Corn, Soy, and the Rolling Plains

After posting my last update, I ended up at Big Foot Beach State Park for the night. I pulled in and got the site mostly set up to my liking, then wandered over towards my neighbors, Tim and Amy, to ask if they knew what Mother Nature had in store for us that evening. As a lone cyclist pulling into a campground, that's always the easiest way to strike up a conversation with the neighbors. After listening to the weather radio for a while, I ended up sitting with Tim, Amy, and their two daughters around the campfire. They fed me a couple of pizza-like sandwiches that they prepared over the fire and provided me with good company for the evening. As the weather radio had suggested, the evening was cut a little short by the rain.

The following morning I hit the road after grabbing a bite to eat at a local cafe. On my way out of town, I found another fearless deer by the side of the road. This one wasn't even in the trees, it was just standing out in the open about 20 yards from the road. I stopped, got out my camera, and took a couple of pictures while it stood very, very still, maybe hoping I wouldn't see it while I was busy playing with my camera. How do deer like this live long enough to pass along their genes? I was tempted to pick up a small rock from the side of the road to see if I could actually hit it. I didn't want to hurt the animal, I just wanted to know if I could actually hit it with a rock. I refrained, put my camera away, and kept on cycling.

Eventually I arrived at my friend Claire's house in Madison, WI. It was a very welcome sight, as a shower sounded wonderful at that point. We hung out, saw the sights around Madison, and ended the evening catching up with some mutual friends that also live in the area.

The following morning I started heading towards the Minnesota border. Not really knowing good bike routes, I just jumped on hwy 14. It worked fine enough for my liking, but I found out later that there's a better way to go. Just outside of town I was riding along, glanced down at my GPS, heard a rustling in the grass right next to me, immediately followed by an awful scream. Anyone reading this ever hear the sound an injured rabbit makes? It's an awful noise. I'm pretty sure that's what came out of the brush near the road, RIGHT next to me. I just about pissed my pants, then started laughing, not because a rabbit was being attacked, but because I just about pissed my pants.

The terrain out of Madison started off very VERY flat, but towards the end of the day I was going up a fairly long climb (for southern WI, that is), followed by a long flat, followed by a long descent, another long flat, and repeat. It was not too bad, but by the end of 90+ miles, I was ready to be done when I got to Viroqua, WI.

I was pedaling through town towards a camp ground when a fellow cyclist crossed paths with me. He turned around, caught up to me, and offered me a place to sleep for the night. I rode with Bjorn back to his place where he double-checked with his housemates if it would be alright if I crashed there. Cecil and Sonya seemed to have no problem allowing a guest into their home for the evening, so I had an unexpected roof over my head for the night. After my shower, Bjorn showed me around town a bit. I was really surprised at how cool of a town Viroqua is. There are remnant buildings in town from the old tobacco growing days, before the government stopped subsidizing it. Now the historic buildings house small businesses. The ground formerly used for growing tobacco now grows mostly organic vegetables. Bjorn's job has him working with a lot of organic farmers in the area. He told me there are something like 222 small organic farms in the county. He also took me to the food co-op in town, which was very cool. They had signs by all of their produce, telling exactly which farm it came from. The signs were color coded to distinguish between local, regional, and everywhere else. Obviously their peaches weren't coming from a local farmer in Wisconsin, but you could just look at the tag and know exactly who it was that grew those peaches. As we headed back to the house, we happened to bump into the owner of the one bike shop in town. It looked like they had a really cool shop already, but they were in the process of putting in a coffee bar. It doesn't get much better than that.

The next day I headed out of town the way Bjorn told me to go and headed for the Mississippi River. The route he put me on involved a little more up and down than I would have had the other way, but it was beautiful and had a whole lot less traffic than where I had been. As I approached the last bit of climbing before coasting towards the river, I saw a bunch of cyclists up ahead. When I got to where they were, I found out that they were doing time trials up the hill. I think a local bike shop or some other organization was putting on a bit of a clinic or something to help these people become better cyclists. I got there as they released the last one up the hill (released in 15 sec. incraments to keep them separated, but still time them). I followed the last guy up the hill and lost a bit of ground on him as we climbed, but I did pretty well. I got to the top while they timers were still parked by the road. They had seen me at the bottom and I think they were surprised to see me at the top already, right behind their last rider. They jokingly asked if I wanted to know my time. I'll be honest, it was not an easy thing to try to keep up with the guy in front of me, but I'm carrying a whole lot more weight on a much heavier bike, so I'm ok with that. One of the guys snapped a picture of me as I came up. We made small talk for a bit, they thought I was out of my mind when I told them about my ride, then they had to go back to address the riders they had just timed. As I rolled past this mixed group of young and old riders participating in this thing, they all basically looked at me like, "Is he nuts? He just climbed that hill we just came up with all of that crap on his bike..." This stretch of Wisconsin actually reminded me of the Appalachian Mountains, except a whole lot easier to ride.

