A coast-to-coast relay celebrating America’s 250th birthday stopped Wednesday morning, Oct. 7, at the Visit Quad Cities Destination Center at Davenport’s Union Station.
The American Discovery 250 Relay is traveling from California to Delaware along the American Discovery Trail, as part of the celebration of America’s 250th. The relay carries copies of the Declaration of Independence in metal batons from coast to coast. The Quad Cities' connection is especially timely, as QC Trails is marking 20 years of helping residents and visitors discover and experience trails throughout the region.
Community partners, local running and cycling groups, and Quad Citizens took part in welcoming the relay to the region.
Following the downtown Davenport sendoff, participants made their way later Wednesday morning to Bass Street Landing, where the city of Moline welcomed the group.
“This past year I have picked up running. It's very much part of our community here in the Quad Cities,” one of the four local relay participants, Rock Island’s Dylan Parker, said. “We've got a vibrant running community, which a sense of place and community is part of what we do on city councils and local government in the Quad Cities.
“There's various running clubs in the Quad Cities. I run with the Running Wild Running Club, so it is another asset in our community development toolkit here in the Quad Cities to make people like me, people younger, want to live in a place like the Quad Cities,” the Rock Island alderman said. “It's having amenities and communities like running clubs and different assets like the bike trail, the river, to take advantage of. It certainly adds a quality of place that is enjoyable here in the Quad Cities.”
Just recently, Parker did a half marathon in the QC Marathon, his first.
“For whatever reason, running— I like long-distance running, and it sort of scratches that same endurance sort of mental itch of just keep going.”
On Wednesday, he was to run/walk the 18-mile segment from Davenport to Colona, Ill.
“It's an opportunity to get outside, literally, but also explore the different events and communities that exist in our country,” Parker said. “Everybody knows about our loneliness epidemic and sort of the negative effects of social media that are often talked about in the public, but it's things like these different events, nationwide celebrations, that can really bring us together, get us out of our little bubbles, and enjoy each other's presence and build a community together.
"So there's a lot of opportunities in the Quad Cities to build community with other people, and this is just one example. I encourage everybody to do that. It's important.”
Unique intersection of trails
“This is kind of a cool thing, 6,800 miles from coast to coast and carrying the Declaration of Independence to commemorate America's 250th,” said Visit Quad Cities CEO Dave Herrell.
“What's unique about this in the Quad Cities is we feel that we've got probably the strongest trail system in the United States, and I think people that live here, we're proud to share that with the world.”
“Our visitors love it, our residents love it. We want to continually invest in our trail system and get people out on bikes, hiking, walking, doing all the things that we know that our trail system does to benefit our community.”
“Our trail system is one of the best. We are the only place in the U.S. where the ADT (American Discovery Trail) and the GRT (Great River Trail) and the MRT (Mississippi River Trail) kind of converge, and that is a very unique opportunity for us at Visit Quad Cities to sell, market, promote, activate.”
“We love our river assets. It's what's great. I think it helps bring people into the act of cycling, walking, running, whatever they do,” Davenport Mayor Jason Gordon said at Union Station. “The assets along the river probably make running a little bit more enjoyable. So we're very proud of our active community in the Quad Cities. We're very proud of being the intersection between the American Discovery Trail and the Great River Trail.”
“What a great way to celebrate America's 250th birthday. I hope you guys make it safe, and I assume that Thanksgiving meal in Delaware will probably taste pretty good,” he added.
QC Trails is a partnership between the Quad City Health Initiative and Bi-State Regional Commission, said QCHI executive director Nicole Carkner.
“We wanted to create a one-stop shop for people to find information about all the non-motorized trails,” she said Wednesday. “So people can go there and look to see how to access them, where they can park, all those things you need to know if you're going to go visit. And of course, we were interested through the Quad City Health Initiative in promoting physical activity.”
Carkner is very impressed with the America 250 relay.
