A ride down memory lane.

July 16, 2021

In 2014 Janet and I did a bike tour riding from the head waters of the Mississippi River (Itasca State Park) to Moline, Illinois. We followed the Mississippi River Trail (MRT) on the tour. Today and tomorrow we will be following the MRT and overlap with the 2014 tour. On the 2014 tour , in the same area we are riding today, we experienced the most unusual thing we have seen while touring over the last 40 years. We journaled that tour and we described what we saw over two journal days. If you are interested in finding out what we saw, follow these links to our 2014 journal entries on the CrazyGuyOnTheBike site: St Cloud to Elk River and Elk River to Cottage Grove.

Today we planned a short day. We were going to check out a campground and if it didn’t look good we would get a hotel. Since it was a short day, we started by going to a cafe for a sit down breakfast. We didn’t get done with breakfast until 9 am and then we had to ride 5 miles to get out of town. One part of the ride was on a bike trail and there was a fun run going along the same trail. We slowly pedaled along with the half and full marathon runners/walkers. When we got out of town we followed the MRT along a secondary road that paralleled the interstate for a good part. After 30 miles we arrived at the town of Monticello where the campground was. The campground was an RV park that was in the middle of a mobile home park. It didn’t look very good so we went to a small cafe in town for lunch. We decided to get a hotel in the town of Rogers, which was 17 miles down the road. After lunch we stopped at a Kwik Trip C-store for water. While there we met another west bound bike tourer. The rider started in Boston and was going to Fargo and then decide his next move. We asked him his name and he said it was Rylan. Our youngest son is named Rylan and we thought we made up the name. It was pretty unusual to run into another person with the same name. We wished Rylan safe travels and started down the road for the last segment. We ended up riding 50 miles and a short day turned into an average day.

Tomorrow is a short day (we promised Janet it would be). We have about 28 miles to get to our hotel in downtown Minneapolis. A short day tomorrow and then we are taking a rest day.

First view of the mighty Mississippi in St Cloud.

Interstate construction. We are glad we didn’t have to ride the interstate here.

Neat painting on the wall in Monticello.

Today's ride: 50 miles (80 km)
Total: 2,079 miles (3,346 km)

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