“How much did you . . . [deep breath] . . . train for this ride?” I say to Sarah as we pedal up a hill on the outskirts of St. Paul.

We are early on Day One of a 330+ mile self-contained bicycle ride from our home in Minneapolis to our cabin in the U.P. of Michigan.  We need to complete the ride in 5 days in order to meet our family “up north” for Memorial Day weekend.   

Sarah thinks for a minute.  “I rode around the lakes,” she says.  And then she adds cheerfully, “oh, and I biked to give blood last week, too.” 

“That’s like 12 miles total,” I respond with more than a hint of judgment in my voice. 

I don’t know about you dear reader, but at 54 years old, I require a bit more than 12 miles of training to get ready for a trip of this size.  In fact, I just returned from a bikepacking trip in Colorado a few days before – the reason I wasn’t sure how much Sarah had been on her bike to get ready for our journey.

But of course, my wife is amazing, and proved over the course of the next 5 days that 12 miles of training suited her just fine—except for the parts of her that come in contact with a bicycle seat.  Those parts could have used a bit more, shall we say, seasoning.  More on that below.

Second Time’s a Charm

After abandoning our last multi-day bike ride across Florida in late 2021, Sarah and I have been itching to get back on the bikes for a ride in a venue far safer than what we encountered in the bowels of the sunshine state. 

And this journey from Minneapolis across Northern Wisconsin and the U.P.—a small part of Adventure Cycling Association’s “Northern Tier” bike route across the country—fit the bill.  It includes long sections of bike path, quiet county forest roads, and almost perfectly spaced small Wisconsin towns for us to resupply, camp, and chat up the (mostly) friendly locals.

Sarah and I did this exact ride in reverse, from our cabin to Minneapolis, in 2021, so we knew its wonders well.  But we also discovered that biking home after a family get together at the cabin was logistically much easier.  In the week leading up to our departure, while I was in Colorado on vacation, Sarah had to figure out who was watching our dogs, complete all of the grocery shopping and meal planning for the Memorial Day weekend crew, get all of that food and drink packed in the car, and coordinate which daughter would drive our car north to the cabin for us to drive home.  All this, and she still had to pack herself for the Memorial Day weekend and for our bike trip.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have questioned the time she spent training? 

We planned to leave Minneapolis by noon on Day 1.  We left at 1:55pm.  It wasn’t a mad scramble planning a family Memorial Day weekend and a week-long bike trip at the same time, but it was close.  Did I mention Sarah is amazing?

Two Metrics

We lived by two metrics on this trip, the first of which is well known to us and the second of which is new. 

Metric One: One Hour of Car Travel=One Day of Biking. 

Sarah and I have done our fair share of bicycle travel in the past few years and almost without fail we end up pedaling around 5 hours total each day at an average of 12.5 miles per hour.  This equates to a daily distance of 60 to 70 miles.  I don’t even need to look at my Strava trip calculator to know when we are approaching that 5-hour, 60 mile mark—I can tell because Sarah stops talking at this point of the day.

This metric makes laying out our trip easy.  It takes us around 5 hours to drive to our cabin.  5 hours of highway driving=5 days of cycling. 

With this metric in mind, our Day One goal is Interstate State Park in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.  I reserved a fantastic walk-in campsite that sits alone on a three-sided bluff perched above the river.  I can’t wait to camp there again.

But alas, newly discovered metric number two will make camping at Interstate Park all but impossible for us.

Our ride starts out great.  It’s a special feeling to cycle out of your driveway on a trip you normally view as a chore in the car.  Instead of 5 hours of impatient, cushy drudgery, we have 5 days of fresh air and open skies ahead of us.  Driveway to driveway in a totally different way.  Sarah and I exchange high fives as we pedal north up our street, nervous and excited for the road ahead. 

After a stop at the Angry Catfish bike shop for a new set of bike gloves for Sarah (and an extra spacer for my rattling front rack) we make our way just north of St. Paul and turn onto the Gateway State Bike Trail.  It’s a symbolic turn away from the downtown St. Paul skyline and onto a tree canopied trail that will lead us northeast away from the bustling metro.  I snap a quick picture as the skyline disappears.    

It’s a very hot day for May (80’s with full sun), but we thoroughly enjoy the ride north east through rural Scandia and onto the Wisconsin border.  The final few miles to the state line include a steep downhill run to the St. Croix river and then an equally grueling uphill climb back out of the river valley and into the town of Osceola, Wisconsin.

It was here that we discovered metric number two.  We stopped at a BP gas station to get a Gatorade, but it was closed for the evening.  As we debated our next move, a swarm of mosquitos descended upon us.  In the middle of town, in the middle of a hot sunny parking lot.  This is bad.  I see panic rise in my wife’s eyes.  Very bad indeed. 

