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Bicyclers end tour in Louisburg PDF Print E-mail
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Written by Kristen Waggener   
Wednesday, 17 June 2009 07:00
The last leg was the worst by many standards.

Bicycling up and down the hills that saturated 311th Street and Metcalf Road from Paola to Louisburg, riders sighed in relief as they reached 287th Street, signaling their more-than-500-mile journey was about completed.

“You guys forgot to flatten out the roads for us. You left all the hills!” a bicycler shouted as he conquered the final hill on Metcalf Road before reaching Louisburg’s city limits.  

Louisburg was the end location for the 35th annual Bike Across Kansas weeklong bicycle ride that began at the Kansas-Colorado state line west of Syracuse and ended Saturday with bicyclers peddling to the Kansas-Missouri state line on Kansas Highway 68 and back to Broadmoor Elementary School.

Early Saturday morning, bicyclers began riding into the school’s parking lot looking for a place to rest before grabbing lunch on their final day. Just after 9 a.m., Louisburg resident Vicki Hites stood in anticipation, waiting for a phone call from a friend she hadn’t seen in 16 years.

As her phone rang, Hites was only a few feet away from friend Concha Duarte of Hutchinson, who just completed Bike Across Kansas.

“I didn’t know how we were going to recognize each other,” Duarte said.

The two exchanged hugs and reminisced about their year teaching in Paola — Hites as a Spanish teacher and Duarte as a business teacher.

“This is just so cool to see you,” Hites said.

After filing in to the school parking lot, many of the bicyclers made a stop at either the pop station run by the Louisburg High School Band Aides as a fund-raiser, or the T-shirt station run by BAK veteran Ed Ramirez of Topeka-based Embroidery Plus. Joined by his wife, Kim, son, Ed Jr., and family friend Rene Tinoco, Ramirez was distributing an annual tradition: end of the ride T-shirts.

“We came up a week ago and took a picture of the state line and incorporated it into the shirts,” he said.

Ramirez and his son have a special place for BAK, as they both participated in the event in 1988. “It’s a lot of fun.”

Raindrops began spitting out of the sky about an hour after riders started peddling in, but that didn’t stop riders from celebrating their accomplishments and the friends they met along the way.

Tom Gilman of Wichita and friends Bill Sorensen and Paul Peckman ended their third BAK ride with newly found friends Jason Armes and Bill Egan of Columbus, Ohio, who traveled to Kansas for the first time this year to ride across the state.

“I think this was the easiest of the three (years),” Gilman said.

“But there were more days of headwinds,” Egan quickly chimed in. “That was the tough part.”

Hills, headwinds or rain, all agreed the thing that will keep them coming back is the friends.

“The people are the best part of the ride,” Gilman said.
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