Transcript

So this is Cameron Park, and it was the location for many, many years of a tent that we put up every Labor Day weekend to organize the La Crosse Labor Day Bicycle Festival. I really first started getting involved in Bike Fest because I was just riding the rides. I was not an organizer yet. I just knew that this event was happening, and I was getting ready to teach the fall semester but I was here with not much to do Labor Day weekend before classes started after Labor Day. And I heard about this multi-day festival, so I just rode down. It’s a free event, you just ride up and start. And at the time, the way that they were doing it, it was, they would just hand out the paper with the routes on them: cue sheets. This is before smartphones, and you would have a list of the turns that you would make, and so I would show up and see what the route was for the day. And I’d go out and ride it, and eventually I think I was out on a ride with some folks, and while I had only been in La Crosse a couple of years, it turned out they were all from Chicago and they didn’t know where the next turn was. And I ended up sort of being default leader of this group even though I wasn’t really sure of what I was doing. And so the next year I became an official leader. They called them Ride Ambassadors, and so I would show up every day and lead a group of people. My name is James Longhurst. I’ve been teaching at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse since 2008, and volunteering for the La Crosse Labor Day Bicycle Festival and leading tours here made me feel that La Crosse was my home.