(published on Wednesday, May 15, 1996 in the Horizons section of the Naperville SUN)
Most retirees celebrate their new freedom with a long, leisurely vacation. Michael Tenzinger is going to climb on a bicycle and pedal almost 2,500 miles.
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Tenzinger will be one of 31 people, including his daughter, Marie, who will be participating in the first annual Pac Tour Route 66 Bicycle Tour. The cross-country odyssey will follow, as closely as possible, the original route of the “Main Street of America.”
The group will leave from Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive on June 1 (which happens to be Tenzinger’s 65th birthday) and will arrive in Santa Monica, Calif. on June 23, averaging a travel total of 100 miles a day.
The historic road begins at Michigan Avenue and Jackson Boulevard in Chicago, across from Grant Park, heads southwest to Joliet, continues southwest through Springfield into Missouri and Oklahoma, then generally west until it terminates at Santa Monica, Calif.
It was obliterated in the 1970s by the advent of the super highways such as Interstate 40, which cuts directly across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona on to California.
The trip is the brain-child of husband-and-wife team Lon Halderman and Susan Notorangeio, the directors of Wisconsin-based Pac Tour, which arranges cross-country and transcontinental bicycle tours. Both are accomplished cyclists who are each winners of Race Across America, a coast-to-coast bike marathon which involves pedaling day and night from one side of the country to the other in a total of eight or nine days, Tenzinger said.
For that matter, every person on the Route 66 Tour is an experienced cyclist. “They’d better be, if they’re going to keep up with Lon and Susan,” Tenzinger said with a laugh.
He and Marie (who first sparked his interest in cycling) have been pedaling for almost 10 years. They are both members of the Elmhurst Bike Club and have also been involved with the Naperville Bike Club.
Father and daughter train for long-distance events like this by “constant riding,” Tenzinger said – outdoors whenever weather permits, or indoors on a wind trainer. He admits, however, that “you can train all you want, and it’s never enough on long trips like this. The best you can do is hope your legs are in good shape and get into a routine.”
He cautioned that the Route 66 Tour is not for inexperienced or even “ordinary” cyclists, only for those accustomed to long-distance events.
It is not a race, however.
“The point is not how fast you can go,” he said, “it’s the endurance. It’s finding a pace you’re comfortable with and staying with it for hours.”
The Tenzingers, who live in Wheaton, will be joined on the tour by a diverse group of 12 women and 19 men from towns as close as Evanston, Skokie, and Champaign, Ill., and from countries as far as Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Other U. S. states represented on the trip include Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin.
The 31 participants of the tour include a nine-person support crew driving three vans. “Their main purpose is to leap-frog ahead of us every 25 or 30 miles and hand out snacks and high-energy drinks,” Tenzinger said. “That’s important, because your body burns up most of its fuel after that amount of time when you’re cycling. There’s also a bike mechanic on hand to help with repairs if you need it.”
Good cyclists, however, carry their own repair kit and tire pump along with them, Tenzinger said, as well as about 15 ounces of water to re-hydrate themselves as they ride. He and Marie will tote “camel backs,” bladder-type containers strapped onto their backs that contain 70 ounces of water.
Although the cyclists will be expected to travel every day, rain or shine (“You can’t take a day off if you’re going to keep up with the time table,” Tenzinger said), they will take a well-deserved rest every night at various motels. They will also reward themselves at the journey’s end by flying themselves and their bicycles home.
Some of the motels the group is slated to stay in are original “motor courts” still in existence from the hey-day of Route 66 in the 1950s, such as the Will Rogers Motor Court in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona.
These names bring back a nostalgic sense of the past, which, Tenzinger said, “is part of allure of the Route 66 Tour, the reason so many people are coming from so far away to ride it.
“Route 66 was the ‘Mother Road,’ or the ‘Main Street’ of America,” he said. “It’s the road the Oklahomans took to California to escape the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, so there’s a real feeling of freedom, of dreams for a better life, when you’re on it.”
According to Tenzinger, about 85 percent of the original route is still in existence, although it is no longer called Route 66. In places where the original route is no longer available, the group will travel on frontage roads that parallel it as much as possible.
Besides the chance to ride into the past, the biggest draw of the Route 66 Tour, Tenzinger said, is the physical challenge of pushing oneself to the limit.
“It’s the exuberance of it,” he said, “the thought that when you get to the end, you can say ‘I did it.’ “