Metric Two: Minimum Mosquito Speed.

The Adventure Cycling route leads north out of Osceola along aptly named River Road.  River road contains lots of hills, some of which are Tour De France steep.  And each climb that slows our pace to approximately 6mph or less—aka Minimum Mosquito Speed—includes not only burning in our tired legs, but also the bites of hundreds (thousands?) of angry, swarming mosquitos.  It was a roller coaster ride—each glorious, breezy downhill followed by up an uphill of rising panic and entomologically induced pain.  After about the third hill, even I was ready to get off this crappy ride, and I’m one of those lucky people that isn’t affected by mosquito bites (they don’t itch).  Sarah is not one of those people, and she started using the downhills to not only wave off the buzzing swarm but also to search for hotel rooms on her phone.  Multi-tasking at its finest.

As we pulled up to Highway 35 at the entrance to Interstate Park, I didn’t even have to ask Sarah whether we should abandon ship.  “You keep pedaling into town and find us a room,” I said to her, “I’ll call the Indian restaurant and get take out for us before they close.”  And without a word, she was gone down the road, eager to reach escape velocity.

After losing more blood on the side of the road, I catch up to Sarah on the outskirts of St. Croix Falls.  She is riding in circles in the AmeriVu Inn parking lot at the all-important +6mph speed.  $79 for the night?  Sold.

Sarah’s relief was palpable as we rolled our bikes into the room, and I when I returned to the room with take-out food in hand, I started to think she might actually stay married to me after all.  We enjoy dinner sitting on very stained matching arm chairs while Sarah reads me the hilarious Google reviews for our motel (“my heart sank as I entered the room . . .”).

Flexibility and improvisation are key on a bike trip, and so is avoiding River Road between Osceola and St. Croix Falls in late May unless you have the legs to pedal above M.M.S.

Day Two

The arm chairs may be ratty, but the bed at the AmeriVu was just right.  Sarah and I sleep until 8AM and then enjoy bad coffee at the free breakfast in the lobby that seems to lack any food except jelly packets.  We are alone until the woman in charge—we think she’s the mom of the lovely family running the motel—tells us that the road crew ripping up the roadway outside is going to turn off the water soon.  Say what?  We just woke up 15 minutes ago.  We scramble back to the room, but the water is off before we can even fill up our water bottles.  Seriously?  I start thinking of Google review lines to write, “my heart sank until I realized that a toilet has at least one flush remaining after your water line is cut.” 

Braze On, Braze Off

It’s a gorgeous morning on the Gandy Dancer state trail and we quickly forget the lack of showers, grape jelly packet breakfast and festering bug bites.  A blood red sun cuts through the trees, trillium is blooming across the forest floor, and everywhere I look I see a different shade of exploding green that holds the urgency of spring.  Fresh, clean, green; it makes me want to take a deep breath and hold it in while smiling.  It’s heaven.  We cruise along talking and riding side by side in car free bliss on the crushed gravel trail before our route turns off the trail east towards Balsam Lake.  

And like most bike trips, just when all is right in the world, stuff happens.  A few miles before we reached Balsam Lake my front tire started rubbing loudly on something.  After two roadside stops I uncover the culprit.  The eyelet “braze on” on one side of my fork is gone.  Sheared off.  This is very bad.  Worse than mosquitos.  This eyelet secures one side of my storage rack, which holds at least 30 pounds of critical gear in my bike panier bags.  There is no good place to put this gear if my front rack is out of commission.  It’s a show stopper. 

Thankfully there is an Ace Hardware on the outskirts of town.  I’m able to limp there while holding my rack with one hand and trying to keep the bike on the shoulder of the road with the other.

After three separate trips into Ace for various tools, spacers and bolts, I successfully attach my rack to a secondary eyelet on a lower part of the fork.  It works with about 1 millimeter of space to spare.  We both breath a huge sigh of relief as I try to wipe the grease and grime off of my hands.  I once heard someone disparage the dream of traveling the world by sailboat as nothing more than “boat repairs in exotic places.”  If that’s true, then traveling by bike can include a lot of “bike repair in crappy places.”  Exhibit A: I used a stack of manure fertilizer bags as an impromptu bike stand in the Ace parking lot.  Yum.   

We finally eat a proper breakfast in Balsam Lake at 1:30pm with only 17 miles on the odometer that needs to reach 70 miles before day’s end.  But we were still riding, and neither of us cared.

 Lions and Tiger and Bears, Oh My

In addition to bike repairs in crappy places, another drawback of bike travel is that you are frequently forced to get up close and personal with all varieties of roadkill.  Evolution has not caught up with the threat of high-speed roadways for many species, especially racoons.  Poor buggers.  But sometimes we are treated to encounters with wildlife that is still upright and breathing.

