2020: Connect the Dots, Part II

It’s funny how something meaningful to you can feel like it was yesterday, even when a handful of years have past.  In 2014, I rode my first Connect the Dots tour, riding from Columbia, Missouri to Covington, Indiana.  Those 6 days of riding, starting from my mother-in-law’s home, connected my west of the Mississippi riding miles (Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota) with my Indiana miles.  

Finishing that tour, I thought it would be just “next” year when I would connect the next set, on roads between my “adult” home of Indiana and Michigan, where I started riding has a teen. But a bunch of life happened in the 12 months that followed, and that plan was put on hold.   So now in the middle of all the crazy that is 2020, I am finally about to start that next, un-ridden tour.

There are lot of conflicting feelings on this.  It was a bucket list item, something I thought would be on the way to another ride, part of longer tour, or a high school reunion. And this only opened up this year because every event I had planned to do in 2020 had been postponed or canceled.  And most of all, because the home I am riding too will be missing those I hoped to close the loop with, as I pulled into the familiar driveway of the Farm.

In our family, it has always been the Farm, with a capital F. It was was where my dad was born (really!) and were my grandparent’s lived during the school year, from Labor Day to Memorial Day.  And between Memorial Day and Labor Day, they ran the Willow Grove Hotel, a then century-old farm house converted to a 3-story 20-room hotel.  Both were magical places in my childhood;  the Farm with it’s barns, my Dad’s shop, the acres of crops, and the upstairs bedrooms, with single pane windows that barely muffled the winter winds.  The Hotel was Sunday chicken dinner, the front desk with the ice cream freezer and pop cooler, and my brothers and I entertaining the guests as we scampered under foot.  

Ready to Roll

The Hotel is gone now, closed in the early 70’s, only a memory of old post cards and family pictures.  Grampa Hardcastle is only a most distance montage of images in my childhood, he passed when I was 7.  Grandma Hardcastle was a big part of my childhood and early teens, as I spent hours working for her washing dishes, mowing lawns, raking leaves, and bailing water out of the hotel boats after a summer rain.  It was those chores that earned the amazing sum of $50 dollars that paid for my first “real” bike, a 26” Sears 3-Speed, that started my cycling adventures.

I can still remember a cold winter afternoon at the Farm, soon after Grandma’s death, walking through the empty house, and realizing, in my introduction to mortality, what things would never be the same again; treats in the the cookie jar, TV dinners watching Lawerence Welk, the fragrance of her talcum powered, and her stern reprimands if a chore was not done right.  And it was just a few months later, just after I moved out of my childhood home, that the Farm began the transition to my parent’s and younger siblings home for the next 30 years.  

Dad passed in 2012; he collapsed leaving his shop, just a few feet from where he’d been born 80 years before.  Mom and my brother Matt continued living there, and over the next few years, Mom finished all the remodeling and updates Dad and her planned, but that chance and opportunity had delayed too long.   Completing all those dreams was one of the things that kept her going in years after she lost Dad. After Mom passed in 2015, we made new living arrangements for Matt, and the Farm has remained empty since.  

Now 2020 is another year of change as we prepare to close out another chapter of our family story.   All these thoughts are on my mind, as I finish the final packing before my ride starts tomorrow.

Follow this link to Day 1

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