For many of us, I think our bikes were our first ticket to adventure.

The first time I was able to cross the street with my bike, my sense of adventure and liberation was soaring. I didn’t really know what those words meant. I just felt it in my bones. Adventure. I was seven years old and was just pedaling my gray Huffy with the cool splatter paint design across the street and around the corner to my friends house. A few years later, I was riding 10 blocks with friends, across not one but two busy streets, to the comic book shop to buy pogs.

Some years later, I had outgrown that gray Huffy and had graduated to my dad’s firetruck red Schwinn mountain bike. I was in high school and a couple friends and I would ride bikes around the neighborhood all night long. Wiggling through the streets of the southside of Chicago, sneaking into cemeteries or golf courses. Just exploring.

We slowly started to branch out to the quiet, dim streets of Oak Lawn or wander along every tree lined street of North Beverly, the yellow glow of the street lights giving us glimpses of the beautiful mansions and the surrounding Dan Ryan Woods. One night we got back, and the small black bike computer on my handlebars read 40 miles. I told my best friend and biking buddy, Andrew, “Dude, we just rode 40 miles tonight.” “What, no way.’ “Yes way.”

That got Andrew and I thinking. What if we did those miles in a straight line? And so not long after, we were rolling out at sunrise and heading to Andrew’s family’s summer trailer in Antioch, IL, just on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin. It was a beautiful, steamy June morning. My summer break from my second year of undergrad at UIC had just started, and Andrew had weekends off at his union engineering job for Local 399. We were headed off on our first big bike adventure.

And that attitude of adventure just kept growing. That attitude found me biking 1000 miles from my Uncle's home on Vancouver Island, through the state of Washington and much of Oregon. Andrew and I found ourselves dreaming up bigger trips, further and further afield. Not necessarily to bike in, but to immerse in new places and experiences. Long road trips or a flight out west or even a couple of trips to South America, together or alone. Always seeking adventure.

After I finished up a couple years of AmeriCorp volunteer work with City Year, and two years in grad school at UIC for Literature, I left Chicago on a one way ticket to Alaska and spent a summer commercial fishing for salmon. Andrew quit his union job and joined me the following year in South America. All in all, I spent about three years in pure adventure mode. From a 400 mile bike ride in Northern California, a month-long solo camping trip deep in the backcountry wilderness of Sequoia National Park, farming in Mexico, and even a year teaching English in Colombia, mostly at a coal mine in the desert on the border of Colombia and Venezuela. A freaking adventure. Through and through.

And for me, just like when I was home in Chicago, being called to the grand adventures away from home, now I was on the road, and Chicago was calling me back home. And I was getting mad. Because I felt like I was just grass is greenering the heck out of my life. I can’t be in Chicago without being called away, and now I am away, and I’m being called back to Chicago. What the heck!

We started in 2016 with 4 bike camping trips with 50 participants and by the end of our 2024 season, we had run 23 overnights with 557 participants, just in that one year!

We got about 50 folks out on those rides in 2016. By 2017, we had 8 rides including a family overnight. We were recruiting and bringing in volunteers that wanted to see this project get off the ground. By 2018, we ran an epic, 100 person bike camping festival to Starved Rock, and we officially got our non-profit status. We were growing, but we also were teetering. We were one-hundred percent volunteer run, and it was getting to be too much. And sadly, after the 2018 season, Andrew left the organization. It felt like we might fall apart. We were a brand new board of directors, most of us had zero experience on a board of a non-profit. But we banded together. We vowed to slow things down, get back to basics, and really build us something that was sustainable.

So we got to work to build on the foundation from our first three years. We brought in good people, structure, and really established our mission and values.

Once we felt in a good place, we wrote a future looking 5 year plan for years 5-10 which was all about making OOFD sustainable through program growth and bringing on an employee. We grew non-programming revenue, became more radically inclusive, and stewarded volunteerism. We succeeded as we were able to slowly scale up to bring me on as a full-time Executive Director, brought on heaps of next level volunteers, and even started an Adaptive Program. We learned how to write and win grants. And we grew, in a sustainable way. We started in 2016 with 4 bike camping trips with 50 participants and by the end of our 2024 season, we had run 23 overnights with 557 participants, just in that one year!

We are solidly a mission and values driven organization. We don’t do anything without it living up to our core WAVE values - Welcome, Adventure, Volunteer, Educate. We plan to be here for years to come. And as our mission says, “we welcome you to join us on our immersive, inclusive, and educational bike camping adventures. We aim to deepen your reverence for the region by exploring local trails while learning about the culture, history, and habitats native to the beautiful Lake Michigan area and beyond.”