Author: carlschaumann

Doug, my Warmshowers host in Duluth was not done treating me like royalty. He made a delicious breakfast including homemade granola and yogurt. I really enjoyed talking with Doug and hearing about his time teaching in Morocco and bike touring from Barcelona, Spain to Odense, Denmark. Thank you Doug.

I rode to the Richard I. Bong Memorial Bridge and crossed over into Wisconsin. I either missed the welcome to Wisconsin sign or there wasn’t one when you cross on the bike path. I’m not complaining, having a separate bike lane to cross a bridge that long was amazing! And I got my welcome to Wisconsin sign photo three days later when I noticed I could take it on the Wisconsin/Michigan border.

I got into some pretty hilly terrain before long and I noticed that when I shifted down to my lowest gear, it wouldn’t stay there. It would shift up out of my lowest gear, kill my momentum and I would have to walk the hill. Very frustrating. I was able to make it to my Warmshowers hosts house and was welcomed by Sarah and Jeff. They have a wonderful home on Lake Superior with a beautiful guest quarters they let me stay in. Sarah works as a travel guide in Italy for the Rick Steves Travel Company and Jeff is recently retired. I enjoyed hearing about how they met on a bike tour in Ethiopia and of their other adventures.

I’m sure there was an air quality alert but I didn’t check. I needed to cover some miles and a little Canadian Wildfire smoke wasn’t going to stop me.

I did lament that I sent home my N95 mask in that package yesterday. I wore a bandana bandido style instead.

I was riding some real country roads, some of them gravel, and I was very excited when I saw that there was a coffee shop in a tiny community called Medowlands. Google maps said it was open, but I was trying not to get my hopes up. It was open when I got there! And they had delicious baked goods and coffee in exchange for a donation. Victory community partnership is a nonprofit that hopes to make this coffee shop a community center for the town. They definitely had some great energy going on. 

I did a pretty good job keeping myself on the bike moving down the road all day. When I rolled into Duluth down the big escarpment I had music playing and was in the zone so I pushed the envelope on safe speed down that hill. I glanced down once and saw 42 mph, probably not advisable on a fully loaded touring bicycle.

I arrived at my Warmshowers host’s house and was welcomed by Doug. He treated me with such wonderful kindness. He made a wonderful salad and homemade pizza for dinner and set me up with a shower and laundry. Then we took his camper van for a tour of Duluth. Doug was a teacher, has a degree in geology, keeps a beautiful garden and has a great love of Duluth that he likes to impart onto others.

I ended not getting out of Grand Rapids till the afternoon. The post office didn’t open till 8:00 and then it took me a while to decide what I should send home and pack it up. By then it was close enough to lunch I decided to pick some up in town before I left and to stop by the grocery store.

Then I only made it out of town a few miles on the Messabi rail trail when a thunderstorm hit. I sat out the worst of it in a fortuitously placed log shelter along the trail.

The Mesabi trail is named for the 110 mile long Mesabi mountain range. It is the largest of three mountain ranges in Northern Minnesota known as the iron ranges. The puddles along the trail were the most rust red I had ever seen.

I was reconciled to the fact that it was going to be a short day and decided to set up camp in the town campground in Nashwauk, MN. The mosquitos were insane! I doused myself in deet and it seemed to deter them for about 5 minutes. I was able to set up the tent and quickly eat a cold dinner before fleeing to my tent. Somehow even though I was being careful getting in the tent, at least 30 mosquitos had made it in with me. I had to hunt them down before going to sleep.

I was camping on a cross country ski trail in a Minnesota State Forest just outside of Bemidji. It worked well, no one seemed to know I was there.

In Cass Lake, MN while looking at my phone in a gas station parking lot, trying to figure out where I could pick up some water and food, Dan rode up on his classic Schwinn. He asked where I was headed and from whence I came. Dan told me he had been involved in getting the bike paths established that I had been riding through town. He had also taken a bike tour to Lake Superior and back recently and was finishing up a graduate degree at Leech Lake Tribal College in Biology and Forestry. He was also teaching and had worked in a bike shop and a bike co-op. It was great to hear about all the good things he was doing. It makes me hopeful for the future to meet young folks like Dan.

I had a Warmshowers host that was able to host me in Grand Rapids, MN. I also had a resupply package that my wonderful wife Beth had sent general delivery that I had to pick up. I pushed myself to get to the Grand Rapids post office in time to pick it up before they closed. That would allow me to repack my bags overnight and send some things back that I no longer needed in the morning. The only hitch was the package hadn’t arrived at the post office! It was estimated it was going to arrive three days ago but the post master said it was in Duluth and would be there in the morning first thing.

