traveling Archives | Page 7 of 9

Sleepers

Prior to this trip to Moorhead, the girls had only stayed in a hotel once, when we were stranded by a colossal snowstorm in Rogers, Minnesota, as we tried to get home after spending Christmas in Moorhead. They were really little then, so it didn’t go well.

This stay went much better. They enjoyed the novelty of having a hotel room* and they really enjoyed the pool. Shannon and I really enjoyed the way the pool made them so tired they were asleep by 6:30 on Saturday night.

* They both had many, many questions about just how this whole hotel thing worked, ranging from whether we had to stay in the same room each day to why we had to leave at all. Worldly, my children are not.

Cloudscapes

I love cloudscapes, but I am usually admiring them from below. During the flight home from Burlington today, I was able to see some amazing cloudscapes from above, somewhere over between BTV and ORD. If I were a pilot, I wouldn’t fly for the huge salaries, the easy hours, the low-stress work environment, or the unanimous thanks of my passengers – I’d fly to look at clouds.

Yep Nope It’s Okay

A picture Vivi made for me while I was out of town. I love the way the three people (left to right: me, Vivi, and Julia – I think) are all saying something: “Yep” and “Nope” and “It’s Okay. Julia must be reaching out to hold Vivi’s hand (the red arrow), while I’m suffering some sort of left-hip dislocation.

Overdistanced

Autumnal Gravel Road
I took Columbus Day off to (try to) do a 100-mile “century” bike ride. A big loop east, north, and west of Northfield got me to that distance goal, and the combination of long stretches of flats and some judicious hammering helped me hit my average-pace goal, too. The keys, I found, were choosing a big-but-not-too-big gear on all the flats and going as fast as possible down every hill. Having picture-perfect weather the whole time was a big help, too.

Physically, the ride was nearly as hard as anything I’ve done in my life, though honestly the 60-mile I did a couple months back felt much harder. On that ride, I was suffering from the halfway point onwards. Perhaps because I rode smarter this time – pacing better, eating and drinking regularly, stopping less frequently and for less time – I didn’t feel that I was on the very edge until very late in the ride.

As usual, the scenery contributed to making the ride great.
Country Colors

Like all my long-distance rides, this outing was mostly on gravel roads across rolling green (or, now, yellow, red, and orange) countryside that’s now the setting for intensive harvesting. I saw scores of combines rumbling through the soybean and corn fields and at least a hundred grain trucks either parked incongruously in the middle of a barren field (waiting for a combine – one, next to a shiny silver-rimmed Escalade: your ag subsidies at work!) or, more frighteningly, roaring along the roads on their way to this or that elevator. Nothing throws up more dust than a corn-laden semi-trailer bombing along at 45 mph on dry gravel.

More stationary sights were plentiful, too: falling-down barns, neglected farmhouses, fields studded with New Deal farm equipment, an engineless van sitting in the middle of a pasture and nearly overgrown with weeds. And while I’ve seen many empty corn cribs, this was the first time I’ve seen full ones. Since from a distance you can’t see the fencing that makes up the walls of them, the cribs appear to be constituted entirely of solid white-yellow corn. Sadly, they are not, because that would be cool. I also saw cows, horses, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys wild and domesticated, geese, ducks, and pheasants. I didn’t see any deer, but I did see both elk and bison – albeit behind fences. Bison can throw off quite a glare, though I’d eagerly agree to ride past twenty miles of angry buffalo than to ride another mile behind a grain truck.

So while I expected both the physical arduousness and the visual scenery, I didn’t expect to struggle so much with the psychology of the ride. From about the halfway point, I solved and resolved the mind-over-matter problem in various ways. The least interesting was simply watching the miles tick by on my cyclocomputer. I tired of that early in the ride. The most ubiquitous brain game was counting – pedal strokes, breaths, chain squeaks, whatever – with second place occupied by trying to calculate kilometers from miles. On climbs, I muttered Jens Voigt‘s mantra, “Harden the fuck up,” in time to my pedaling. “Harden… the… fuck… up… Harden… the… fuck… up…” Silly, but effective.

A lot of the time, I simply thought fuzzily about various songs. I bet I spent 10 miles trying to recall the lyrics to a particular song that may or may have been sung by Moby. I never did figure that one out, though I did sing Raffi’s “Baby Beluga” many times, and pieces of “La Marseillaise.” The chorus – “Aux armes, mes citoyens…” – is great for cycling: bloodthirsty, rhythmic, French.

