Paul Bunyan

We were in Paul Bunyan territory today. In particular, we were riding on the Paul Bunyan trail. Evidence of big Paul and Babe was all around us.

Many lakes have been left in places where Babe stepped and left deep footprints.

The sky was overcast all day. However, every once in a while you could see places where some if the blue rubbed off where Babe stepped over hills and his back rubbed against the clouds.

There were also a few statues around to commemorate Paul and his family.

Normally Paul used an axe, but if you look closely you can tell that every once in a while he used an electric router.

Since we are on a tour of the rust belt, we thought it appropriate to briefly divert from the trail to check out a junk yard. Actually, we are now on the southwestern fringe of the Minnesota iron range, source of a lot of that rust.

We met a cyclist named Chris who has been doing big cycle tours for 37 years, both in the US and around the world. He had a lot of interesting stories to share.

We met another cyclist who was not quite as experienced, but we took his picture anyhow because he was so cute.

Cutest cyclist on the Paul Bunyon trail (not counting Jeanna and Viktoriya).

We are now at a similar latitude to Viktoriya's birthplace in Europe. She is excited to see familiar plants like birch trees. We are all enjoying the Minnesota wild flowers. For some reason the colors seem more vibrant than flowers further south.

We had to check to make sure it wasn't just an aspen pretending to be a birch.

We saw some dragonflies that had an unusual black and white coloring. We've never seen them before, but anything that eats mosquitoes is a friend of ours.

A note on team A's rear wheel: Despite the best efforts of mechanics at 3 different bike shops to get the spokes on our wheel set up correctly, we had nothing but trouble with loose spokes. Spokes kept breaking and the wheel was going out of true. Despite a lack of tools, Kerry actually did the best job of getting them reasonably tensioned so that we could keep riding.

We finally decided our best course of action was to get a complete new wheel shipped to us. We should have done this in the first place instead of getting just a rim shipped to us.

We contacted Velocity and had them build a 40 spoke wheel with a Chucker rim. It certainly looks sturdy. They shipped it to a bike shop in Baxter and we put it on the bike yesterday. We shipped the earlier attempt at a wheel back home.

If this new wheel does not work out, I'm planning to write a limrick about the wheel using the word Chucker.

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