Summer is the best. Join Milwaukee Record and Wheel & Sprocket August 3-10 as we search the city and beyond for the Spirit Of Summer.
I’ve been hitting my head against the wall trying to dream up another epic, food-based ride for Milwaukee Record’s Spirit Of Summer week. In the past, that meant pedaling across north-central Wisconsin to visit the last remaining Chip’s Hamburger locations, or biking from Milwaukee to Chicago and eating enough Italian food to turn a pleasant hobby into a cry for attention and praise.
This time, though, I couldn’t come up with an edible finish line that fit into my increasingly stupid schedule. Between working two jobs, smoky air, and humidity that turns me feeling into an over-boiled potato bobbing in a bowl of human soup, I couldn’t find a free day. That only made it more irritating because I had a plan: bike 50 miles, eat five hot dogs, call it “journalism,” and wait for strangers to congratulate me for surviving a problem I created.
So, apologies to anyone who came to Spirit Of Summer week hoping to watch me pedal myself into another avoidable gastrointestinal crisis. I promise you, I’ll do it again someday. For now, maybe I’ve been trying too hard to manufacture a new adventure when I should be writing about what biking has already given me.
Childhood Summers On Two Wheels
My earliest memories of summer on a bicycle have less to do with distance than permission. A bike made my world larger, one parental boundary at a time. I don’t remember exactly when I got my first one, but I remember it was black with neon-green details and had mountain bike tires, necessary because both my street and driveway were gravel. I learned to ride on crushed granite, so I presumably learned to remove crushed granite from my knees around the same time.
When Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace premiered on May 19, 1999, I was nine years old, which probably makes some Milwaukee Record readers think, “Damn, Mitch is that young? Why the fuck does he look so old?” Have you read Sunday Sauce? I like-a-duh pasta. I like-a-duh salty deli meat. I like-a-duh Negroni cocktail. In fact, I like-a-duh all of those things far too much, and that shit ages you.
Anyway, I was nine, Y2K anxiety was beginning to simmer, and I had just seen podracing on the big screen. Naturally, my friends and I started racing our bikes along the rural roads of Ringle, making engine noises and turning central Wisconsin into Tatooine. Sebulba was a dick, but his podracer looked cooler than Anakin’s, so naturally I claimed his. Our bikes were slow, and the course ended wherever our parents said it did, but for a few hours those gravel roads felt like another planet.
By the fourth or fifth grade, I was allowed to bike from Ringle to the Weston Aquatic Center, about 15 miles round trip. I’d meet a friend halfway at Dale’s Weston Lanes, dump quarters into the Gauntlet Legends arcade cabinet, then continue to the pool for an afternoon of pencil dives, cannonballs, and pissing in said pool. Our only real responsibility was saving enough quarters to call home from a pay phone when we arrived. One brief conversation was usually enough for my mother to confirm that I had not been pancaked by a dump truck.
Usually. On one ride home, my chain came apart, I wiped out, and tore the hell out of my shin. I limped from business to business, begging to use each landline so I could call my parents for a ride, but nobody answered because my sister was on AOL all goddamn afternoon chatting with God knows who and devouring our only phone line. I still harp on her about it today, and I’m proud to finally have the accusation published for the public record.
Eventually, my parents’ boundaries gave way to whatever distance I could pedal. By the time I left Ringle for college, I knew a bicycle could make a small world feel enormous. What I didn’t know was how quickly it could make the big city feel smaller.
Learning Milwaukee One Street At A Time
The summer before college, my friend Farmer Dave’s dad, Farmer Greg, gave me an old road bike. I brought it to Milwaukee when I started at UW-Milwaukee in 2009. Without a car, I relied on the bike and bus system. Within a week, Milwaukee taught me that a cable lock wasn’t going to cut it in the city.