Such was the case this day.  Instead of lions and tigers and bears, it was bear, and bear, and fisher.  The fisher was up first.  Just after we left Balsam Lake a fisher ran across the highway not 20 yards ahead of us.  I sometimes see pine martin, which are often confused for the more elusive and rarer fisher, but this guy was much larger than his smaller cousin the pine martin.  Sarah thought it was an otter when we first saw him, but he turned around at the tree line to get a better look at us it was clear that he was a huge, tree climbing, squirrel eating member of the weasel family.  Our first fisher sighting.  What a treat!

And then a few miles before the town of Cumberland we enjoy a visit from Ursus Americanus.  A couple in an ORV—the motorized outdoor recreation vehicles that seem to multiply like rabbits each year in the woods and have no known predators in the wild or the government—flag us down at an ORV trail crossing.  “There’s a bear up deh-er,” the driver says in a glorious Wisconsin accent.  He means this as a warning but it has the opposite effect.  We race up the road to get a look at the small bear that is moving briskly across the stubble of an open farm field, heading south.  Good luck surviving the roads, and farms, dogs and people, I think as the bear cruises away.     

Only a few hours later we see our second bear, this one bounds across the road in pigeon toed fashion just in front of us.  It’s much bigger and makes us appreciate the fact that this is a fast, large animal that could run us down without much effort.  Instead, it makes a break for the safety of the trees before turning around to check us out.  “How fast can they run and should we be worried?” Sarah asks as we stop to get a picture.  “30 miles per hour,” I reply, but we both agree how awesome it is to be in a place where a large predator still has enough wild space to live.    

The jolt from that second bear sighting comes at a good time, as we are tired.  Back in the lakeside park in Cumberland, while we ate a late afternoon snack and cooled off in the freezing lake, we made the decision to push on to Birchwood.  This will require over 70 miles of biking today.

Thankfully, we have several more diversions in store before reaching Birchwood, including a pair of curious donkeys, two Amish kids in big sun hats that run out to the roadside to wave at us, and the topper:  A stop at our favorite little family grocery store in Haugen, Wisconsin.

Dollar General this is Not

“You are my first cyclists this season,” Mrs. Hill says as we step into her time machine named Hills Grocery Store.  Sadly, her husband Jim passed away in 2020 shortly after my first visit to Hills, but she is still going strong.  44 years behind that counter with the push button cash register.  44 years stocking these narrow shelves and serving this community as a husband and wife team running their own business.  It’s sad to think that there are no young couples starting their own small grocery stores in towns like Haugen today.  Walmart and Dollar General have seen to that.  Economists call this creative destruction. 

I think capitalism is the best system humankind has invented (so far) to allocate resources, but I would never pick a Dollar General over Hills Grocery.  Ever.

We buy as much as we can carry from Mrs. Hill and wish her well after talking for far too long.  Visiting Hills Grocery reminds me of reading the newspaper on the D-Day anniversary each year and seeing a dwindling number of WWII veterans still alive to commemorate the event.  The Greatest Generation is almost gone.  I hope we see you again next year, Mrs. Hill.  God speed.  And Dollar General and its corporate overlords be dammed.  

No Quarter without Quarters

We roll into Doolittle Campground in Birchwood at 7:20pm.  The Bluegill Bar downtown stops serving dinner at 8pm, so that gives us just enough time to set up our tent and take an overdue shower before we devour whatever a couple of pescatarian bicyclists can find to eat at a tavern in Birchwood.  We are the only people in the campground except for an older guy sitting atop a picnic table eating a sandwich. 

There are a few bugs—far better than last evening thankfully—so Sarah head’s off to shower while I set up camp.  She returns 15 minutes later. “The showers take quarters.”  Oh no!  First no water at the AmeriVu this morning and now no shower tonight?  Sarah senses my disappointment and adds, “It’s ok. I was able to clean off in the bathroom sink.”  After some skepticism on my part, she convinces me that she cleaned her entire body with the exception of the middle of her back in the bathroom counter sink.  “I’d love to see a security camera recording of that,” I say but then think better of it.  “Actually, never mind, I really don’t want to see that.”

I’m not climbing into the sink and the old guy eating subway doesn’t have any change, so off to the Bluegill Bar we pedal with one clean wife and one very smelly husband.

We return to the campground in the dark with full bellies and a pocketful of quarters.  Sarah dives into her new sleeping bag and I take a glorious 4 quarter shower.  Although it’s late, I have a hard time going to bed.  It’s too beautiful.  Cold air is seeping into the low places and clouds of non-biting bugs hover in the lake mist.  There is a sliver of moon hanging.  I’m filled up with gratitude; for having a partner that can shower in a sink, for being healthy enough to pedal 72 miles today, for having the resources to spend a week moving at 12 miles per hour.  For all of it. 