I headed to the YMCA for a shower before I showed up at my Warmshowers host’s house.

My hosts were Emily and James, they have 3 kids. It was really nice to be welcomed into their home and experience a little of their joyful, creative, loving and very active life. They are providing a wonderful childhood for their children.

In the morning, I went back to the post office to pick up my package only to find out it wasn’t there! The package mainly had food that I had bought, baked and dehydrated back home before my trip to save some money and have in appropriate amounts. But it did have my summer weight, down sleeping bag that was going to replace my cold weather, synthetic sleeping bag that was taking up way too much room in my bags. I made the rash decision to send home my cold weather sleeping bag anyway and I convinced myself that I would be warm enough wearing my cold weather clothes inside my sleeping bag liner that is like a zippered sheet.

Stay tuned in to see how that works out.

The sunrise over Little Elbow Lake was gorgeous.

I rode past a bird on the road and it did not fly away. I circled back to try to help him. Pretty sure he had a run in with a car. When I picked him up he chirped, I set him by the edge of the road, gave him some water and built a little shade out of the cut grass on the side of the road. After a minute he flew away. Hope he made it.

Itaska State Park was a joy to ride through, there was a separated bike path through the woods that eventually led to the outlet of Lake Itaska which is the headquarters of the Mississippi River.

Riding into Bemidji, MI, there was a lot of storm damage. They had a storm back in June that had strait line winds over 100 miles an hour and was estimated to be as powerful as a category 3 Hurricane. Now I understood why the three Warmshowers hosts in Bemidji were not hosting. I went to the Sheriff’s office to ask what my options might be for camping in town. At first they wanted me to fill out an intake form for a shelter. When I said that wasn’t what I was looking for, they had a deputy come out to talk with me. She seemed to understand what I was looking for. She said I couldn’t just camp in town. I asked if I could camp on some State Forest land nearby and she said she thought that could work. So that’s where I pitched my tent.

The mosquitos weren’t as bad in the morning but they were in sufficient numbers to get me packed up and on the road early. And that was a good thing for I needed to cover some miles today to make up for my low mileage yesterday.

I didn’t have a planned campsite for the night and ended up a good bit off my route going to a tribal campground on the White Earth Indian Reservation. I got routed onto 6 miles of a sandy dirt road to the campground. I should have looked closer at the route because there was a way I could have gone most of the way on pavement. It would have made it a more than 100 mile day but I wouldn’t have been devoured by deer flies for as long at the end of a long day. (See below)

Little Elbow Lake Tribal Campground was brilliant once I got there. There were loons calling to each other on the lake and it was a beautiful spot. Thank you to the White Earth Tribal Land Office for letting me camp there for free.

I struck camp and ate breakfast pretty quickly. Then I headed to an unoccupied campsite with an electric outlet where I had plugged in my power bank battery last night to vampire electrons all night. Then I headed to the campground bathrooms before I hit the road. When I down shifted before stopping, my rear derailleur shifted right into the spokes of the rear wheel, broke and wedged itself between the spokes and frame of the bike. Not the “Good Morning “ I was hoping for this morning. This was bad.

I decided I needed to remove the trashed derailleur and chain so I could at least roll the bike to a bike shop. The closest and only shop was 4 miles away and didn’t open till 10:00 am. So I decided that my best course of action would be to roll my bike to a coffee shop to wait.

After ordering coffee and a pastry and finding an outlet to plug in my phone, I called the bike shop and left a message. Then I messaged the two Warmshowers hosts in town to see if they knew of any other alternatives to the bike shop. I got a message back from Dave saying he worked at the bike shop and could come pick me up in the shop van, saving me the 4 mile walk. A half hour later he was there and we loaded my bike in the van. At the shop, I unloaded all my bags off the bike so it could be put in the repair stand and they let me stow them in a corner of the shop. I think Dave may have jumped my bike up the work list of bike repairs and the next thing I knew he was working on it! It definitely needed a new 9 speed derailleur and lucky for me they had one in stock. Dave also tightened the spokes on the back wheel, trued it and straightened the derailleur hanger. He was having trouble getting the indexing of the shifters to work with the new derailleur and needed to start working on other bikes. I told him I understood. He said he would work on it when he had time in the schedule later in the day. I went for a walk about to find some food.

Around 3:15, Dave sent me a text saying my bike was ready. He had decided that the indexing in the derailleur and the shifter were not compatible so he switched my shifter to work as a friction shifter, a little more work for the rider to shift correctly but it should solve the problem and get me down the road. Dave at The Ski and Bike shop in Grand Forks, SD saved the day for me. Thanks!

