The Gandy Dancer Trail
Is it breakfast time yet? That’s how all of my days seem to start. A twenty kilometer ride to breakfast. Today’s was over county roads first, and then onto the Gandy Dancer Bike Trail for a few miles. The Main Street Cafe in Siren was one of those marked as worth driving 100 miles out of your way for, and it was a cute little place. I got my own half booth looking out the window, which was nice. The food was good, but I just got the eggs, ham, hashbrowns, toast, so it’s hard to mess that up or shine too much. And then I had a slice of the lemon meringue pie that the author had enthused about. Meh. The crust was so pasty and raw I ended up leaving it. The lemon and the meringue were ok, but certainly it wasn’t the best pie ever. I did buy a cookie for a future snack.
And then it was all trail all the time. Trails are a mixed blessing to a bike tourist. They make the navigation very easy for large chunks of time. They are usually railroad beds, so there are no steep hills. However, in Wisconsn, they are usually a fine limestone gravel which, when you are pulling a heavy trailer with two wheels means there is enough drag that you can’t really ever coast. I happen to like coasting. Especially when my rear end is tender from too much biking too many days in a row. And the result of taking away the short steep hills is very long gradual climbs. So it’s great exercise, with that constant spinning. But it’s tiring.
Oh yeah, and it was raining. The day dawned in a pea soup fog. Oatmeal, maybe. I left my wet fly on the outside of my trailer, but I also left my tent on the outside, hoping it would dry out a little as the fog cleared. Except the fog turned to rain. And I didn’t put my tent in the trailer at the point when that happened, so I ended up having to leave my tent out as it got wetter and wetter. Ick. My last night on the road, and it was going to be in a wet tent.
But the rain pulled out some great scents. Or maybe someone sprays the trail with organic bug spray, because there were a few points where I could smell the strong scent of citronella. And occasionally vanilla, once a kind of honeysuckle, though I thought it was too late in the season, many fresh green scents, and then that one space of dead dead dead animal. Ick.
It was a long slow slog up to St Croix Falls, which surprised me, since it’s on a river, I thought I’d be progressing down. Only once I got to the town itself and plunged down the city streets to the main drag. I found an overlook, and the library, and ducked into the library for some wireless just as the rain kicked in for real. I sat trying to decide if I wanted to push on three miles to the close campground, or fifteen miles to the far campground. It was only 2:30pm, so it seemed as though I should push on, but it was raining, and I didn’t know where I would eat breakfast the next day if I stayed in the further on campground, so Interstate State Park in Wisconsin won the day.
I figured out how to bike to it without retracing my path all the way up to the bike path. I was offered a choice of north or south campgrounds, the north has showers, grass pads, but is less remote. The south has pit toilets, gravel pads, and is more remote. I took the north space because gravel pads are horrible. Unfortunately, by less remote, they meant “Next to the bridge across the river where all the trucks will be engine braking.” Eeew. Oh well. The good news was that my tent wasn’t very wet at all, despite being in a soaking bag. And the weather cleared as I set it up, so it dried while I showered, ate, and went for a mini hike to overlook the river.
The other amusing bit about the north campground being “less remote” was that it was actually just on the other side of some trees from the downtown main street. They were thick trees, but I could have saved myself the mile bike ride out to the country and back down. Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to pay for my campsite, so there might have been repercussions.