When I reported it, I was told I had used the wrong lock, which was useful information delivered approximately one stolen bicycle too late. I already felt awful. Farmer Greg had trusted me with the bike, and I had managed to lose it before I even knew where most of my classrooms were. Somewhere in Milwaukee, someone else was presumably discovering how fast it felt. The bike had been stolen from me, but I still felt like I had stolen it from Farmer Greg first be being careless with it.
My parents were kind enough to find me an old Schwinn Continental, and I bought a U-lock, having successfully completed Milwaukee Bicycle Ownership Orientation. I’m happy to report that 17 years later, I haven’t had another bike stolen and I still use the same U-lock I bought in 2009. That thing has more career tenure than I do.
That Schwinn carried me beyond UWM and into parts of Milwaukee that initially felt like separate cities. I made friends through biking, and we spent long nights getting gleefully lost. Night rides were the best: lighter traffic, cooler air, and city lights that made us feel like we were riding light cycles in Tron. Milwaukee gets quieter at night without feeling empty, and a bike lets you notice the murals, storefronts, and little connections between neighborhoods you might otherwise miss.
That first summer after freshman year, I had a girlfriend living with her family in New Berlin. Without a car, my options were to wait for a ride, piece together an awful bus route, or bike there. I’d copy MapQuest directions onto a scrap of paper, follow 1st Street toward National or Greenfield Avenue, and trust my handwriting to get me west. Those rides taught me to get lost, find my way back, and slowly turn Milwaukee from one giant unfamiliar place into a city I knew street by street.
The Joys Of Riding Together
That map kept growing after college. My Schwinn was showing its age, so when I started working at Lakefront Brewery, I earned a Lakefront-branded Fyxation Eastside. The simple single-speed was perfect for Milwaukee and reignited my love of riding just as biking could have faded into something I used to do.
Around that time, my then-girlfriend and current wife, Shelby, got a bike too. We started joining community rides, including the Milwaukee Underwear Bike Ride, still one of the purest forms of organized joy I’ve ever experienced. One person biking through the city in their underwear is alarming. Two is troubling. A few hundred becomes a revolution.
Photo: Milwaukee Underwear Bike Ride
I’ve never actually raced the Riverwest 24, but I can’t imagine letting the weekend pass without joining the festivities. Most years, I bike over, ride the route, meet up with friends, and soak in what really does feel like the people’s holiday. The race itself is only part of it. The crowds, costumes, porch parties, cheering, and general delirium really do make it the best weekend in Milwaukee during the summer.
Two years ago, I also finally remembered to sign up for the UPAF Ride for the Arts, something I had somehow managed to forget about every previous year. For one morning, roughly 20 miles of lakeshore pavement from Cudahy to the Upper East Side is closed to cars, including a ride over the Hoan Bridge. It feels like a route of my dreams that becomes a reality for one day per year. Having that much Milwaukee pavement handed over entirely to bicycles feels like an absolute gift.
Other rides carried more serious intentions without losing that collective energy. In 2020, we joined a Black Lives Matter ride, following a van blasting music as hundreds of cyclists filled the streets. We were there in protest, but there was also joy in being together, taking up space, and turning hundreds of individual bikes into something larger and harder to ignore.
One of my favorites came during Bay View Gallery Night a few years ago, when our friend and de facto mayor of Bay View, Rushmor Records‘ Bill Rouleau, organized a slow-roll scavenger hunt combining nearly everything I love about biking here: friends, public art, small businesses, mild confusion, and the freedom to roam the neighborhood without being sealed inside a car.
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Not every memorable ride required a crowd. During my beer-selling days, I sometimes planned entire workdays around my bicycle, carrying samples between clients. The Hank Aaron State Trail became my preferred route to Brewer games. Biking to Summerfest meant avoiding waiting in traffic and parking fees. Other days are simpler: meeting someone for a ride, following the Oak Leaf Trail to a beer garden.
