Susan and Brice's Bike Blog

(brice writing)

We were encouraged by the weather report this morning – light showers sounds a lot better than torrential thunderstorms. Our waterproof socks hadn’t dried out fully and our gloves were still soggy, but we put them on anyway and rode off into a steady drizzle. We’re definitely getting better at handling rain; the first few miles are cold, and then after some hills go by we’re too hot, but that’s easily fixed by partially unzipping a jacket.

After awhile this morning we passed by this abandoned schoolhouse:

A passerby told us that his brother-in-law went to school here and is in his early 50s, so it hasn’t been abandoned as long as one might think.

We continued on through a few brief patches of non-rain and discovered what Leif Erickson’s ghost has been up to:

Thanks for keeping the highway clean, Leif! On a slightly related note, the most frequent roadside trash we’ve seen, by far, is banana peels. I’ve seen at least one a day and around 3 most days. Are fruit remains not litter? I’m guessing apple cores get tossed about as often but they’re a lot easier to get far off the road. In the grand scheme it’s a lot better than tossing soda bottles or whatever, but seriously banana peels on pavement just turn into gross rotten leather that we have to avoid. Take ’em home and compost them.

Towards the end of the day we turned to the north and immediately heard loud thunder and saw ominous clouds. Despite the forecast, we ducked into the least structurally sound shelter ever:

and were glad we did because torrential rain and lightening followed soon after:

The shed managed to not collapse, so we continued on our way past some gorgeous hill country:

And now we are in Pelican Rapids at a nice motel next to a hormel turkey packing plant. We’re supposed to get rain through the night but tomorrow will be dry for our ride into Moorhead and our last day in Minnesota!

(Susan again)

We left Long Prairie when what looked like a potential break in the front opened up, around 2:30. We made it nine miles before the break-that-was-not-a-break hit, right as we arrived at a conveniently located dairy farm. We waited out the torrential downpour and epic lightning in their equipment shed, chatted with the farmers, and petted Sparky the dog.

After we set out again we were mostly in the clear, though we did bike through some solid rain. We’re in Parker’s Prairie now, about to check out the take-away pizzas at the liquor store, which the motel lady strongly hinted was our best dinner option in town.

(susan writing)

Yesterday we crossed the Mississippi one last time, on Morrison county rd 26 between Royalton and Bowlus, Minnesota. The river is still wide up here, though not as gargantuan as it is down along the bluffs along the state border. We camped across the road from the river last night at Charles Lindbergh State Park, where the Lindbergh family had a summer home and engaged in some gentleman’s farming.

Yesterday was our last day of nice weather for a while. Storms hit last night–we stayed nice and dry thanks to our REI Half-Dome2 tent, which we highly recommend if you’re in the market. Today things are a bit dicey because there’s only one town in between our starting point and final destination and there’s flash flood warnings, big storm systems to the south, and rain showers all around. We’ve managed to avoid the big storms by staying north of the mapped route but got hit with some solid showers just before we hit Long Prairie, the one town along the route today. So we’ve been sitting at the restaurant here in town for about an hour and a half now, watching the radar and waiting for a chance to go. The problem is that there is a meteorological force field of sorts between here and Parker’s Prairie, a big storm system that’s moved up and hasn’t seemed to move on. The ol timers a couple stools over from me are talking about the hail they had out at their farms this morning. It’s not pretty. Cross your fingers for us.

Since Friday, we’ve been hanging out in the Twin Cities, where we have a bunch of friends. To prove it, here’s a picture of one of them, Sean, with Brice on the Stone Arch Bridge today, with one of the two cities in the background:

Here we’ve had a great time visiting friends and also stocking up on provisions, including the giant bag of cheese powder and box of Clif Bars we had shipped to Sean and the 50 feet of cord and one of Sean’s old ‘biners for making bear bags.

Tomorrow we’re heading out in the general direction of Moorhead, MN/Fargo, ND. We’re starting off going straight north, forging our own path back to the ACA route, and then following ACA west. Tomorrow night we should hit Milaca, followed in order on successive nights by Charles Lindbergh State Park (outside Little Falls), Parkers Prairie, Pelican Rapids, and Moorhead on Friday. Following that is a long hard slog across North Dakota, which I’m (Susan) really hoping is a more awesome state than everyone who’s every driven through there says it is. We’re going to start a new approach to rest days, since we really don’t have friends or family well-spaced throughout the rest of the trip like we have had so far. We’ll take more frequent one-day breaks based on wind forecasts, rather than more farther-spaced longer breaks based on people we want to see. North Dakota will be a test case for that strategy, which I’m hoping works out well. Not sure what we’ll do if we’re forecast for like 5 successive days of 30 mph headwinds, which sounds like may be possible in the state. Wheeeeeeeeeeee

(brice writing)

At the beginning of the trip, we were extremely diligent about taking appropriate action with our food at night, making sure that all food was sealed up in one of the drybag panniers away from the tent (note that we haven’t hit bear country yet and know that won’t be enough once we do). Clearly, I need to reread Feynman’s “Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” because the lesson we took from having no problems at all on previous nights was that we could probably stop paying as much attention to the issue.

