Category: Rich’s Ride

We live in communities. Neighborhoods, towns, churches, families all can be places where people come together toward some common purpose. They can also be places of oppression, isolation, and inequality. I’ve thought a lot lately about community. Because it’s difficult, because we do these bike tours, because I spent 35 years in classrooms. Today I’m […]

We completed two amazing tours. Community is hard. Whether it’s a bike tour/mission trip, a neighborhood, a city, a state, or a country, bringing folks together from different places, with different backgrounds and beliefs and different reasons for showing up, and asking them to work toward a common purpose takes a lot of work. Classrooms […]

On our bike tours, we sleep in churches. Each night, generous congregations allow us to invade their space with coolers, sleeping bags, and cycling equipment. When we leave each morning we do our best to leave the spaces just as we found them, clean and ready for use. In Breckenridge, Becky and I slept in […]

Two ways to create a culture. Method #1: Highlight bad behavior and make a rule. “Don’t do that.” You see the problem, right? We do it all the time, in reality TV and politics (is there a difference?) and the legal system. Media shines a spotlight on the bully, the creep, the social media troll, […]

If you’ve been here before, you’ll know I’m not fond of rules. Control, coercion, punishment…as a teacher I found those to be pretty ineffective ways to run a classroom. The more rules you have, the more time you spend enforcing rules instead of doing important stuff. I learned later in my career that things work […]

I’m never quite sure how to summarize a tour experience. One way is a video. I hope you enjoy this brief look at Front Range Tour 2019. Can’t see the video? Click here.

The folks at Harvest Farm are a special part of the FREEDOM TOUR community. Each year since 2015, we’ve invited men from the farm to join us on the initial stage of the Front Range Tour. For those who don’t cycle a lot, a 58-mile ride – on a hot day with what could be […]

I might have mislead you. You’ve read the last two days about a crash and getting lost, and you might think our team is the gang who can’t shoot straight. Truth is, this tour has gone incredibly well. That’s kind of how it is though, with bike tours and with life. You can go on […]

Monday we managed to get lost. Not quite sure how you get lost on a path you ridden several times before, but we did it. At the end of the day, we wrote it off as a great team building exercise. When you take off on an adventure like this, you like to think you’ve […]

Front Range Tour 2019 is off to an on usual start. Saturday, we get rained out. In seven years that’s never happened. Part of the group got in a little bit of a ride later in the day, but we had to cancel Cheyenne to Fort Collins. Sunday we got started about an hour and […]

Perhaps we shouldn’t fight injustice. We want to end the horrible blight of human trafficking. Some might say we’re engaged with ruthless, violent criminals. The only way to win, they say, is to fight back. I’m looking at our never-ending war on drugs, terrorism, human trafficking and thinking more, bigger war might not be the […]