Why did I make this website? First, I ride all over the suburbs. I usually start from my home in Schaumburg and most often go north toward Long Grove, Hawthorn Woods, Lake Zurich and Wauconda, or south to Glen Ellyn, Wheaton and Winfield, or west to Elgin, South Elgin and St. Charles, or even Campton Hills. Sometimes I drive to start rides in Naperville or Plainfield heading south, or Lemont onto trails nearby, or Evanston heading north, or even Huntley heading further northwest. And sometimes I simply ride nearby into South Barrington and the Dundees, or my beloved Busse Woods.
I ride on trails and I ride on roads. I have liked to explore by bike since my childhood, and the vast Chicago area provides never-ending options. I’m discovering great new places all the time — our area is full of neat neighborhoods and beautiful scenery even amid the sprawl — and now I aim to help you discover them, too.
I also created this website to highlight some of the many efforts to make bicycling better in the Chicago area. I’m by no means the first to do so; bicycling advocacy has gone on for decades here, so there’s a lot of bicycling to enjoy today.
There’s still so much to be done. While advocates in Chicago have made the city a lot easier to ride over the decades, the suburbs aren’t always easy to get around. There’s a lot of advocacy aimed at bicycle commuting, but there are a lot of obstacles. I see it riding just from Schaumburg into nearby DuPage County towns like Bloomingdale and Glendale Heights; I can get there, but not every mile is safe. And I’m a seasoned cyclist accustomed to riding in traffic. People can have trouble riding safely even from one side of their town to the other — to say nothing of families trying to enjoy bicycling; I will be keeping them in mind, and a range of bicyclists up to the serious recreational level, as I write about trails, roads and rides on this website.
The good news is there is so much advocacy happening, from the hyperlocal to the super-regional levels. The range of work that’s been done and reports proposing more are stunning. The number of places to look for the advocacy is huge. I’ve rounded up links to at least some of it in this one place for a starting point.
Most of all, I think bicycling is fantastic. You can see neat things with each trip, you can relieve stress and feel great, you can improve your health, you can improve the environment, you can improve the community. So I want to share some of what I’m experiencing. Thank you for reading.
About me, Neil Holdway, real quick: I grew up in Harwood Heights, east of O’Hare and surrounded by the Far Northwest Side of Chicago (Norwood Park). I rode my Schwinn Sting-Ray all around the neighborhood, then my Schwinn Traveler and World to work at the Brickyard Mall. I used that World to ride to college at Northwestern University, too. After graduating, I moved to the more spacious suburbs — specifically, Hoffman Estates, and now in Schaumburg with my wife Michelle, who is perfectly happy to let me do all the riding. I’m a former Daily Herald editor (as was Michelle), the lead night editor from 2006 to 2023 who worked on front pages among other things, and who also occasionally wrote about bicycling in the suburbs and later even wrote a few editorials about it. I’ve also been heavily involved with ACES: The Society for Editing for all of this century. And the serious cycling came after a decade of running in my 20s.
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