I can’t help cracking a smile, until I turn back towards our tent site and notice the harsh glare of a store brightly illuminating the entire back bay between our campground peninsula and the town.  I don’t remember this light pollution last time we camped here. 

Yep, you guessed it.  It’s a brand spanking new Dollar General.

Day Three

If I could pick one day of my life to live over and over again, Day Three would get serious consideration.  After eating oatmeal and drinking coffee in the hot morning sun, we said goodbye to Doolittle campground.  We had the place to ourselves but for a group of messy geese and a pair of Ospreys fishing the back bay.  Their artificial nesting platform has a commanding view of the Dollar General parking lot.  They didn’t seem to mind.  Maybe I shouldn’t either.         

Our morning ride begins on a magical section of county highway that winds for several miles along the western shore of Chetec lake.  It’s a road that was made by people who traveled the contours of the land, working with the land, rather than by our modern engineers who prefer straight lines and speed at all costs—hills, wetlands and other obstacles be dammed. 

We have a tailwind.  The sun is out.  There are no cars.  We wave at a few fishing boats and admire all of the wildflowers on the shaded forest floor.  At some point I notice how many different birds are loudly singing their spring songs.  Ambient noise is funny like that—invisible until you pay a little attention and then you can’t understand how you didn’t notice it earlier.

The 60-mile ride today has to be some of the best biking in the Midwest.  Rolling hills, streams and lakeshores, deep green forests, old churches and cemeteries.  And very few cars, none of which seem to be piloted by angry, impatient drivers.  It doesn’t get any better than this.  Sure, the bugs are still present if we slip below minimum mosquito speed and Sarah’s saddle sores are starting to become a primary challenge of the trip, but all seems right in the world.   

It wasn’t until the last several miles of the day that our bliss was shattered.  A bone rattling section of County Road S had Sarah questioning my route finding skills.  Again.  Why do bad roads always come at day’s end?  They don’t, of course, but we remember the bad ones like we remember “always” having to walk to the furthest gate at the airport.  At least that’s what I pointed out to Sarah.  She didn’t respond, other than to cast an icy glare in my direction. 

“I will never ride that section of road again,” Sarah says with a heavy emphasis on the word never after we turn onto Highway 77.  I believe her. 

A mile or so down the road, we enjoy a warm welcome from Terry, the proprietor of Boulder Lodge, who soon makes us forget the torture of Highway S.  He gives us a tour of several buildings on the resort—birthed from an original 1800’s logging camp on the property—and even lets us shack up for the night in an original log cabin he is refurbishing at water’s edge so we don’t have to camp.  The cabin has no running water and is a mess, but there is a futon and most importantly, screens on the windows to keep the swarming insects at bay.  At $50 for the night it feels like a steal.       

Not only do we get screened windows, we also have another treat in store: Our friends Trevor and Patti Twose are meeting us for dinner.  We bumped into the Twose’s on the Outer Banks of North Carolina during a bike ride down the Atlantic Coast a few years ago.  They might be the coolest, and most inspirational couple we know.  After exchanging emails during that first campground meeting, we soon discovered that the Twose’s called Madison, Wisconsin home for decades, and that Trevor and I were in the same line of work in Madison and likely bumped into each other without knowing it in that small market more than once. 

Serendipity and bike rides go hand in hand. 

Use it or Lose it

Sarah and I are 54 years old.  Not long ago I mentioned to Sarah that we probably have 20 more years to do trips like the one we are on now, if we are lucky.  It was a reminder to not put off big trips that test our limits, and our wits, because there will come a day when they are no longer possible. 

I don’t know how old Trevor and Patti are, but I do know that they moved to Madison from their native U.K. in 1971 for Trevor’s post-doctorate studies.  This is my only clue that they have passed that age threshold I mentioned above because the Twose’s are a vibrant, adventurous couple that have not stopped testing their limits.  When we first met them on the Outer Banks, they were crossing the country camping out of a tiny tear drop camper, bikes and gravity bag shower stand in tow.  When they aren’t camping and biking, they split their time between a cabin in Hayward, Wisconsin and another home in Idaho at the base of the Tetons. 

Soon after Trevor and Patti pick us up for dinner, we learn that they just returned from a 4-day backcountry camping and mountain bike trip in northern Minnesota.  They were exploring potential routes for a national group that maintains a bikepacking route on dirt and gravel roads and trails that extends across North America.  “We ran into some difficulty because the storm this past winter dropped a lot of trees that we had to drag our bikes around and through,” Trevor says.  His smile is infectious and uplifting, like his personality, and I always a sense a bit of devilish grin hiding in there, too.          

