The Farmer in the Dell, the Farmer in the Dell

Okay, so I repeated the title twice, just like in the song. That's because I had to combine yesterday's post and today's, since there was no WiFi yesterday.

Thursday, July 23

I expected broad expanses of dairy farms clear across Wisconsin. But after a 90-mile ride at 16 mph, I only saw about a dozen cows, a million ears of corn standing seven or eight feet high by now, and hundreds of rolling hills along the highway. Every hill climbed, leveled out for awhile, then climbed again. My map profile says that we only climbed 1500 feet, but the hills seemed to be much steeper than that. Maybe my legs are getting tired! Understandable, since we’ve traveled 2122 miles since June 18, so that’s in just 35 days. If I can get some good recovery days, or a good wind at my back, maybe I’ll actually arrive in NYC on August 15 in one piece, relatively speaking.

Our route today took us from Bloomer to Merrill, heading due east across Wisconsin. Then we head south-ish until we hit Lake Michigan in Manitowoc, not too far south of Green Bay, three days from now. For tonight, we are camping in the front yard of Warmshowers hosts Roger and Annie Wolf, several miles out in the country near Merrill. They also provided a delicious spaghetti dinner, and Pat got a grand tour of the garden. Then tomorrow morning, we will go into town for a leisurely breakfast, then we will have a short ride tomorrow, and hopefully enough of a WiFi that I can post this blog along with tomorrow’s.

Speaking of going into town … we spent last night near Chippewa Falls, several miles south of Bloomer. To get there, we had to add 11 miles to our schedule, and this morning we would have had to retrace that same extra 11 miles. So instead, we loaded everything onto the support vehicle … Jonathan’s bike on top, the other three on the rack, and everyone squeezed into the car for the 11 mile journey into Bloomer. Then we unloaded the bikes and set off from there, up and down the rolling hills for the entire 90 miles. We stopped for lunch in a town that happened to have a community swimming pool, so Ryan and Bryce cooled off in the pool for about half an hour before deciding that there were way too many screaming kids. So they changed back into their cycling gear, and we completed the last two hours of our ride. The boys were going to polish off their ride with a trip into Bloomer, but then discovered a Monopoly board, plus an X-box. So one guess what they are doing! X-box, instead of even setting up their tents.

What else can they do? No WiFi, and poor cell phone reception.

I’ll add to this blog tomorrow before posting it, since we have a short day, supposedly a good WiFi / electricity / showers situation, and did I mention, a short day? Funny, to most people, 38 miles would seem like a gargantuan task, but we’ve just done two days in a row of nearly 90 miles. It doesn’t seem like we’ve been riding at all unless we at least do a metric century (around 62 miles).

Friday, July 24

After a long ride yesterday, uphill, downhill, up again and down, and what seemed like mostly uphill, today we had it easy. Only three or four long uphill stretches, and we didn’t have to worry about the downhills because there weren’t many. We were saving them all for tomorrow, when we have a friendly downhill route profile. Today’s route was only 40 miles long, which somewhat made up for the long climbs and some head wind. We are getting near enough that we are getting weather effects from the Great Lakes, as well as beginning to run into more and more Greenbay Packers fans. 

Tonight, however, the Antigo Red Robins are hosting a baseball tournament. We are camped in a city park right next to the baseball field, and we were told that there is nowhere else available in town, so we anticipate a noisy evening, and what looks to be a rather inadequate campsite. There is no electricity (electricity was promised), there is no picnic table (a picnic table was expected as a bit of a routine amenity), and there is no nearby parking because the City of Anitgo does not allow cars to park near tents because of safety and liability issues, presumably. There are hot showers, however, and there is WiFi. So we’re half way to civilization! We can probably buy some quiet time by having dinner out, and we can grab breakfast on the road, sufficient to propel us on our way to 82 miles of downhill road, and maybe (hope hope) a tailwind.

Kept seeing road signs today that read “Dead End.” They didn’t need to remind me. My bicycle seat was giving me a very similar message every time I went over a bump.