I was awake before 7 but because the bed was warm and the air felt cool, I didn’t get up until about 7:30. Kim was up before 7 and later reported that his bike registered 39o the first time he checked it this morning. But once the sun broke through and then over the trees the temperature was steadily on the rise. Fifty eight degrees felt toasty warm while in camp but it felt slightly chilly when we took off at 10. The temperature was still on the rise, though, and soon enough we had our jackets off.
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Woke up this morning literally faced with the consequences of forgetting to put sunscreen on yesterday. The first clue I had was when I reached up to rub my face while still in bed. Face felt
unusually hot and slightly tender against my hands. I stepped outside the tent and mentioned I may have gotten sunburned yesterday. Kim laughed, said it was picture worthy and was asking if it was to take a picture as he was fetching his phone. I said okay since I only knew what it felt like…I hadn’t seen myself yet. And I agreed…it was picture worthy if only for the laugh.
While it might be akin to
locking the barn door after the horses got out, I dutifully sunscreened today…several
times throughout the day.
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I know the premise behind
this trip was to just enjoy the ride, don’t pressure ourselves to meet any
goals. But realistically we have to have
a daily goal simply so we can get reservations for a campsite somewhere before we
even get on the road for the day.
Winging it in this instance seems only applicable to birds.
Last night around the
campfire we talked about the distance to the Badlands (about 675 miles) and how
to split that up. Decided we could do
another 300+ miles today so we wanted to look for a campground near the
midpoint from Ladysmith to the Badlands.
Since steering clear of the Minneapolis/St. Paul area was also a
priority I told Rapunzel to avoid highways before I let her calculate our route.
It took a bit of doing to
fine tune things but eventually we settled on heading north to St. Cloud, MN,
then angling southwest to pick up a good state road on which to ride into South
Dakota, again wanting to avoid US 90. I started randomly picking cities near the MN/SD
state line in hopes they met the distance criteria and if so, then looked to
see if there were any nearby campgrounds.
Pipestone Family Campground in Pipestone, MN met all our criteria. Called this morning to see if they had any
openings for tonight…no tent spots left but they were willing to put us in an
RV spot. As soon as we knew where we’d
be laying our weary heads for the night, we headed on down the road.
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We spent a good deal of the
day driving past thousands of acres of corn.
Farm equipment businesses were plentiful and well stocked. It seemed that each small town had grain
silos next to train tracks. There had to be some serious tractor time involved
in getting these fields prepared, planted and then harvested. Do humans and livestock really consume that
much corn?
Then we passed a processing
plant with a weird smell emanating from it and I realized a third possibility
for the use of that corn: ethanol. Turns
out Minnesota is
a national leader in ethanol policy and development and currently has 21
ethanol plants and over 11,000 corn farmers who supply it with feedstock. It
ranks No. 5 in the nation in ethanol production.
So maybe none of that corn
was for human or livestock consumption.
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The speed on today’s route
was 60 mph, with the occasion bump up to 65.
Despite leaving an hour earlier and traveling at a faster speed limit
than the bulk of our route yesterday, we still managed to turn an estimated 6
hour trip into 10 hours and pulled into the campground just as it was getting
full on dark. How do we do this?! 😏
Saw a beautiful sunset but was
able to only get glimpses of it as we were still on the road…about 20 minutes
out from the campground. It was a race against darkness at that point.
At our last gas stop (about 40
miles out) I debated about putting my fleece back on in case it got
chilly. I decided not to and sure
enough, when the sun went down the air got chilly. But I wasn’t about to suggest a stop so I
could put a jacket on. Nope, no way, uh
uh…I wasn’t going to be the reason we’d be arriving any later than we already
were because I still had hopes of setting up in some semblance of daylight. So I took one for the team and rode on,
knowing full well that as soon as camp was set up I was heading for a hot
shower.
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We’ve pretty much been eating
Nutty Bars and trail mix in camp because not only did we leave home with an
absolutely empty cooler but we hadn’t stopped to get any kind of groceries
either. Oh, we had good intentions but
those good intentions didn’t put any food on the table, that’s for sure. We stopped to eat lunch both days so it’s not
like we’ve gone hungry…we just haven’t had any food in camp.
But today we stopped and
tonight we feasted…on hot dogs. It was
served rather late and we didn’t have anything to go with the hot dogs except
buns and ketchup but it was a feast all the same. At least it was something besides Nutty Bars
and trail mix.
And I heard rumors there’ll
be pancakes and eggs for breakfast tomorrow. 😋
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Small town of the day: Florence, MN with a population of 39. The area of the town is 70 acres which
equates to .109 square mile. Small
indeed!
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If I define ‘oodles’ as more
than one hundred but less than one million, then today I saw oodles of bikes
out on the road, enjoying the warm sunshine. And not one of those bikers looked tortured
about it. 😎
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Zeus has a couple of ways to
let me listen to music. One is the radio
but getting a station to come in when cruisin’ down the road is always dicey
plus there’s the incessant commercials.
So the radio is a no-go. The
other option is a thumb drive in the USB port.
What could be better? No
commercials and I get to pick the music.
Even though the 400+ songs I
put on the drive are supposed to be played randomly I do hear a number of
repeats. On long rides that can get annoying so today I
wanted to see if I could get another option to work…Bluetooth. Since I can access our Pandora account on my
phone and Zeus has Bluetooth capabilities, it seemed worth a try. Took a couple
of attempts but it worked so first Chris Stapleton and then a 70’s rock station
entertained me for the afternoon. The only negative is that I can’t change the
Pandora selection through the bike; I have to do that through the phone itself
so that means waiting until I’m stopped for more than the cycle of a traffic
light. But that inconvenience isn’t a
deal breaker.
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Today’s miles: 347
Total miles: 788
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