Patti is Trevor’s perfect complement; she is the engine that makes them go.  Case in point, our dinner that evening is at Louie’s Landing, the only place open on a Tuesday in May in the Northwoods.  The place is packed and there is zero staff—one cook in the kitchen and the owner, I’ll call him Louie of course, behind the bar mixing drinks and waiting tables.  All of the tables.  It takes forever for us to get in our order and meals.  “I can’t get anyone to work these days,” Louie tells us as he runs back and forth from behind the bar.  Instead of complaining, Patti empathizes, and after dinner as we are walking to the car she decides to go back in and get Louie’s contact information.  “Let’s come back here to volunteer this weekend for the Memorial Day rush to help him out,” she says to Trevor after returning.  What a refreshing way to respond to bad service.  The world could use more Patti’s.  I silently resolve to be more like her as we drive back to Boulder Lodge dodging potholes on dreaded Highway S. 

Are the Twose’s lucky winners in the genetic lottery, blessed with special longevity genes?  I don’t think so.  I think they practice a mantra I started following when I turned 50 years old: Use it or Lose it.  At that time my son was 16 years old and I remember encouraging him to enjoy this phase of his life by saying to him “every month you get smarter and faster and stronger and I get dumber and slower and weaker.”  It depressed me for a bit, until I stumbled upon the antidote: Use it or Lose it.  Once you stop [insert whatever challenging mental or physical activity you want here] it becomes exponentially harder to start doing said activity ever again. 

So don’t stop.  Don’t ever stop.  Whatever that means to you, resolve to keep doing it.  And it doesn’t have to include routing a new bikepacking trail in the arrowhead wilderness of Northern Minnesota or slinging plates at Louie’s Landing on a holiday weekend.  It could be as simple as taking the stairs two a time instead of the elevator at work.  Or sitting on the floor every time you tie your shoes.  Or grabbing a shovel instead of a snowblower.  You get the idea.                      

“Those two are badass,” I say to Sarah later that evening, and it’s meant as my highest compliment; a quality I wish I could be.  For someone who has spent a career behind a computer screen, I’m lucky enough to have met a fair share of badasses—my friend Webb Chiles the octogenarian offshore solo sailor who still does his age in push-ups comes to mind—but the Twose’s might be the first husband and wife team in that category that Sarah and I have found.  “I sure am glad we met them,” I add.  And I mean that both for their inspirational badassery, but also because they are the type of friends that make you feel better having spent time with them.  Another quality Sarah and I aspire to be. 

“I’m renaming this the Use it or Lose it ride in honor of the Twose’s,” I say to Sarah as we slip into our sleeping bags later that evening and drift off to sleep.    

Day Four

It’s cold.  I got up to pee in the middle of the night and shut the windows and the cabin’s front door on my way back in.  We wake up to a 35-degree swing in temperature overnight.  Sarah and I put on all of our clothes and eat breakfast in our little shack.  If it starts raining, as forecast, we are screwed.  Heat may slow us down, but 40’s cold and rain is a show stopper for me.      

We reluctantly get underway at 10am to solid, low hanging grey skies and a brisk headwind.  Today’s route to Mercer leads us onto Highway 77, a two lane highway that cuts an arrow straight line through the Chequamegon national forest for as far as the eye can see.  It’s the home of Wisconsin’s largest elk herd but we don’t spot any this day.  The Memorial Day car traffic has not started and I spend most of the morning biking in the middle of the road next to Sarah while talking incessantly to keep my mind off the cold.  “Car back,” she calls out on the few occasions that she spies a car approaching in her rear-view mirror.

We get a few passing showers, but not a soaking, and arrive in the town of Butternut at lunchtime in fair shape.  Both of us are looking forward to a chocolate malt at the town’s ice cream and deli, but it’s closed. 

“Closed until Friday.  Dad is having his second brain surgery” reads the hand-written message taped to the front door.  You don’t see personalized signs like this in a city the size of Minneapolis.  At some mysterious point of population growth, a town becomes a city and the feeling of intimate community is replaced by an anonymous mass of humanity.  “I wonder what population number that switch happens at, 50,000, 100,000?” I say while we eat peanut butter banana wraps and charge our phones under the awning of the deli’s brick building.  Butternut’s population stands at 367, so I don’t think they will be moving away from handwritten store signs about family members anytime soon.

The afternoon ride from Butternut towards Mercer is fantastic.  The straight lines of Highway 77 are replaced by winding country roads passing beautiful old farmsteads and wooded back 40 acreages.  We even see several well maintained big wooden barns. The kind that were commonplace in our childhood and are now almost gone from the landscape.  It is rural and sleepy but no one living here is on vacation—in stark contrast to the Northwoods we are about to enter that is full of lake cabins, bait shops, restaurants, and Illinois license plates. 

