Blowing & Drifting

One of the best drives in the Upper Peninsula takes US41 from the Copper Country around Keweenaw Bay to L’Anse, Michigan. Driving west on that route last Sunday, I stopped in the tiny bayside town of Baraga to take a few shots of the morning sun on the bay. I could not have been more [...]

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I’m just back from my four-day trip to the Upper Peninsula to attend my grandfather’s funeral. I’ll be writing more about the trip – and about the funeral – soon, but for tonight I wanted to just post three pictures of the Copper Country: the view from Houghton, on the southern side of the Portage [...]

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There really are twin ruts in this road, but this is a funny sign anyhow.

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A classic sign at the wonderfully-named “Middle Spunk Lake” rest area on I-94 north of the Cities.

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The Betsy-Tacy road trip was a huge hit.* We spent the better part of four hours touring the beautiful (tiny!) houses, walking the neighborhood, and picnicking in the same park where Betsy, Tacy, and Tib picnicked. The girls were great – curious about the oddities in the houses (a sewing machine! old-fashioned telephones!), patient on [...]

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Julia is totally enamored of the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace, a Minnesota writer who turned her experiences as a young girl in the 1890s and 1900s into a long series of novels published in the 1940s and 1950s. They’re good books, full of very tame mischief and exciting-for-a-kid adventures and just enough period [...]

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Maybe the recent trip to Iowa has activated my travel jones, but I’m dying to get up to the U.P., even though such a trip is pretty much impossible this summer. I particularly want to see the great New Deal-era suspension bridge over the Black River, north of Ironwood at the far western tip of [...]

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I was really, really taken by “Prairie Cairn” sculpture at Grinnell’s natural reserve. It’s a gorgeous piece of art, for one thing, but it’s also perfectly suited to its setting – even though there’s nothing shaped quite like it in the reserve itself. Grinnell’s art gallery has a nice page on the sculpture, and Goldsworthy [...]

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Tonight, I ran out west of town, stopping at this road, just west of Grinnell, Iowa. Gorgeous. I wish this photo did justice to the incredible purple-white sky – and that I’d had my bike, because this road was begging to be ridden.

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I had a sweet gravel ride planned for this afternoon, a 34-mile affair that would’ve probably taken a couple hours in the cool humidity. Alas, eleven minutes into the ride, I suffered a pinch flat, which – since I’m not exactly a wizard with the bike repairs – took a good bit of time to [...]

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I’m so proud of my wife! She had a fantastic time traveling to Chicago to read her essay (the finest one) in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, meeting the book’s editor and three of the other authors, hanging out with an old and dear and generous friend, and generally [...]

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One ride, which I’m calling the Tour de Fagen (map), accounts for a good chunk of my recent cycling mileage. Covering 16 miles, mostly on hilly gravel roads, the ride starts by going straight east of our house – and I mean straight, on a road that’s as plumb as any dreamed by Thomas Jefferson [...]

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Thanks to the great weather and a relatively open schedule, I managed to do two long rides this weekend. (Long for me, that is.) Both were fantastic fun: tiring, sweaty, scenic, occasionally tough, satisfying. The new Surly bike is acquiring a nice layer of grit, but rides wonderfully, especially on gravel roads. On Saturday, I [...]

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For at least a year, this inflatable attention-getter has been moored at a car dealership in Clearwater, Minnesota, a little town along I-94 northwest of the Twin Cities. The thing is bizarre, both in scale (huge) and in purpose. The stern of the ship reads “Titanic,” and here it is at a car dealership. Is [...]

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Since I’m too car-shocked (like shell-shocked, only caused by car travel with children) to blog anything substantial, I’ll follow up last night’s post on Fargo-Moorhead signage atrocities with this photo of the sign at the restaurant where we had a very nice extended-family dinner on Sunday. To answer the sign’s question, what would be good [...]

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