Cyclist visits Perryville on trek to Houston

Earlier this month, Ralph Zuke, a Rotarian from St. Louis, made an overnight stop in Perryville.
He’s making a bike trek, in a Barcalounger rickshaw, from St. Louis to Houston.
May 4 was just his second day on the bicycle trip. His goal is to make about 30 to 40 miles per day.
While last Thursday, May 4, was a rainy one, that didn’t matter to Zuke. He wasn’t scheduled to be on the road that day.
“I had a rest day scheduled for Saturday (May 7),” Zuke said. “What we do is because we have a SAG (supplies and gear) truck that can get me to where I need to start, it’s no big deal. Even if we’re staying, you know, 30 miles away. We just come back out and I’ll start here tomorrow morning.
Zuke is attempting to stick to roadways that are less traveled, if at all possible.
“We tried to keep it as light of traffic as possible, on this trip, there’s a lot of roads that are much harder than I would really want to be,” Zuke said. “With having a SAG vehicle behind, he kind of is in charge of my blind side. I can’t see behind me. So he stays behind me, which makes cars go around.”
“It’s so big and so red,” Zuke said. “It’s hard to miss, but people were really good about giving me space.”
Prior to reaching Perryville, he began in Red Bud, Ill.
“We started in St. Louis, but the route shifted to Illinois soon.
“There’s a lot of hills (in Missouri),” he said. “This thing is not great on hills. It’s 113 pounds, so it’s a lot of drag. My old rotary club was in Illinois. So we actually went over the program with that and then started heading south, knowing that we were going cut back across into Missouri and then keep going. It was more just to catch up with some old friends and stuff along the way.”
Previously, Zuke traveled via bike from St. Louis to Toronto. That was three years ago in 2019, he has learned a great deal since that first trek.
“We would look at a map and say okay, ‘We’re gonna go from this town to this town,’ and if it was from this town or that town, it was 30 miles,” Zuke said. “We always have a truck with us. I don’t need to do more than 40 or 45 miles per day. We did 50 The first day but that was kind of by accident. We just pick a spot we’ll stop put a flag down, throw everything in the truck go to wherever we’re staying for the night and they come back next morning and start from there. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a town or out of a town. I’d like to think we learned something.
Other than passing through, he hadn’t really experienced Perry County. “This was first time really getting the get the flavor of Perryville,” Zuke said. “We’ve been just kind of been around the square and around the courthouse.”
They made plans to stop by a coffee house Thursday afternoon.
Zuke didn’t arrive in Perryville until shortly after 5 p.m. Wednesday, May 4.
“Whenever you stop anywhere, then you have something like that in the back people started asking questions like, ‘What is that? And what that does is it provides me a few minutes to you know, I take the cover off, get them in the chair and give them a ride. When they’re in the chair, they can’t get out until I stop. So they’re captive audience. That’s my time to say, ‘Okay, this is a little bit about Rotary, a little bit about polio and Rotary’s role in the eradication of polio.’ Everyone who gets on it. It’s just I mean, almost without doubt the first thing they’ll say is how comfortable it is and they’re shocked at how uncomfortable it is. It’s a nice ride. I get to do it every once in a while.”
Zuke described how he got to use a rickshaw.
“The concept came about 15 years ago, I had a friend who wanted to do a fundraiser, and I said, ‘Well, you know, I do a lot of cycling, so let’s do something that’s based on cycling...Let’s go big, let’s go across country.’
His friend encouraged him to find a unique cycling adventure.

‘She goes, ‘You need a hook’” Zuke said. He didn’t hesitate. “It just almost immediately popped in my head. How about with a barcalounger rickshaw? I had no idea where they came from, but it worked.”
Several individuals from Perryville received a ride Wednesday afternoon when he arrived in the city.
“That’s based on a 1950s model of a Baraclava lounger,” Zuke said. “This marks the actual chair. Of course it doesn’t actually have a working mechanism because too much weight that you know reclining so this ride was it.
The trip to Houston goes all the way to June 3. He is planning on attending Rotary International Conference, which starts June 4.
“I’ve been doing polio rides now for four years, not always with the rickshaw,” Zuke said. “Last year. We did a 24 hour ride where we just had people sponsored by the mile and I got to see how far I could go in 24 hours.”
That was all done in Forest Park, in St. Louis.
“It was a good fundraiser,” he said. “It was it was nice and tight...They had one spot in the park. I could come and check in get something to eat, get something to drink. You know, it was just made a lot easier and it’s a nice park.
Zuke spoke about traveling up McBride Hill on Highway 51 as he made his way toward Perryville.
“The hill is kind of strange, but it’s nice in that it is curvy enough you can’t see where it ends, so you don’t know at the bottom how bad it’s going to be. I just knew because it was a named hill it could be a problem.”
He was forewarned before starting the upward climb.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh, yeah, Cardiac Hill’ and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, now that sounds even worse.’ But so you get to the bottom and you have that first sort of up and gradual turn to the right. And I was like, ‘Alright, now let’s try to at least get up to the curve. Let’s see how much more it is beyond here.’ So I knew it had to be more than that one. So I got up to about there and took a breather has no, you’re just huffing it gone. Especially again, the drag 113 pounds on there.
Start to finish, Zuke estimated it took him about 20 minutes to get all the way up McBride Hill, which he said was about three-quarters of a mile. He took three three breaks but, ultimately, prevailed and kept on journeying to Perryville.
“You get to what you think is the top there’s just a little down and then there’s another up but that wasn’t too bad,” Zuke said. “I know I’m going to h ave a a few of these but yeah, hopefully it’s only a few.”
Admittedly, the trip through Southern Illinois and Missouri has already been more hilly than going from St. Louis to Toronto.
Zuke knows his cycling days aren’t done, but this trek from St. Louis to southeast Texas will be the last time with the rickshaw.
“This will be the last ride with the rickshaw,” Zuke said. “I’m going 56 at the end of this ride, and I don’t know how many times I won’t be able to pull this thing this far. It’ll be time to come up with something new. But we’ll come up with something entertaining.
Zuke’s cycling adventures have taken him to different parts of the country.
A few years ago, he took part in the Tour de Donut, a 36-mile loop in Staunton, Ill., which deducts for every glazed doughnut eaten during the appropriated stops.
“I’ve been doing fundraising for a long time,” Zuke said. “I did a ride for the American Diabetes Association. It’s just a race but it’s a race where at the 10-mile marker and the 18-mile marker.
They have these big tents set up and you eat donuts and every donut takes five minutes off your time. So it’s sort of a race with gluttony, it’s just a fun ride, but I did surprisingly well.”