Smoke What?

As we approach Mercer and the sprawling Turtle Flambeau Flowage the hills get bigger and the mosquitos return in force.  These two challenges pale in comparison to Sarah’s saddle sores, however, which are now demanding most of her attention.  At one point I notice her typing away on her phone perched in its handlebar holder.  “I remember hearing somewhere that women after pregnancy smoke their vaginas to help the healing process,” she says when I ask her what she is searching.  “That’s actually a thing?” I reply, and add “I really don’t ever want to see your search history.”  We both laugh for several miles having reached the slap happy state of tiredness. 

Correction:  It turns out that some women steam their vaginas after childbirth to speed recovery. An important change of verbs. We conclude that neither steaming nor smoking is going to help Sarah get out of her current pain predicament, but I do offer to make a smoky campfire for Sarah tonight just in case she wants to experiment with a new form of holistic saddle-sore therapy.  She declines.    

Nail Saloon

We decide to stop for the evening at Lake of the Falls county park.  The park is miles short of our goal to reach Mercer, but it is too beautiful to pass up.  The campground sits next to a big set of river rapids that roll and boil downhill into a bay of the Turtle Flambeau flowage.  We pick out a camping spot just far enough away from the rapids that we will enjoy a natural sound machine tonight.  And best of all a quick Google search confirms that there is a bar and restaurant just around the river bend that we can easily reach on foot or bicycle.  15 minutes after setting up our tent we are eating French fries and drinking a well-deserved beer at the Gateway Lodge and Resort. 

“Add that to the list of things I never thought I’d see,” I say to Sarah as we emerge from the Gateway an hour later.  “That was really gross.”  As we were eating our fries, the woman who cooked them emerged from the kitchen, part of the mother/daughter team staffing the place for the evening.  She plopped herself down on the end of the bar and proceeded to pull out a nail clipper and start clipping her nails while chatting up the only other guy sitting at the bar.  And as a topper, as she cut them, she laid them out on the bar like a fishing party might lay out their catch at day’s end.  If you ever find yourself hungry on the outskirts of Mercer, Wisconsin consider yourself warned. 

Despite our culinary nail salon—I mean saloon—experience we both agree at the campfire later that evening that we saved the best campsite for last.  The night is clear and cold enough that the mosquitos are out of commission.  A waxing moon hangs over the bay and mayflies are rising in the mist of the rapids.  And we are alone at what I’m sure is a very busy campground all summer long.  Almost alone, I should clarify.  There is one other tent in the campground occupied by a single guy driving a vintage 1970’s muscle car.  He is straight out of a Stephen King novel and we wonder what he is doing in the giant dome tent he has all to himself.  “I can take him, he’s old,” I assured Sarah as I catch her stealing glances across the campground to his dark tent more than once. 

After eating a surprisingly good freeze-dried meal right out of the packet, we both dive into our warm sleeping bags and sleep the bone tired, outdoors all day, sleep that eludes us back in our cushy Minneapolis lives.  And muscle car dude doesn’t make a peep, until I hear his car roll out of the campground at 5:55AM, probably to go bury a dead body somewhere. 

Day Five

It’s in the 40’s when I emerge from the tent.  I make a fire and try to position my camp chair to catch the early slanting rays of sun.  The last day of a bike trip is always bittersweet.  I did, however, forget quarters for the campground showers (again) and the thought of a hot shower and seeing our kids and my Mom and Dad tonight at our cabin outweighs any sadness I feel while I drink coffee and wait for Sarah to wake up. 

We get underway before 9:30am and strip off layers of clothing on the first part of the ride into Mercer as the bright sun burns off the morning mist that is hiding in the woods and low places.  Lots of RV’s and pick up trucks hauling fishing boats pass us on the winding road and announce our official arrival into the Northwoods.       

Sarah runs into a grocery store in Mercer for Vaseline and bananas—the two items of choice for all long-distance cyclists—and we join a paved bike path that will take us almost the entire way into Boulder Junction this morning.  We even see a several people riding bikes, most of the electric kind.  It feels so good to no longer be the only strange misfits alone on two wheels on the edge of the highway. 

“We haven’t had any angry drivers on this trip,” I make the mistake of saying out loud from the blissful security of our bike path.  This turns out to be an ill-advised comment—similar to saying things like “I never get sick” or “what could possibly go wrong?”

