arranged in yards, and Halloween ghosts made of white trash bags dangled from trees and porches.

Morning mist blanketed still-green pastures and fading fields of cornstalks. Red sumac and yellow walnut trees stood waiting for the rest of the forest to catch up.

Old farmers and children called out and waved. Dairy cows stood and stared. Dogs watched, too, or gave chase, depending on their age, temperament and how many cyclists they had already gone after.

Riding back roads makes you realize how much of this state is made up of small farms, modest rural homes and crossroads communities barely big enough to support a store or church.

As you roll quietly from one little town to the next, there’s so much to see. Then your burning legs remind you that there’s a hill coming up and, beyond it, another colorful piece in the patchwork that is Kentucky.

Nothing refreshes you like a good vacation. Riding a bicycle more than 350 miles up, down and around the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia may not be everyone’s idea for a refreshing vacation, but it worked for me and the 2,000 others on the annual Bike Virginia tour.

This was my sixth Bike Virginia, a five-day tour that each June goes through a different part of the Old Dominion. I went with a group of about 20 friends from Central Kentucky, plus a couple of riding buddies from when I lived in Atlanta. One of our group referred to it as “summer camp for adults.” That’s a pretty good description.

While on the trip, we had dinner a couple of nights along the huge pedestrian mall that attracts hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of locals to downtown Charlottesville each night to eat, shop and visit with each other. It’s a great place, and a larger version of the idea proposed for Mill Street between Main and Short streets in downtown Lexington. I’ll be writing about what lessons Lexington can learn from Charlottesville’s experience in my column in Wednesday’s Herald-Leader.

Phil Needham didn’t make it to Churchill Downs to see the horse he bred and foaled pull a stunning upset in the Kentucky Derby.

He had his own race to win.

Mine That Bird became the second-biggest long shot ever to win the Derby, covering the 1¼ miles Saturday in a little more than two minutes and two seconds.

A few hours earlier, Needham, 67, rode his bicycle 123 miles in six hours to win his age group in the 18th annual Calvin’s Challenge road race, which drew 210 cyclists to Springfield, Ohio.

Had the Georgetown resident not wanted to be done in time to see the Derby on television, he would have entered the bicycle race’s main event, where he set the record for his age group two years ago by riding 225 miles in 12 hours.

Needham’s racing partner was Bena Halecky, 50, of Lexington, whose 123-mile performance won her age group. She was named the best overall female racer.

“I went up to Louisville last Monday to see the horse work and meet the new owners and trainer, and I was very pleased with what I saw,” Needham said. “But the chances, you know, were very remote, 50-1. So because we had trained and planned for this race, we went to Ohio.”

It wasn’t the first time Needham has been wrong about Mine That Bird.

The Birdstone colt was athletic and strong. Needham’s wife, Judy, thought the yearling was promising. But Needham and his business partners decided to sell him.

“When the partners agreed to sell, we had the right to buy, but we let him go,” Needham said. “He brought $9,500, which was next to nothing. People spend millions trying to create a Derby horse.”

Needham had better instincts about Mine That Bird’s mother.

When Needham and Bill Betz ended their thoroughbred partnership last year, they decided to sell the mare Mining My Own at auction. But when the bids started coming in, Needham thought they were too low. He jumped in and ended up buying her for $8,000.

Needham and Halecky had been friends for years. Halecky, a Procter & Gamble executive, had urged him to buy P&G stock. “He said, ‘If I’m going to invest in your business, you need to invest in mine,” Halecky said. So she kicked in $4,000 for half interest in the mare.

As Needham and Halecky raced Saturday, the Derby was on their minds. They considered it an omen that their race was called Calvin’s Challenge and Mine That Bird was being ridden by jockey Calvin Borel.

“And then we kept seeing birds in front of us on the road and I kept yelling to Bena, ‘Mine That Bird!’” Needham said.

After their race, Needham and Halecky headed back to Lexington, stopping at a sports bar near Cincinnati to eat dinner and watch the Derby. The place was noisy, and the big-screen TV was hard to see. So it took them a few moments to realize that the impossible had happened.

“Finally, Phil looked at me and said, ‘We just won the Kentucky Derby!’” Halecky said. Soon their cell phones were ringing as friends called the congratulate them.

Several of their Bluegrass Cycling Club friends, who gathered to watch the Derby at Keeneland, bet and won big on the horse. But Halecky had put only a $2 bet on him. Needham didn’t bet anything, although his wife, who had always known better, put down $100 to win.

“It was one of the best Saturdays that anyone could ever have,” Needham said. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Since ending his partnership with Betz, Needham has formed Needham Thoroughbreds, with interest in about 15 horses, including Mining My Own.

Needham had planned to focus more on his cycling.

He took up the sport a decade ago and has been riding competitively for seven years. He was sixth in his age group in the 24-mile time trial at the 2007 masters nationals. A first-place finish in last year’s Bluegrass State Games made him eligible to compete this August at the Senior Games in San Francisco, where he plans to enter the time trial and the road race.

