Yesterday was a pretty short day as long-haul bike touring goes — I shortened it to 47 miles after feeling pretty spent from my battle with Monday’s winds. The day was quite overcast, and very cloudy, but the wind had died down significantly. There was the threat of rain for much of the day, but it never quite came to pass. I didn’t camp last night due to the possibility of overnight rain and storms. Instead I holed up in the Grand Rapids Super-8, where I slept like a log.
In the morning I got going pretty late after a rather fitful night. Some racoons had awakened me at around 2am, and I found it mildly difficult to get back to sleep after that. I finally hit the road around 9, remembering that there was a full 7 miles of riding back into the town of Bigfork where I could get some breakfast at the place simply called Pizza Parlor, although it was also a dining room and general purpose cafe — the only one in town. As I rolled up, a weathered man of maybe 70 (it was hard to tell) looked me directly in the eye from his place on a bench outside the cafe and said in a deep but shaky voice, “Like sands through the hourglass. So are the days of our lives.” “You got that right,” I replied. He’d said it almost liturgically, as if it required a response, or was of particular weight in that moment. I went inside the cafe and ordered breakfast.
Breakfast was huge, and it took a little while to both prepare and consume. Meanwhile I observed the collection of patriotic art by local children which adorned one of the walls. The children’s’ liberal intermixture of national and Christian symbols suggested a theocratic politics, or perhaps a nationalist Christianity. A kind woman in the cafe saw me there and asked about my trip as a means to tell about the time, many years ago that she’d done RAGBRAI. I love it when people tell me about their own past tours — and it happens a lot. Already three people in two days have told me about their past rides: a man who road from the Twin Cities to Yellowstone with friends after high school graduation, the RAGBRAI woman, and another man who’d crossed the country. Sometimes you can tell (especially if they’re older) that they would love to ride away with you at that moment.
Speaking of riding, I did actually do some of that too, covering the remaining 40 miles to Grand Rapids in about 3.25 hours of riding time — not too bad for the extent of what I’m carrying. Minnesota 38 between Bigfork and here has sections which aren’t all that big on shoulder, but remain crowded with construction and logging trucks. If you’re reading this in search of a route, I don’t recommend the road, which is also somewhat hilly in parts. Dangerous situations are possible. The guys at Itasca Trail Sports in Grand Rapids recommend staying in Highway 6, and in retrospect they were right … But everything went well and before long the road opened up again into a shouldered, wide highway with massive amounts of space. Before long I was in Grand Rapids, crossing the Mississippi under gloomy skies and humidity.