Before our inevitable comeuppance for my comment, we enjoy a big breakfast at the Aurora Borealis cafe in Manitowish Waters.  We are the only people in the place, a common theme on this trip, and I do my best to make sure the cafe won’t go out of business by ordering two plates of food, neither of which fills me up.  I love this feeling that comes after a few days of riding.  The food hits my stomach and is immediately absorbed and gone.  It feels like hitting the power boost button in a video game.   

Our long stretch of bike path nirvana ends south of Boulder Junction and we turn east onto Highway K, a favorite Northwoods stretch of road that runs through Star Lake and on towards Conover.  It’s not a bike path, but it’s not too shabby.  The road cuts through deep, shaded hardwood forest interrupted by a smattering of glimmering glacial lakes.  I have ridden this road on long rides from our cabin with my friend Michael Salat.  I snap a picture of the Highway sign and text it to him.  It feels good to be almost back in our neighborhood. 

But something is amiss on normally idyllic Highway K today.  We feel it almost immediately as we keep seeing “Save Our Rustic Road” signs planted next to driveways along the road.  Uh-oh.  Turns out the Vilas County Highway Department has plans to create a 10 foot wide no tree zone on either side of the road way.  There are thousands of trees (tens of thousands?) in this zone and I can’t help but notice the oldest and most beautiful trees as we pass them.  Death sentences for them all in the name of ensuring that everyone in a vehicle—even on low traffic roads like this one that are designated by state law as Rustic—must be able to travel at the maximum speed possible at all times.

This theme of “let’s spend millions of tax dollars so we can all go really f*#$ing fast in our cars” was on extreme display later in the day, too, on Highway S; another peaceful, forested highway on our route.  We were shocked to find that the Highway Department is busy replacing the first several miles of this winding, low traffic road.  And rather than upgrade the existing road, they are instead cutting a massive new road corridor on a straight line for miles through the county forest.  It looks like a new international airport runway for 747’s is being bulldozed through the trees.  Now vacationers can race through what used to be the Northwoods going 75 miles per hour along a 500-foot-wide, level and straight drag strip.  Progress! 

Before we get to the bulldozers on Highway S, however, we still have miles to travel on Highway K.  It’s hot and hilly and today will be our biggest mileage total of the trip at almost 80 miles.  There comes a point on a multi-day ride when your body turns the corner and starts feeling stronger instead of beaten down, but 80 miles is a lot to ask on the fifth consecutive day of riding. 

Hard Things & Middle Fingers

“I can do hard things.  I can do hard things.”  Sarah tells me that she has been repeating this over and over in her head as the hills of Highway K keep coming one after another.  It’s a nice distraction from noticing the trees flowing along the roadside that will soon be sacrificed to the automobile gods. 

And then a different distraction begins—a parade of angry drivers.  It was inevitable after my stupid observation earlier.  One, two, three different vehicles pass us in short order with increasing levels of hostility.  The last truck is driven by a cretin towing a big portable cement mixer.  The road is empty but he swerves right in front of us and puts the pedal of his big diesel engine to the floor to fog us in thick black smoke.  It’s an effective proxy for his middle finger.  I spend the next several minutes thinking of the things I would like to say to him.  If I was sitting next to that guy at a bar he would probably seem normal and friendly.  What is it about wrapping yourself in a steel and glass motorized wheel chair that reduces our humanity?  What makes it so excruciating to have to slow down and delay a few seconds of time for another human?  Why do we chose anger over empathy or kindness so often?  Why can’t we all be more like Patti?    

Just like that, we reach Star Lake and its little country store.  Thanks impatient a-holes; I didn’t even feel the last several miles of hard riding while pondering your psyches. 

Even better, Karl, the proprietor of the Star Lake Store, brings our blood pressure back down with his kindness.  He has just opened for the season and is clearly happy to move some merchandise even if it is just a pair of cold Gatorades.  Karl’s store sits on the official Northern Tier bicycle route we are following that goes from Atlantic to Pacific and he tells us stories of some of the badass bicycling folks that stop in each year.  My favorite:  A grandfather traveling unsupported across the country with his 12-year-old granddaughter on a tandem bike.  Those two can do hard things.  And probably saw their fair share of middle fingers, real and metaphorical, too. 

Unfortunately, Highway K is not done with us just yet.  Another wonderful human driving a pick-up truck comes up behind us at the base of a large hill.  There is no shoulder for us so the driver has a decision; Drive slowly behind us in our lane until the top of the hill and the all clear or take his chances passing on the left side of the road on a blind hill and hope there is no oncoming traffic.  You would be surprised how many drivers decide to pass us in situations like this—gaining literally a few seconds of time in exchange for risking death.  Even if you are a top heart surgeon or lawyer who makes $750/hour, are you willing to pull into the left lane of traffic to save 15 seconds of time?  If so, you just risked your life and the life of anyone about to drive over the top of that hill for a whopping $3.13 of lost billable time. 

