Events: Planning the 2022 Rapha Festive 500
(2022) Bucks County is a cyclist’s paradise. There are dozens of miles that can be tied together with themes. If one is lucky to have rolled through all the themes the county has to offer, it’s easy to cross the river into Hunterdon County, NJ. It’s also not that hard to cross into Montgomery or Lehigh Counties to explore. Each year we try to tie our Festive 500 effort together with a theme. With an idea that had been building, we kept adding to it. Ultimately, we wound up thinking, “Why not use this theme for the Festive 500?”
Our county has a lot of American history in it. For Rapha’s Festive 500, an event that challenges riders to cover 500 kilometers from December 24 to December 30, we have explored General George Washington’s haunts, the Underground Railroad stops, Doan Brothers hideouts, and even county reservoirs. With several attempts and only a handful of successes, a theme is the best way to hold out hope to cover 39 miles of average daily riding. The thing is, hardly anyone ever manages to maintain enough discipline to ride almost forty miles daily.
In the past few years we have explored a gaggle of propositions. One year it was explored to cover only nighttime miles for the Festive. Recently it was suggested to ride the Bucks County canal system - also at night - for maximum mileage. And until a few days ago, based upon an article by a local historian, it was suggested to ride to all of the area’s historic grist mills. Yet we kept coming back to the old suggestion of a quintessential Bucks County feature.
Throughout our landscape we have numerous aircraft runways. From the now shuttered Willow Grove Naval Base to the historic grass runway of Van Sant Airport, it’s quite the experience to collect visits to areas of aircraft. It was recently learned that in neighboring Montgomery County, the campus of Penn State Abington was once a girls’ boarding school. Its most famous student was one Amelia Earhart. Meanwhile the Willow Grove runway saw the introduction to the Pitcairn Autogiro, the precursor to the modern helicopter.
Then there are the smaller runways. There’s Doylestown Airport that is too busy to host an airport criterium bike race. But look closely and there is a runway off of Buck Road in Perkasie where the runway is also the road into the cluster of houses. There’s the Philadelphia Glider Association, also in Perkasie, as well as the skydiving company, from another airport in Perkasie. In one rural area, there is a runway that features a sign, “No Trespassing. That means everybody.” Whatever that means.
For this year’s Festive 500, we look to collect as many of these runways as possible. Aircraft history is certainly alive and well in Bucks County. But should we run out of runways, Hunterdon County is home to the Charles Lindbergh home. It was here that his son was tragically kidnapped and slain. These are the biggest names of aviation and they are all right here in our area.
Though this is clearly a situation of free advertising for a monstrous cycling company, it still motivates us to look for stories in our area, clouding the company responsible for the mileage. We will try to cover the 500 kilometers in as economical an effort as possible. While we’re doing it, we’ll explore the runways that dot the landscape of our area. If we have to cross into neighboring counties, so be it. There’s a lot of aviation history out there to entice us farther into the mileage count.
