Its All About Me

I was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1954 where my father Donald Reeves worked for the Upjohn Company. I have five brothers (Dave, Rick, Don, Paul and Bill) but no sisters. Family gatherings were always a crowd and they still are today. All five still live in the Kalamazoo area (Three Rivers, Schoolcraft and Portage), while I was the only one to leave the area and live in Springfield Virginia.
We all had bikes as kids. I had a couple nice ones that I bought with paper route earnings, a five speed Schwinn Stingray Fastback with a stick shift on the top bar, and a yellow ten speed Schwinn Varsity with chrome fenders.

I attended Western Michigan University and have a B.S. degree in Printing Management. I worked for the US Government Printing Office (GPO) in Washington DC from 1976 until retirement in 2009. I had several different jobs at GPO, in functions such as Quality Control, Software Development, Typesetting, and Web Site Management before my last position as Director of Production Engineering.

I met my wife Peggy soon after arriving in DC at a bus stop in Arlington Virginia and married her a year later in 1977. We have one daughter Shannon Reeves Simonini, a 2006 Mechanical Engineering graduate of Virginia Tech and now a Calibration Engineer at the General Motors Proving Grounds in Milford Michigan. Both my daughter and her husband Matt Simonini are cyclists and I hope both will join me for at least one day on this tour.

I started riding again in 2007 on a Trek Hybrid, rode that for a couple years before getting a Trek 2.1 road bike in 2009. I caught the Bicycle touring itch and did Adventure Cycling Association (ACA) tours of the Blue Ridge Parkway (2010), C&O/GAP (2010) and Cycle Vermont (2011).



ACA C&O Canal / Great Allegheny Passage Tour September 2010 (Antietam Battlefield)