This guy, who I’d bet good money is not a heart surgeon, decides to wait and putter along behind us up the hill.  So far so good.  Less than 10 seconds later I reach the top of the hill ahead of Sarah.  There is no oncoming traffic so I turn and give the guy a thumbs up to signal to him that it’s safe to pass.  This all clear usually elicits a return wave and a brief moment of solidarity with a fellow traveler. 

Not today on Highway K.  For some unknown reason—Sarah thinks perhaps the guy needed glasses and thought I was flipping him the middle finger—this guy goes berserk.  It was as if I had just kicked his dog or kissed his wife.  Maybe even spit in his beer.  He immediately floored his truck, swerved into the left lane just below the most dangerous crest of the hill and started screaming obscenities at Sarah and then at me as he passed.  Fury and rage with some hatred mixed in.  Like an idiot, I requested through multiple universal gestures that he stop so we could work out our shared frustrations along the side of the road.  I’m not sure what I would have done had he taken me up on that request.  Next time just smile and wave you idiot, I told myself after the adrenaline rush passed. 

“We need to get off this road now.”  Just a few miles after Sarah states the obvious, we find a short cut that releases us from Highway K’s clutches.  I will never comment again on the lack of angry drivers.  Lesson learned.  Let sleeping dogs lay.  Don’t poke the bear.  You get the picture.    

Memory Dividends & Iron Cages—The End

The last hour of the ride is spent focused almost entirely on pizza.  Or the lack thereof.  Our local pizza joint closes at 7pm.  After some rough calculations I realize that if we don’t pick up our pace we are going to miss that cut off and go hungry.  A terrible fate we avoid by digging deep and talking little for the last several miles. 

“We’ve been riding our bikes for five days and thinking about your pizza for at least the last two,” I tell the waitress at 6:52p.m. as we plop down—or in Sarah’s case sit down gingerly—and place our order.  “Wait, you mean like bicycles?” she replies after a pause as she cocks her head and raises an eyebrow. 

“Yes.  We’ll take a large.”

Driveway to driveway in five days and 333 miles.  It’s an incredible feeling to roll down the cabin driveway to our destination.  A feeling of joy and bone-tired satisfaction.  Of freedom and accomplishment.  Of challenges met and risks overcome.  Why do long distance bicycles trips, which can be uncomfortable and messy, have this effect?  Why do they call to us and keep us coming back again and again?

I will offer two reasons. 

First, I believe we all have an innate human desire to escape what political economist Max Weber called the “Iron Cage” of modern life.  According to this theory, our modern institutions–the corporation in particular—have organized our lives for maximum capitalist productivity, leaving us to feel like mere cogs in a machine, separated from the natural world and deprived of our humanity. 

I may be the luckiest person in the world so it’s a bit much for me to claim that I live behind metaphorical iron bars.  But I do believe a lot of us feel boxed in by life, and seek outlets to channel our animal spirits.  To enter the unknown, take on risk and uncertainty and regain some feeling of freedom in the process.  To break out of the iron cage and be wild.  Some go to Vegas and roll the dice.  Some dance at weddings and concerts.  Some hop on a bicycle and voyage together into the unknown.

I can feel Sarah rolling her eyes as she reads this, thinking “ok enough professor, let’s stop talking about Iron Cages.  I just like to ride my bike.” 

Fair enough. 

I do think Sarah will agree with my second reason as to why bike rides are magic, which was summarized nicely by the butler on the show “Downton Abbey” when he said: 

“The business of life is the acquisitions of memories.  In the end that’s all there is.”

I read a book recently called “Die With Zero” by some Wall Street hedge fund wizard who makes the case that the key to a life well lived is to focus on accumulating experiences rather than material possessions (if you are blessed to live and thrive in the first world, that is).  And not just any experience will do.  In the name of Wall Street optimization, we should seek out experiences that pay a “memory dividend” like money pays interest in the bank. 

Long distance bike rides fall squarely into this category for Sarah and me.  Case in point: I can vividly remember the 28 days we spent biking down the Atlantic coast in 2020, the 8 days across Florida last year, the 5 days of this journey.  These experiences are like bright shining objects reverberating above the background noise of my regular life.  Thinking about them now actually makes me smile.  If that’s not a memory dividend, I don’t know what is.    

I hope to collect and bank more of these experiences with the people I love for as long as I can.  And I am grateful beyond words to have the freedom and resources to do so.  And for a partner that shares the same goal.  And one that can shower in a campground sink (an extra bonus!).            

I wish the same to you.  I hope you find the time and space to get busy in the business of accumulating memories that make your life worthwhile.  

Until next time. Use it or Lose It.