The bike ride that fills Three Oaks every last Sunday in September

Three Oaks is a quiet farm town of a couple thousand people most of the year. On the last Sunday in September, thousands of cyclists ride into it at dawn. The Apple Cider Century has been doing this since 1974, when the Three Oaks Spokes Bicycle Club started a single ride through the surrounding orchards and woods. It stuck. The club still runs it, and it’s grown into one of the best-known one-day rides in the Midwest.

The “century” in the name is the classic 100-mile distance, but you don’t have to be a road racer to ride. The routes branch off into a menu of lengths — 15, 25, 37, 50, 62, 75, or the full 100 — so a family on hybrids and a pack of lycra-clad veterans can both find a loop that fits. The shorter ones stay close to town; the long ones swing out through the fruit country and wine roads near the Indiana line and back. Rest stops along the way hand out, fittingly, apple cider and doughnuts.

The numbers behind it are what make it remarkable. A village that size hosting up to several thousand riders means the whole town turns out — the school, the parks, the downtown all bend around the event for a weekend. The same bike club that started the ride also built and maintains the Backroads Bikeway, a set of marked routes you can ride any day of the year, and keeps a little bicycle museum in town.

Come the morning of the ride, the trick is to stand on a country road a few miles out around sunrise. The light comes up gold over the apple trees, and a river of riders rolls past for what feels like an hour, the whole thing smelling faintly of cider and chain oil.