“It’s exciting to be able to share and showcase these trails that we have here, be able to celebrate with visitors that are coming through our community, and just remind people that are here all the time that we have a wonderful trail network that they can go explore,” she said.
The ADT relay began July 1 at Limantour Beach, Calif. (near San Francisco), and will end at Rehoboth Beach, Del., on the Atlantic Ocean, Thanksgiving Day.
Biking from West Branch to Colona
Dixon Novy, 68, of DeWitt, was one of the small group of four on Wednesday doing the relay.
He biked from West Branch to Davenport, and will go on to Colona. He’s a member of Quad City Bicycle Club, a board member with the Iowa Bike Coalition, Eastern Avenue District Leader for the Iowa Bike Coalition, as well as member of the Tall Dog Bike Club in Des Moines.
Novy has biked across Iowa 28 times, including RAGBRAI and on the inspection team for RAGBRAI.
“The first time I had both knees redone, then I really started, I started road biking,” he said, noting he just heard about the ADT 250 relay last week at an Iowa Bike Coalition summit in Ames. “They had a blurb in there about this relay across the United States on the American Discovery Trail. And I'm like, I got to get in on that. So I signed up, jumped in.”
“They want to make it an annual event, and this publicity is what we need for the American Discovery Trail,” Novy said. “It's out there. We need to utilize it. And a lot of people do, but it'd be better if more people did.”
QC bike veteran Dean Mathias came out Wednesday morning to support the effort, though he’s not riding. He’s completed 24 RABRAIs, the last in 2022.
“But the cool thing is it brings everybody together for a week. Anybody that loves cycling. This is what's outstanding about this,” Mathias said. “I love it. It's simple. I love it…And when people would be traveling across the United States, we try to help them out. When we were doing Bike to Work Week, we had people traveling across the United States and I rode with them.”
Driving relay support
Sara Heitman, from southern California, is driving a relay support car from Colorado (starting Aug. 29) to its end in Delaware on Thanksgiving Day.
“I am called the ground coordinator. I meet everyone in the morning, pass out the batons, take pictures, all that good stuff,” she said Wednesday. “And then depending on the day or the group, we meet at different points throughout the day so that we can all open those long days, it might be every 20 miles or something. And then we all meet at the end of the day, and I collect the batons, and then we do it all again the next day.”
The variety of small groups in each segment (a total of 1,800 participants nationwide) vary anywhere from six to 95 miles a day, with the longer distances biking, Heitman said.
“This idea came about as sort of, it's the 250, we need to do something special, we're the American Discovery Trail,” she said. “But it's my personal hope that they'll do it again, maybe not every year but every so often, or do just each state or something like that. But this is not an idea that has been discussed yet. But I hope it will because just everyone that I've been meeting and have participated in the relay have been -- everyone's so enthusiastic, and it does bring people together in that way, just being patriotic and being part of something that's going across the whole country.”
“People from different cities are meeting people from neighboring cities, whether it's just because they traveled so far to get to the starting point to start the relay, and then they're meeting different people, or they're from different bicycle groups, or they're looking to join a bicycle group,” Heitman said. “The cities themselves are coming together to coordinate these events and staging official baton passes between mayors and things like that.”
“Using trails in cities are a great way to see the city,” she added, noting she hiked through Davenport in August 2025 as part of walking east to west with her boyfriend. “My boyfriend and I basically quit our lives and just set aside this year and last year for hiking. It was my boyfriend's dream to walk across the country, so I just kind of tagged along.”
Heitman is very impressed with the Iowa bicycling community, in part fostered by the annual RAGBRAI across the state each July.
“We're on the way out of Iowa. Iowa has been the biggest, biggest group of enthusiastic bicyclists that I have been dealing with,” she said, noting relay participants mix camping and staying at homes of friends, family and complete strangers.
“We just meet people, meet nice people along the way,” Heitman said. “I'm just blown away at how many people are out there that will welcome perfect strangers into their home just because you're out walking and doing something like this.”
For more information on ADT and the coast-to-coast relay, visit discoverytrail.org.
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