Dave offered to take me out for dinner after he got off work but I wanted to get down the road so I thanked him but declined. I rode the 4 miles back to the campground and by then it was apparent we were going to have some weather blow in. After looking at my weather app, I decided it would be prudent to wait to get on the road and that the public library was the place to do that. While waiting Dave the mechanic messaged me and let me know I shouldn’t get on the road because of the weather (tornado watch) and if I hadn’t eaten, we could still go get some food together. So that is what we did. It was nice be able to visit some more with Dave, he has done some epic bicycle touring, has a kind soul and has led an interesting life. Hope you can pull off that Icelandic bike tour in the near future Dave!

I finally got on my bike and rode out of town at 8:30 at night. By 10:00 I had covered 12 miles and it was very near dark. A roadside rest presented itself and I decided it would have to do. The mosquitos were epic! I imagined that if they all decided to try to fly without taking their Proboscises out of me, I would levitate.

I packed up camp, ate breakfast, thanked my hosts in the Golden Cemetery and hit the road. It was a short way into Park River, ND. It had a wonderful bike path through town. On the far edge of town I stopped at a Cenex Gas Station/convenience store. I was hoping to get my water bottles filled and I have had luck filling my insulated water bottle with enough ice that I can keep filling it with water from my other bottles and have cold water all day. I usually buy some salty snack to eat on the bike and to have some standing to ask for ice and water. So this time I picked out a bag of corn nuts and went to the counter. I chatted with the two women behind the counter, bought the corn nuts and got the go ahead to fill my bottles. By the time I was done filling my water bottles, their boss (Gordon) had shown up. He heard about my tour and wanted to ask me some questions. I had a wonderful time talking with him. I thought I recognized his accent and asked him if he was from South Africa. He was and we had a little time to talk a bit about South Africa. Before I left the store I was handed a bag with three donuts in it gratis. They were amazingly kind folks.

The reroute yesterday to beat the wind had me on some gravel roads for a few miles. This one gravel road didn’t have any power lines along it and when it crossed another one with no power lines all there was to see, in all directions were gravel roads, fields and trees in the distance. It reminded me of the legend about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil to be a master blues guitarist. I wondered what the devil would offer me if he showed up…. An E-bike?

I came through a small community with this tiny post office. I have tried to figure out what the name of the place was but the picture doesn’t give a clue and I looked on google maps but had no luck.

I eventually made it to Grand Forks, ND crossed the Red River and into Minnesota.

I went out for pizza and a beer. While I was coming back to the campground I spied a bike repair station along the greenway and decided it was a good time to clean and lube the drive train of my bike. I should have been more careful while doing this because my bike fell off the bike stand. More on this in tomorrow’s post.

I got a pretty early start out of Rock Lake but the wind continued to plague me. It wasn’t a direct headwind, it was mostly out of the North, but it was fairly strong. I was planning on making 77 miles and getting to Cavalier, ND. But by the time I made it the 42 miles to Langdon I had decided I did not want to continue fighting the wind another 35 miles. I had the epiphany that my route had me starting to go Southward tomorrow in Minnesota and I could decide to go south today, right now! I planned and downloaded a new route in Langdon, SD where I had a good cellular signal and set sail South. It was glorious to be riding the wind now and instead of only going another 35 miles, I was able to go 48 more. The only problem was my camping plans needed to change.

Wind power is big in North Dakota.

My new route had me riding past a huge field of windmills and a Cold War site that was supposed to shoot down Russian nuclear missiles with our own nuclear missiles. Glad we didn’t have to find out if that works. More info:

https://www.coldwartourist.com/stanley-r-mickelsen-safeguard-complex

Eventually I selected the Golden Cemetery as my final resting place for the night and no one disturbed me all night.

I am realizing I didn’t take many pictures in North Dakota while I was riding through. I don’t think it was because there were less worthy things to take pictures of, it was beautiful, I think it was because of the attention the head wind demanded. This day I was fighting it again and I barely covered 60 miles. I did get out of Bottineau at a leisurely hour but I I also spent too much time and energy on the road.

Right outside of Bottineau I saw a sign on the side of the road that said “Quick Sand” and thought it was a joke. A few hours later I googled it and sure enough there was quick sand there! Wish I had stopped to check it out but I’m not quite sure what I would have done to check it out.

My host from last night mentioned that the town of Rock Lake was nice and allowed cycle tourists to camp in there town park. So when I saw that it was probably as far as I wanted to ride today, I set my sights on it. Coming into the town there were a lot of wetlands that reminded me of the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay where I live.

The park had a picnic shelter and water which was enough for me.