How about an invitational bike ride where every rest stop is an ice cream shop and there’s a pig roast at the end?
That certainly got my team’s attention in the mid-2000s. It was the selling point of the Roun’da Manure Bicycle Tour, a fundraiser for the chamber of commerce of Sharon, Wisconsin.
Where? Right. It’s a town of 1,600 just over the border, northwest of Harvard, which itself is well out there in McHenry County. So we had to drive quite a bit and navigate the farm roads to get there.
Why Sharon? In 2005, it became the base of four loops that riders could choose from to make their own “tour.” Before 2005, the ride had been the “Around the Manure Century,” the ride’s website says. The location could have something to do with that ride’s founders, Lon Haldeman and Susan Notorangelo; more on them later.
The ride this year remained four loops of varying lengths: 37 miles, 28 miles, 22 miles and 20 miles. You could put them together to make yourself a century, a metric century or something shorter.
With the varying lengths and light traffic nearly everywhere, this ride is good for serious cyclists and casual bicyclists, and with some caution, maybe even for families.
Ice cream!
But did they say ice cream shops? Yes, they sure did. This year we were provided with $10 in “moo bucks.” And we could use them at one or more of four ice cream shops: the Darien Ice Cream Shoppe in Darien, Maggy Moo’s Dairy Ripple in Walworth, and Myrt’s Ice Cream Shoppe and the Coffee Cup Cafe in Sharon.
In truth, not all of the four loops had an ice cream “rest stop,” unless you count the two shops back in the home base of Sharon. (And you certainly could count those.) A couple of the loops had traditional if minimalist rest stops midway, with staples like granola bars, bananas and Gatorade, and the organizers posted a bigger traditional stop in Sharon itself just around the block from the ice cream shops.
That’s a bit of a slip from years past, when the ice cream stops could also be a hot dog joint or even a Mexican place at which you could cash in the moo bucks for real food. This year, Myrt’s in particular got a little busy later in the day, with fewer ice cream or other choices out on the routes and many saving their moo bucks for the end of the ride.
Also missing from the past: the pig roast. It had been quite a busy event outside in the park behind Sharon’s Veterans Memorial, with an excellent post-ride meal.
As it did with everything, COVID changed the offerings. The meal each year now is at Pat’s Brew & ‘Que near the main rest stop in Sharon. Everyone can get a barbecue pork sandwich with a side of mac and cheese, and cole slaw. We could certainly do worse. There are vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options, too.
That meal plus the $10 in ice cream — which, by the way, you could get to go in pints or other forms like ice cream cookies, or even come back and buy later up until Labor Day — were part of the $45 entry fee, or $50 after Aug. 1.
The roads
So, the riding then: The organizers said “the four routes vary in difficulty and length, but all of them feature the same Southern Wisconsin beauty: lush trees, fields, and sometimes a herd or two of cows.”
That’s about right. The difficulty lay in some rolling hills, but no single climb gained more than 100 feet. Downloadable Ride with GPS maps with elevation profiles were posted online.
And yes, those little hills came with views of pretty green farm fields or prairie. Or trees easily mixed with the fields. Or we encountered canopies of trees over roads.
Plus we’d pass the small towns — often corners more than anything — and surrounding homes. Sometimes we rode by tall corn stalks on one side and homes in a tree-lined neighborhood on the other.
The road conditions varied — as they have for years. Many are full of bumps, cracks and potholes. The roads arguably were better this year because more of them were recently repaved.
The routes
As in years past, one route took us back into Illinois. That’s not too hard as Sharon’s southern border is right on the state line. But the route went 8 miles south to Capron, then another 5 miles southwest to Poplar Grove before heading back north.
Those 5 miles are actually on the Long Prairie Trail. Sometimes that’s nice asphalt, sometimes that’s rough asphalt, and sometimes that’s outright dirt track. An alternative for some of it is the parallel Route 173, if you’re comfortable with that; the traffic is not so busy that far out.
The long route took us far west to the Town of Turtle (that’s its name) and some scenic views surrounding Turtle Creek, by the towns of Shopiere and Tiffany. What you could call the hilliest route went to Fontana and Walworth.
Fontana is on the west end of Geneva Lake — Fontana-on-Geneva Lake is the full name, after all — but the route avoided the lakefront and stayed on the outskirts of town. (Lake Geneva the town is on the east end of the lake.) Still, there was a big downhill to the edge of Fontana — you could easily hit 40 mph — and then a thankfully longer, gentler incline south out of town toward Walworth.
Walworth turned out to be the most congested area, relatively speaking. In fact, it was easy to miss the ice cream stop, Meggy Moo’s, as we concentrated on navigating the busier streets through town. Of course, if we had reviewed the cue sheet and seen the note about Meggy Moo’s, the big Meggy Moo’s sign along the road would have sunk in.
The history
All of the roads on the Roun’da Manure Tour are roads that event co-founder Lon Haldeman has ridden over and over since he was a boy growing up in Harvard in the 1970s.
Haldeman, if you didn’t know, is recognized as “the catalyst for ultra distance bicycle racing,” according to the UltraMarathon Cycling Association. After he himself set the Double Transcontinental Record — from New York City to Santa Monica and back, in 24 days — he and three other men embarked on The Great American Bike Race in 1982. That was documented on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” and later would become the Race Across America, or RAAM.
Haldeman went on to set several more transcontinental cycling records. Plus in 1981 he had set the 24-hour track record in the Northbrook Velodrome. Soon he was organizing races and tours across the U.S.
Susan Notorangelo, Haldeman’s wife, herself is an ultra-distance legend, breaking ground for women in cycling. She and Haldeman in 1987 organized a series of one-day Randonneur rides around southern Wisconsin that would qualify cyclists to participate in the Paris-Best-Paris ultra-distance race, the Roun’da Manure website says. Those led to the Around the Manure Century that became Roun’da Manure.
Haldeman was at the Roun’da Manure once again this year. He was stationed at the main rest stop in Sharon, greeting and helping riders as well as selling and autographing copies of his 2024 self-published book about that Double Transcontinental ride, “Cycling Pioneer.” His PAC Tour company also is based in Sharon.
So on this ride, you could meet a bicycling legend.
All in all, even if Roun’da Manure has suffered a little since the pandemic, the riding is still peaceful, the southern Wisconsin views are still pretty, and you can still get plenty of ice cream plus some barbecue. It’s sort of a quieter stalwart on the Chicago-area riding calendar.
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