Training Has Begun

Pella, Iowa
Volksweg Trail

We are training hard for the second part of our 100 year memorial bike ride which starts in July. Our latest ride in Pella, Iowa was good practice for hills. As much as I would like to think Kansas is flat, from what we have seen on the internet, it is not. The following is a sign I like to see.

Unfortunately, most of the time after you go downhill, you must go back up! Our legs got a good workout Thursday on the Volksweg Trail and proved to us that we need more conditioning on hills. We really enjoyed our stay in the quaint town of Pella.

I am in the process of mapping out our ride for July and it looks like it will take us 10 days to ride from Kansas City to the panhandle of Oklahoma. We are planning to end our ride at the Hooker Cemetery where my grandmother, Irene Cousins Craig, is buried. She was the youngest person (2 years old) on the caravan leaving St. Louis in 1911. We thought it was fitting that we started our ride in a cemetery in St. Louis last September and will finish in a cemetery this summer. We are also going to have a few more people with us this summer and will have 2 support vehicles. Tom and Susan are seriously considering riding a tandem also. We would like to invite our other Cousins descendants to ride with us this summer, either in a vehicle or a bicycle! If you are thinking there is no way you would ride a bike that far, maybe you would consider meeting us on the last day in Hooker, Oklahoma and riding with us out to the cemetery. Hope you will consider it!