“My goal is to be number one in my age group in the country,” he said.

But his 40-year career in thoroughbreds seems to have gotten a second wind.

The $8,000 mare he and Halecky own could now be worth millions if they sell her — or even sell part ownership in her — and perhaps even more in the long run if they keep her and breed her well.

Mine That Bird was the mare’s first foal. She also has a 2-year-old in training and a foal by her side, and she is pregnant with another. At age 8, Mining My Own could have 15 more years of productive life ahead, Needham said.

“Bena wants to continue to own her and have the fun; my wife wants to continue to own her and have the fun,” he said. “My best business sense tells me to keep at least 25 percent. I have to review that with my partner. I have to let the dust settle a little.”

As the dust was beginning to settle Monday afternoon, and it was beginning to rain, Halecky and Needham met near Georgetown for a bike ride through the countryside. They said they planned to ride 20-something miles, maybe more. After all, they had a lot to talk about.

Many people at the University of Kentucky were surprised — and not especially pleased — when officials Tuesday announced a new $15 fee and registration program for bicycles parked on campus.

With student tuition rising and employee pay stagnant — not to mention all of those millions going to the new basketball coach — it seems like an odd time to be adding another fee, even if it is a small, one-time assessment that wouldn’t take effect until 2010.

Besides, if you’re wanting to encourage bicycling as an alternative form of transportation, is it a good idea to start charging for it?

After a couple of articles in the Kentucky Kernel student newspaper, officials might be reconsidering the fee. But the rest of the program seems like a good idea, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s another sign that UK is taking bicycles seriously.

The plan would require bikes parked on campus to be registered and bear a sticker, beginning in July. The sticker would help with recovery of lost or stolen bikes and make it easier for bicycle owners to get insurance.

Money from the fee would be earmarked for upkeep of bicycle racks and, more importantly, bicycle education.

Whether or not the fee remains — and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it scrapped — UK officials should press forward with the education piece. I see a lot of students riding bicycles around campus who don’t seem to know the rules of the road or some basic safety practices. It’s dangerous for the cyclists, and it just makes drivers angry.

Yellow bikes update

Yellow bikes will begin reappearing on Lexington streets later this month. It’s the third year for the program that provides free loaner bicycles for short trips around downtown.

But the program, which was started by private donors and administered by the Downtown Lexington Corp., could be much better next year.

The city will find out this fall whether it will get a $206,000 federal grant to provide high-tech bike racks and other support for the yellow bike program. The grant would need to be matched by $51,500 in local funding, probably private, in-kind contributions.

“If we get that support, we’ll be able to do a world-class shared bike program,” said Phil Holoubek, a downtown developer who helped start the yellow bike program.

That would include 12 to 15 solar-powered racks where bicycles could be borrowed with the swipe of a credit card and returned to another rack at the end of a ride. The racks would be concentrated downtown, around the UK and Transylvania University campuses and at the Kentucky Horse Park at the end of the Legacy Trail, which is now under construction between downtown and the park, said Kenzie Gleason, the city’s bikeway/pedestrian coordinator.

The rack vendor would be chosen by competitive bidding. But one major player in the business is Bcycle (bicycle with no “i”), a three-company partnership that includes Louisville-based Humana. To see how its racks work, go to Bcycle’s Web site.

But this year, like last year, about 60 yellow bikes will be available for checkout from several downtown locations, mostly retailers, and must be returned to the same location, preferably on the same day. Yellow bikes will be out through October.

There’s a $10 one-time fee to join the program, and people who have signed up before don’t need to re-register.

Bike Lexington plans

The annual Bike Lexington event has been moved from the third Saturday in May to Memorial Day, May 25, to better coordinate with the Bluegrass Cycling Club’s annual Horsey Hundred ride that Saturday and Sunday.

The Horsey Hundred attracts nearly 2,000 cyclists — many of whom come from as far away as Florida and Michigan — to the countryside around Lexington, Georgetown and Versailles.

The event is based at Georgetown College, but Gleason said shuttle buses will bring riders into Lexington that Saturday evening for food and a live band at Cheapside. “Lexington wanted to bring them into town and show them a good time,” she said.

Bike Lexington on Monday will be at the Courthouse Plaza at Main Street and Limestone and will include a 10-mile family fun ride and other activities for cyclists, walkers and families.

More information on Bike Lexington will be available next week at www.bikelexington.com. For information about the Horsey Hundred, go to www.bgcycling.org.

In other bicycle news: Mayor Jim Newberry and the Mayor’s Bicycle Task Force will have a Community Bike Forum on Tuesday, May 5, at 6:30 p.m. at a location still to be determined. The public forum will include updates on various bicycle-related activities and organizations around town.

“We’re hoping people will come, find out what is happening in Lexington and tell us what they would like to see,” Gleason said.