After a brief stop in La Crosse, WI, to check out my route on a computer, I took Bjorn's advice and headed for the Root River Trail. The trail was mostly lined with trees, protecting me from the 18-20 mph winds that had picked up by this point. It took me on a quaint little path through the hills of southeastern Minnesota through a lot of farm country amidst a lot of tree covered hills. I found a campground along the trail near Preston, MN, where I spent a pretty uneventful night.

The next day I continued to move southwest into Iowa. At about this time I started to think about how much corn I had seen so far. I remember the vast expanses of corn starting somewhere in New York and continuing the whole way to Iowa. I know what's west of here. More corn, occasionally rotating with soybeans. I kept rolling into Iowa until I got to a town with a library (Osage, IA), where I started writing this post until the library closed. As I headed out the door, I asked the woman working at the desk if she knew a laundromat in the area. She told me where one was, and then asked how long I had been traveling. She thought it was very cool, but didn't have time to talk. I went to the laundromat, and the same woman swung by on her way out to tell me about an event at the fairgrounds.

While doing laundry I chatted with a local fellow for a bit, explained a little bit about the different kinds of Mennonites and why I didn't have a beard or black hat. After laundry, I headed towards the fair grounds to see what was happening. They had an event called "Friday Night Out" going on with live music and food. I stopped to grab a bite to eat and listen to some music. The librarian saw me and insisted that I meet a woman from the Chamber of Commerce (unfortunately I have forgotten her name). She was very excited to have me stopping through and immediately drug me on stage and introduced me to the crowd. It was a little awkward, but a very nice gesture. I stuck around for a little while and a few people stopped me to ask some questions.

When the sun started to set, I got back on the bike and headed west towards a campground several locals had mentioned. They said it was just a mile or so out of town, so I didn't think I needed to leave too early. I put my flashing rear light and my headlight on and started out of town. I really don't like riding at dusk, so I was not moving very fast and was looking behind me quite regularly to try to avoid traffic. Most of the shoulder was gravel, so I was basically on the white line the whole way out of town. Most of the traffic was being very cautious around me and slowing way down, waiting for the opposite lane to open up, then passing. One truck, however, decided that there was room for us both on the road. He had slowed way down, but decided to pass. I was a bit startled to have his rear view mirror a couple inches from my shoulder, so I stopped pedaling and focused on staying on the very edge of the pavement because the gravel was pretty thick and I was moving too quickly to safely handle the transition. The truck got past me and for a split second I thought I was in the clear. Then the fender of his flat bed trailer caught my front pannier (bag), thus changing the direction of my bike. For the second time this trip, I found myself flying over my handlebars, only this time it was not my inattention that caused the event. Like last time, I'm not exactly sure what happened with the landing, but both my hands, my chest, both my knees, and my chin hit the pavement. Lucky for me, I kind of just landed and there wasn't any sliding involved, so the road rash is almost non-existant, but my jaw is sore. I suppose I'll give the driver the benefit of the doubt and allow them to plead ignorance of how to drive when a bicycle is present, rather than call them a jackass. And I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they didn't see their trailer knock me off the road into a tumbling mess rather than accuse them of a hit-and-run. Regardless of what was going on in that person's head or in the cab of that pickup, I really would feel safer on the road if they did not have a lisence. I picked my crap up off the road as traffic continued to pass, reattached everything to my bike, bent some stuff back into place, and kept going to the campground. I set up camp as quickly as I could and just went to bed, soon enjoying the sound of rain on my tent.

This morning I got up at a decent hour and headed straight west. There were a few sprinkles in the morning, but nothing major. The wind picked up during the afternoon and blew mostly out of the south all day. A headwind is obviously not a lot of fun, but after several ours of fighting to keep your bike on the road with a 14mph cross wind while trucks pass. I got just outside of Algona, IA, and found a little bar on the side of the road. I needed water and a break from the mind-numbing wind. I stepped inside and was quickly greeted by a couple at the bar. When they heard what I was doing, they immediately gave me directions to their house in Algona and told me to go there. For a couple of reasons, I am going to a camp ground north of town. The people seemed nice enough, but I did not feel comfortable just walking into their house where the only person that was home was the woman's daughter. The woman called the daughter to tell her that I was coming. I got an opportunity to speak to the daughter (in her 20's). She made it very clear that she did not want me in the house, no matter what her mother said. The rest of the conversation was a mix of their sense of humor and reality that I could not distinguish between. I feel bad not accepting their hospitality, but it just didn't sound like the kind of place I would get a decent night's rest.

Now I'm at a McDonald's, about to use that 14mph south wind to push me 4 miles north to a campground. I should be arriving at Sioux City on Monday and riding through the northeast corner of Nebraska on Tuesday on my way into South Dakota, which will likely be the last place I find familiar faces for quite some time.