Across Old Man River

Today was another fairly long ride, but included a real milestone, crossing the Mississippi River. We left the Rochester area, from where you can see this water tower shaped like a giant ear of corn.


The early part of the ride was rather misty, due to the copius amounts of rainfall that still puddled in most places. The ominous skies of yesterday were soon forgotton (not really, but is sounds better) in the beauty of the new day. Here are scenes from along the ride.


At one point, we were able to take a very nice bike trail that avoided some of the traffic, and kept us in the cool glades along a river. THis was another rails to trails project. The storms had inflicted a lot of damage to trees along the trail, but kudos to the crews who were clearing the fallen trees evevn as we rode by.



This part of the country has a wealth of older churches, with distinctive architecture.

I had a snack in the town of Rushford, where I was told that there would be great pies at local diners. Again, a bum steer. No pie exists in Rushford. Rushfordites, however, extolled the pies of the town we had just come from, Peterson. I would have ridden back to Peterson, except there was the matter of having coasted downhill 2 miles into Rushford, and I didn't relish the thought of climbing back out.

Rushford was not a total waste. I found a hardware store where I was able to bodge together some parts to make a camera mount to replace some pieces that had come off during the terrible storms of the day before. Once installed, I had a perfectly good mount, and my replacement camera went back on the bike, and has been working well since. I wish I could say the same for the camera I had bought back in Twin Falls. It has been my snapshot workhorse, but didn't survive the storms. When I went to turn it on to record yesterday's sunset, the lens just opened, shut, and did this two more times. It never went into picture taking mode. I will try to dry it out some more.
After the bike trail, we headed up the big climb for the day.


Our reward for the hill-climb was coasting down for 3 miles, crossing the Mississippi, and entering Wisconsin.

The motel in La Crosse is one of the best on the tour, and our room is big enough for all three bikes and probably one of the SAG vans. The atrium of the motel has an indoor water park. It will probably be noisy tonight. I think there is also a wedding party or something going on.