Also, people interested in bicycle commuting can attend free seminars at the Courthouse Plaza on three Wednesday nights next month — May 6, 13 and 27 — from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The seminars, conducted by trainers certified by the League of American Bicyclists, will cover such commuting basics as how to change a flat tire, and choosing the right bike, clothing and route.

Bill Fortune, my friend and cycling buddy, called one evening last fall with an announcement: “I’m going to ride across the country.”

Fortune, a veteran law professor at the University of Kentucky, is phasing into retirement, so he finally had the time to pedal coast-to-coast. At 68, he’s in better shape than most people 20 years younger. But he thought that if he was going to make the ride he had long dreamed about, he needed to do it now.

So, in mid-June, Fortune flew to Seattle and met up with two guides and 14 other cyclists, many of whom had retired after careers as a nurse, a banker, a helicopter pilot, a builder, a lumber executive and a physicist.

Their trip was chronicled on a Web site whose name probably summed up the thoughts of many of their friends and relatives: www.crazyguyonabike.com.

After dipping their tires in Puget Sound, the riders set off across the northern United States and Canada toward Portland, Maine. Over the next nine weeks, Fortune said he learned a few things about himself and a lot about his fellow countrymen.

Fortune said he knew he was in for an adventure the first day when the group pedaled out of Seattle. The cyclists met a group of locals on bicycles headed to the summer solstice celebration in the counterculture neighborhood of Fremont. They were wearing body paint — and nothing else.

There were many strange and ordinary sights to come as the group pedaled more than 60 miles a day and spent nights in small-town motels, campgrounds and church basements. Bill called occasionally to update me on his progress, and I got more details from his wife, Beverly, a Herald-Leader colleague.

Of course, there was a lot of beautiful scenery: The peaks of the Cascades and Glacier National Park; the endless prairies of South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming; and the beautiful Erie Canal towns in New York state.

There were famous landmarks such as Mount Rushmore and the Little Bighorn battlefield, where Indian warriors’ graves now have marble stones noting that they died “while defending the Cheyenne way of life.”

But what impressed Fortune most were the places he never would have stopped to see, and the people he never would have met, had he been driving through in a car.

There was the couple in Waterville, Wash., who bought and renovated the abandoned Lutheran church where they had been married years before. Now it’s beautiful again, and the couple rents it as a wedding chapel.

There was the museum in Stanford, Mont., with a vast collection of salt and pepper shakers. Fortune now knows that Buffalo, Wyo., claims to have the world’s largest swimming pool, and Huron, S.D., the world’s largest statue of a pheasant.

There’s a section of the Berlin Wall standing in Rapid City, S.D. And in a museum in Manitowoc, Wis., there’s a replica of the biggest thing to ever hit town: a 20-pound chunk of the Russian satellite Sputnik. It landed in the middle of a Manitowoc street on Sept. 5, 1962.

“You see the country in a different way when you’re on a bicycle,” Fortune said. “If you made the trip in a car, you couldn’t see it as slowly and intensely as we saw it.”

Fortune marveled at the vast openness of the West as he passed abandoned houses and towns depopulated by a changing economy. Many people had lived in their small towns all their lives, but their children had left in search of jobs and a more exciting lifestyle. He saw human despair on Indian reservations, and noted there was at least one bar in every Western town, no matter how small, and gambling machines in every bar and gas station.

The cyclists agreed that the West ended and the Midwest began when they crossed the Missouri River in eastern South Dakota near the Minnesota line. Gradually, the empty country gave way to tidy farms and farmhouses and well-kept small towns.

The cyclists were invited to a church ice-cream social in one town, a rhubarb festival in another, and a county fair in rural Michigan. They attended Aebleskiver Days in Tyler, Minn., a festival dedicated to a spherical Danish pancake.

The people Fortune met along the way were open, friendly and more broad-minded than he expected.

“They were interested in what you were doing, and they wanted you to be interested in what they were doing,” he said. “They wanted to talk about the history of their small town, and its prospects for the future, which often weren’t good. And they loved to tell you about something that you don’t know anything about.”

In South Dakota, Fortune ran into a crew of Kentucky men with R.J. Corman Railroad Group, busy laying track across the prairie. He met a couple from Africa who had traveled throughout the United States looking for a place to settle before they bought a small campground in Waterville, Minn.

He had a long conversation with a woman in Fond du Lac, Wis., about sturgeon spearing. “Her whole family was into sturgeon spearing,” he said. “It has to do with cutting a hole in the ice and standing over the hole with a spear and waiting for the sturgeon to swim under your hole.”

By the time Fortune had dipped his wheels in the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, his last few ounces of fat had turned to muscle.

A week before his journey ended, he called me from upstate New York so we could make plans for a Louisville-to-Bardstown ride the weekend after he returned home. Even after pedaling 4,100 miles to get a view of America from a small, hard bicycle seat, he was eager to ride more.

“I’ll bet you’re coming back with legs of steel,” I told him.

“I don’t know about that,” he replied. “But I sure have a butt of iron.”

And a new appreciation for small-town America and its people.