So last night when I heard the always-sounds-bigger-than-it-is noises of a raccoon shuffling around in the leaf litter outside our campsite over where we’d locked the bikes, I didn’t think much about it. And when I woke up a while later to hear a pannier falling off of the picnic table by our tent, Susan and I both said “wonder why it’s going after that, there’s no food in there!”

After the enthusiastic raccoon noises continued from the picnic table area, I poked my head out of the tent to see a little guy with his head in the pannier. He wasn’t bothered by the flashlight, so I threw some pebbles his way. He backed off maybe 15 feet and then crept back in. After we repeated this a few times, he stopped moving in response to the rocks and just stayed at work. Clearly there was something in that bag. So I got out of the tent, and sure enough, there was a ziploc with 16 packets of instant oatmeal we’d forgotten about in there.

In my sleep addled state (that’s how my defense will lead anyway), I cleaned up the single packet he’d gotten to, repacked the pannier (this was one of the ones that just has a tight waterproof lid rather than an drybag rolltop that seals), tightly closed the lid, put the pannier on one of the bikes, and went back to sleep. With this result:

Somehow he was able to get his little raccoon thumbs under the lid and liberate all the oatmeal. All of this is particularly embarrassing considering that a decent part of my professional life has been spent convincing people that “but [this weakness] hasn’t caused any problems so far” is by itself an extremely poor argument.

Anyway, we cleaned up the mess and got on the bikes for a quick (aided by 20mph winds out of the south) 45 mile ride to Afton State Park. We crossed the river into Wisconson for 15 miles or so and saw nary a badger, so that was disappointing. Tomorrow we will ride into the Twin Cities for some rest days with some old friends we are extremely excited to see. Tonight we’ll put our food away properly.

(Susan here)

Today we said goodbye to Winona and its jacuzzi and travelled along the river, passing through Wabasha (the setting of the movie Grumpy Old Men)* and Lake City (the birthplace of waterskiing)* to Frontenac State Park. We took highway 61 pretty much all the way here except for one of the (flat) ACA detours that took us along Winona County Road 84 through state- and Nature Conservancy-protected dune ecosystems that line the river south of Kellogg:

(This view looks away from the river.)

Entering Frontenac State Park, we were faced with the only real climb we had all day. This park is gorgeous, but I recommend arriving by car.

Many of the visitors to this park are birdwatchers. In fact, you can check out a binoculars and guides for free from the park office, which we would have done if we were going to stay a full day here. But this afternoon, we didn’t even need any binoculars to get some pretty awesome ad hoc birdwatching in. We were standing on an overlook over the river when a bald eagle flew right in front of us, followed not a minute later by another one! (We knew it was a bald eagle because it looked just like that bird at the beginning of the Colbert Report.) Brice, who had only caught the briefest of glimpses of the birds because he was in the midst of ordering us a 1-pound bag of cheddar cheese powder from Amazon on his iPhone, said in mock petulance, “I want another bald eagle!’ And whoosh! There came another one flying in the opposite direction. For someone who’d never knowingly seen a bald eagle in the wild before, getting three all at once was pretty awesome. (Or, who knows, maybe it was the same bird flying in circles.)

*Note that my knowledge of these factual tidbits comes entirely from the “Welcome to X” signs outside each town. For example, did you know that Lansing and New Albin have won a whole lot of Iowa state high school baseball championships? It’s true. And just about every other town in Iowa has one state wrestling champion, whose name and weight class is listed proudly on the sign into town, which means everyone knows exactly how much you weighed in high school. I imagine that if you were that guy still living in that town 30 years later you’d have a lot of people saying to you, “Gee, Bob, you’re looking a little heftier than 138 pounds these days–we should petition the town council to change some of the numbers on that sign around, hardy-har-har” ad infinitum. Lesson: If you’re an athletic boy in Iowa, move to Lansing and go out for baseball.

Since we ended up in Winona last night and are taking simpler routes, we’ll end up in some different spots the next few days than previously advertised: tonight, Frontenac State Park; tomorrow, Afton State Park. Then we’ll hit the Twin Cities and stay there for a couple days to rest and visit friends.

Mild crosswind today and strong tailwinds the next two days: yee haw!!

At Great River Bluffs State Park: (Brice wants me to tell you that we biked to the top.)/em>