Pilgrimage on Wheels rolls on out
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
Special to The Globe
Posted June 13, 2002

STORM LAKE - Our Offenburger home here on the lakeshore in northwest Iowa has stacks of T-shirts covering the pool table, boxes of bottled water in the garage, bright orange directional signs all over the driveway, boxes of specially-designed map books in the basement and six months of paperwork in orderly piles on the dining room table.

Those are sure signs that a bicycle ride is about to start.

This one is the week-long, 433.5-mile "Pilgrimage on Wheels" (POW!) ride that is part of the centennial celebration of the Diocese of Sioux City.

"I'm looking forward to a POWerful experience!" cyclist Jay Hardcastle, of Ames, Iowa, quipped on June 7.

He, his wife Linda and sons Tyler and Justin, who are 9 and 6, are riding two tandems. The parents have done bicycle tours in 18 states and three Canadian provinces over the past 22 years, and they've started taking their sons on the tandems in the last couple of years.

And they are loyal members of Bethesda Lutheran Church in Ames, illustrating that not all the cyclists on POW! will be Catholic.

On June 9, the Hardcastles and more than 150 other cyclists began to make the 62.3-mile ride from Storm Lake St. Mary's Catholic Church to the first overnight stop at Mapleton's St. Mary's. Along the way, the riders will visit other Catholic churches in Schaller, Ida Grove and Danbury, with additional stops in Galva and Battle Creek, which do not have Catholic congregations.

The other overnight stops at Catholic churches and schools during the week were June 10 in Carroll, June 11 in Fort Dodge, June 12 at West Bend, June 13 in Milford and June 14 in Granville before the finish on Saturday, June 15, at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City.

POW! riders from 10 states were making their way to Storm Lake. Some were coming on a shuttle bus at mid-afternoon from Briar Cliff.

Opening activities at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Storm Lake, where associate pastor Rev. Doug Klein said Mass for the POW! riders at 5:30 p.m. Father Klein was getting on his bicycle with the rest of us early Sunday morning, and he expected to ride all week.

St. Mary's POW! coordinators Mark and Jenny Petty lined up the St. Mary's High School Fine Arts Boosters to provide dinner for the riders tonight, and invitations have been issued for members of the congregation and the general public to join-in on the meal, too.

After the meal, an entertainment program started at 7 p.m., with a slide show telling the history of Catholicism in the Storm Lake community. In addition, several talented singers and instrumentalists from the congregation are performing. And then "DeeJay Joe" from Sioux City spun tunes for a dance.

Riders camped on a parish-owned lawn behind St. Mary's Church, as well as on the lawns around the church itself, the rectory and the school.

Sunday morning's breakfast was by the St. Mary's Knights of Columbus.

The idea for the POW! ride came out of a meeting a year ago this month when the staff of the Sioux City Diocese was discussing different kinds of activities that could be included in the centennial celebration in 2002.

"Bike ride!" said Sister Kevin Cummings, the diocese's archivist. She knew that my wife Carla Offenburger and I were living in Storm Lake after years in Des Moines, where we had been heavily involved in RAGBRAI, the Des Moines Register's Annual Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, and other bicycle tours.

Royce Ranninger, the diocese's director of operations, asked us to recommend a route, thinking at first it would be a two-day event - perhaps from the oldest parish in the diocese, Corpus Christi in Fort Dodge, to the Cathedral of the Epiphany in Sioux City.

But after we began considering the diocese's many other majestic churches and well-known attractions like the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, we recommended that the ride would need to last a week and even then we would not be able to get to all the parishes we'd like to. Bishop Daniel DiNardo and his staff approved the proposed route, and Carla and I began driving it last August.

The real organizational work began in February when three Briar Cliff students began working with us as interns. They are Rick Kellen, of Alton; Becky Wittrock, of Dedham, and Lloyd Johnson, of Fairfield, Neb.

They have done most of the work in contacting the parishes that are hosting snack, lunch and overnight stops, as well as designing and supervising production of commemorative T-shirts, water bottles, map books and other essential items for the cyclists. And the three of them will serve as the ride's advance team during the coming week.

In addition, others stepped forward to help out.

Jim Green, the coordinator of RAGBRAI for the Des Moines Register, has loaned POW! one of the RAGBRAI "sag wagons," which haul in broken-down bicycles and pooped riders.

Driving the sag wagon during the week will be Joe and Linda Nydegger, of little Bolan in north central Iowa, friends of ours who've been involved in several past Offenburger projects. Joe is also a RAGBRAI sag wagon driver.

The luggage truck drivers are Ray and LaVonne Friedrichsen, parish members in Mapleton who drove an Iowa display trailer in 1995 when we organized a trans-USA ride to help promote Iowa's Sesquicentennial celebration.

Finally, Kenny Gordon, 82, of Cherokee, and Ralph Reining, 80, of Laurens, are serving as the ride's reception station hosts, philosophers and story tellers. Gordon is a retired restaurant and bar owner in Meriden, and Reining is a retired barber and school bus driver. In addition, Reining served as my fashion consultant when I was writing for the Register, issuing his forecasts and judgements on matters of style and apparel under the name of "Ralph of Laurens."

The two of them will also man a sales booth at which POW! t-shirts and water bottles will be sold, in addition to copies of the new diocese history book, "Frontiers of Faith," written by Rick Roder, of Remsen. Roder will also be riding his bicycle all week with us and sharing stories about the diocese's history.

All meals are open to the public, and each evening there will be entertainment programs at 6:30 or 7 p.m. featuring local historical vignettes and local singers and instrumentalists.

There are a couple of special performances, too.

In Mapleton June 8, the "Nuns on the Run" troupe of local women, who dress as nuns and then do songs and dances from an old Whoopi Goldberg movie, performed at 7 p.m. And at 7:45 p.m. there, Father David Hemann, the pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Ida Grove who is an accomplished guitarist and vocalist, performed, as did choirs from Mapleton St. Mary's and Anthon St. Joseph's.

In West Bend June 12, the congregation hired the well-known, high-energy a cappella group Tonic Sol-fa for a concert that is free to the public.

There will also be special POW! Masses from Monday through Saturday mornings at 6:30 a.m. in the overnight host churches.

Each morning from 6 to 8 a.m. and each late afternoon and evening, daily passes will be sold at the reception station in the campgrounds to cyclists who want to ride for a day or two. Those are $15 per day.

"I'm looking forward to this being an unusually meaningful ride," Carla Offenburger said as she was winding up preparations. "I think it's going to be both physically challenging and spiritually inspiring."

Sounds like that same "POWerful experience" Jay Hardcastle forecast.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Chuck Offenburger's daily reports from the pilgramage will be published in the next edition of The Globe. For those who can't wait, you can read the reports on the Diocese of Sioux City's Web site (www.scdiocese.org).