Grease, Paint, And A Little Confidence
Bicycles also made me more willing to try and fix things. I cannot build a house or confidently repair most objects that break around me. After years of practice, however, I can replace a tube, adjust a brake, clean a drivetrain and occasionally diagnose a problem without having to carry the bike into a shop. A few winters ago, with considerable help from my father-in-law, I stripped down the Fyxation, repainted it, and rebuilt it as the custom “Spaghetti Speedster.” It was part repair project, part art project. It did not make me faster, but it made my bicycle feel unmistakably mine.
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The People Who Keep Milwaukee Rolling
That may be what bicycles have given me most consistently. They turn transportation into memory, errands into small adventures, and strangers into friends. Milwaukee is full of people organizing rides, teaching repairs, advocating for safer streets, expanding access, and inventing new reasons for people to gather with two wheels beneath them. I have ridden with some of those groups. Others remain on the increasingly crowded list of things I sweat I will do someday.
So, in place of the epic ride I failed to get my shit together and complete for this Spirit Of Summer series, here are some of the people making every summer in Milwaukee a little more bikeable.
Milwaukee Casual Community Rides
• MKE Tuesday Night Ride: A weekly social ride that rollsout every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
• Milwaukee Critical Mass: Critical Mass is a fun, social ride at about 10 mph that builds community, safety in numbers, and support for safer transportation infrastructure.
• Scrappy Hour: A Milwaukee cycling group that meets every month.
• Tosa Full Moon Bicycle Rides: A social ride the evening of every full moon. This slow paced ride is for friends and neighbors through metro Wauwatosa.
• Brew Cruisers: A monthly community ride to Brewers games that promotes better bicycle access in the stadium district.
• Oak Leaf Familia: Milwaukee’s inclusive Latinx and Immigrant cycling club.
• Red Bike & Green Milwaukee: The city’s chapter of the national group, building a sustainable Black bike culture through community and cycling.
• Friends With Bikes MKE: A casual group ride for femme, trans, and non-binary riders, held the 1st and 3rd Thursdays and last Sunday of each month.
• Milwaukee Underwear Bike Ride: A welcoming ride that promotes positive body image and is open to everyone.
• Milwaukee Alley Cat: Community operated bike races at changing locations throughout the city.
• The Riverwest 24: A volunteer-run, 24-hour bike race and community celebration that brings riders, neighbors, and spectators together throughout the Riverwest neighborhood.
• Chris Kegel Foundation/Chris’ Slow Roll: A free, family-friendly lakefront ride honoring Chris Kegel and advancing accessible, inclusive cycling and better bike infrastructure.
• UPAF Ride for the Arts: A family-friendly bike ride featuring a 20-mile car-free route along Milwaukee’s lakefront, over the Hoan Bridge, and through nearby lakeshore communities, while raising funds to support local performing arts organizations and arts education.
Bike Access, Repair, and Resources
• Wisconsin Bike Fed: Wisconsin’s statewide bicycling advocacy organization advances cycling through education, legislation, infrastructure, and community programs.
• Vulture Space: A nonprofit bike workshop and recyclery offering affordable parts, refurbished bikes, tools, instruction, and hands-on repair help.
• Bublr Bikes: Greater Milwaukee’s nonprofit bike-share system offering traditional, electric, and adaptive bikes throughout Milwaukee, Wauwatosa, and West Allis.
• MKE.BIKE: A free mobile guide to Milwaukee cycling, combining routes, bike infrastructure, shops, repair stands, perks and local bike events in one place.
• Bicycle Benefits:< A helmet-sticker program rewards people for arriving by bicycle with discounts and perks at participating Milwaukee businesses.
• The Parks People of Milwaukee County – Oak Leaf Discovery Tour: The tour encourages riders to explore Milwaukee county’s 135-mile Oak Leaf Trail using a passport-style app to discover points of interest, unlock local offers, and support county trails.
• Milwaukee Bike Rides: A comprehensive directory of recurring Milwaukee-area rides and clubs that was a huge help in compiling this article, with even more groups and rides than I was able to include here.
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