In “Back to the Future,” when Marty McFly travels from 1985 to 1955, he sees a retro billboard advertising the soon-to-be built Lyon Estates— the neighborhood he grew up in — complete with a smiling family gazing at their futuristic suburban house.
“Live in the home of tomorrow…today!” the billboard’s tagline entices.
As I exited off Rock Island’s Government Bridge and rode west towards downtown Davenport, I spotted a billboard adjacent to the bike path that bore an eerie semblance to “Back to the Future,” Quad Cities-style.
“Envision a Revitalized Riverfront,” the sign read. Below: a rendering of happy families playing in the soon-to-built park which, if the tagline is to be believed, will be “A Destination to Remember!”
“Great Scott!” I thought, almost mid-crisis in the face of the unstoppable, and seemingly hastening, force of temporality, “I’m already living in the past.”
My bike may not be a DeLorean or have a Flux Capacitor, but its faculty as a time machine along local bike paths is just as strong. On my “Rediscovery Ride,” I not only took a tour of the Quad Cities as it currently is (and is to be) but also as I remember it. I rode past my whole life.
So, in the spirit of National Bike Month, (as a newly minted college graduate, I haven’t become a 9-5’er yet), I extracted my bike that (somehow) I managed to fit in my trusty Beetle, lubed up my chain, pumped up my tires, and set off for what I had unofficially dubbed my “Rediscovery Ride.”

Gabe Lareau, Moline Cycling Blogger
Ready to Rediscover the QC
The goal was to, as best as I could, recreate the bike rides of my youth. That meant no AirPods, no panniers (a string bag would do), and only familiar routes. Not that I was bored, but my brain—constantly accustomed to some sort of podcast, audiobook, or album—had a large swathe of airtime to fill.
As I passed so many familiar sights, a few songs from my youth got stuck in my head. Specifically a single line from Rush’s “Circumstances,” which became an unintentional, but appropriate theme for this ride: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” “The more that things change, the more they stay the same.”
“Since when did they put new slides in at Riverside Park?”
“Hold on, who moved Credit Island’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte statues?”
“Is it my lack of training or did these hills get steeper?”
So, what changed? Well, to satisfy my curiosity, I learned that “Riverside Riverslide,” as Moline calls it now, got a brand new $7 million makeover…not that anyone told me.

Also, apparently Davenport relocated Credit Island’s statues to Lindsay Park back in 2022…which they neglected to inform me about. And finally, no, massive geologic forces did not make Moline’s bluff steeper…I’ve just gotten lazy.
These changes, while surprising, didn’t warrant more than a passing glance and a pensive “hmmph.” They were small rearrangements, micro-movements in a grand design, frothy “bubbles on the tide of empire,” as Robert Penn Warren wrote. One different deviation, what seemed like a Tsunami on the tide of empire, nearly made me swerve off the bike path.
I rode past “Vibrant Arena at THE MARK” — a name I had to look up because I still couldn’t remember if it was the iWireless or the TaxSlayer Center — where my high school graduation would’ve been had it not been for COVID.
I rode past the Freight House where I spent many happy Saturdays, lemonade shake-up in hand, shopping for strawberries at the farmer’s market with my mom. I rode past LeClaire Park where, as a young child, I first heard Tchaikovsky’s cannon fire from the Quad City Symphony Orchestra.
I rode past the memorial of Anthony Castaneda, fellow member of the Marching Maroons, who was tragically killed on what was then the newly built I-74 pedestrian bridge.
Reflection and Rest
Each of these sites — and so many more — only take me back when done right: on a bicycle, where you can ride along slowly enough to notice and appreciate the same sights, sounds, and smells from the halcyon days of yore.
On my way back home to Moline from Rock Island, sweating in the early summer heat, I passed Sylvan Island. What I used to regard as an abandoned patch of mud brimming with mosquitos—where young lovers, draped by the dense canopy and drowned out by the Arsenal’s nightly trumpet retreat, would goo-goo at their beloveds with equal fervor—had a new bridge and looked…rather welcoming.
I swallowed and stepped onto the island, one of the few patches of the Quad Cities I’d never been before. Not five minutes on Sylvan, and I found a resting spot under the shade, next to a graffiti-covered wall.
In the distance was my beloved Moline: familiar, but at an angle I’d never seen her from before. It had the same thrill of finding something unique in a favorite book or learning a new fact about your partner whom you thought you knew everything about. Or, as filmmaker Beau Miles puts it, “If you can look at something familiar as something novel, you’re winning.”
Or, as it was stuck in my head during my entire Rediscovery Ride, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

