My name’s Jim and I’ve lived in Moline, Illinois all of my life other than four and half years at Michigan State University.  It took longer to graduate then, because the courses were much harder and I had to walk to school three miles, up hill, in the snow, everyday.  And fighting off the bears with my three ring binder got old during January and February.  

At any rate, Moline is a great place to live.  It’s part of the area known as the Quad Cities which includes Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa.  The Mississippi River runs east and west through our community, so out of towner are always lost when visiting the area.  We have our share of great concerts at the Mark of The Quad Cities Stadium.  We also have hockey and arena football.  There are great sporting events in all of our school systems, including Augustana College.    

However, once in awhile, a person wants to see some sites other than the river, corn and bean fields.  Now I’m not knocking the beauty of a sun set across Axel Johnson’s corn field.  If you have never lived on or near a farm it’s a peaceful beautiful view that you want to take in.  But, if you have seen it a couple of million times, then you just might want to check out a few other places in North America…… and that’s what Jim and his buddies have been doing for the last 30 years.  

There’s always one more lake “up nort” that may have the big walleye your dad always talks about losing.  And the snowmobile trails out west, north and east are endless.  Mountain biking anywhere is good for the body and the soul(except I can’t ride on anything that doesn’t have some kind of motor involved).  
So in the case of this web site, we are “about” the places we have gone atving and the new places we want to see.  Every year 40 to 50 of Jim’s closest friends take a couple of trips to Wisconsin and Michigan to check out the territory and look for new trails.  Each year a smaller group does an additional “way big” ride in Idaho, Utah, and Colorado etc.  So now we are doing a lot more big rides and were going to pass on every tidbit of information regarding the areas we explore.  Well, not quite every tidbit, but most of them.  

Hopefully there will be one ride every two weeks and the information will be put on this site.  We will also include stuff about lodging and restaurants, along with other things that may be of interest.   That’s it I guess, so I need to get rolling here, grease some bearings, check break fluid or have some other excuse to hang out in my garage.