By the last third of the ride, though, the mind and the body had turned in unison toward a long, close examination of just what the hell was hurting now: a gimpy right knee, cramps up and down both calves, an achy neck, and a dust-induced hack that did no favors for the respiratory process (and could not be cured with any amount of water). Studying all these failings, and assessing their progress toward being unable to pedal another goddamn stroke, occupied at least the last 15 miles of the ride. I can’t say those miles were fun, but in their own way they kinda were.

Sometimes “Fun” Hurts Pretty F*cking Bad

Throughout my ride on Friday – the longest ride I’ve ever undertaken, in terms of both distance and time – I thought of the slogan on a sticker sold by XXC Mag, a great publication on long-distance off-road cycling: “Sometimes ‘fun’ hurts pretty f*cking bad.”

I wasn’t going fast enough to be in agony, at least not the same sort of pain created by racing, but roughly the one-third mark to the end, I was in considerable, increasing discomfort that verged often on pain: my back was sore, my neck was stiff, my shoulders and upper arms were cramping, and of course my legs – from hips to, oddly, ankles – were beyond salvation. And oh god my knees. And I know I hallucinated a few times – imagining that I could see roadsigns that were actually too far away to be legible. About the only non-suffery times were my several rest breaks. Sitting on your ass in the dirt never felt so good:

It’s strange, though, to be in that state and still be happy, to still be having fun. I was out on nice gravel roads, seeing parts of the Southern Minnesota countryside that I haven’t seen before, and above all trying hard to get through the various obstacles literally in my path: to smoothly ride a horrible stretch of washboarded road, to maintain some speed on freshly-graded gravel that was deeper than my wheels’ rims, to not put a foot down on a long slippery uphill, to not tap the brakes on a long bumpy downhill (39.9 mph!).

I wound up riding 90 miles in 6:05 of saddle time. I had actually aimed to ride 10 miles further, to complete my first “century” ride, but that distance was just too much to do, especially because the longest I’d gone up to this ride was 62 miles (a “metric century” of 100 kilometers). All the mileage meant I got to see some good stuff, from the mature cornfields along the Cannon River

and the vaguely reptilian apparatus used to irrigate the corn and beans

and the pleasing linearity of partly-harvested corn

to picturesquely abandoned farm infrastructure like this crownless silo

or this overgrown corn crib

and this caboose used apparently as an outbuilding or even a house at some farm west of Kenyon.

I hope I can find the time in the next six weeks – before it gets too cold – to do that century ride, to have some more f*cking painful fun, and to see more of the sights…

Land of 10,000,000,000 Logs

If mining made the Upper Peninsula great in the period up to about World War II, it’s logging that – along with, arguably, tourism – that is keeping the place viable. My late grandfather spent his whole life handling logs, either skidding them out of the woods with horses or driving log trucks from the forests to the mills, a job that his youngest son now carries on. My dad, too, trucked paper out of the U.P. mills for a while.

Nowhere is logging more evident in the U.P. than around my grandparents’ tiny town, Channing. The highways pass huge piles of logs, the main business is log hauling, most of the woods are second-growth or even “industrial forests,” the railroad tracks carry skeletal wood-hauling cars, and a short drive will take you to several hulking mills like this one, a facility in Sagola operated by Louisiana-Pacific to turn wood into “oriented strand board,” better known as chipboard.

The overhead view on Google Maps shows that the Sagola mill is a massive factory – probably one of the biggest buildings in the U.P. – and one that needs to be fed with innumerable feed of lumber:

That’s money, as my grandpa used to say.

Houses Past and Way Past

While up in Hancock earlier this week, I passed by the house where I lived from 1988-1991, at the corner of two steep uphill streets.

It is, I think, a nice little house – though the current owners could be taking better care of it. Apart from the view to the south (a view I cannot remember ever admiring, even though it’s pretty good), the area around the house has been dramatically transformed since I last saw it. The scrubby woods on three sides of the house are now mostly gone, having been replaced by many new houses and office buildings, new high and elementary schools, churches, and a hospital. This isn’t the first time the area has been transformed, though. Here’s what the neighborhood looked like in 1911:

The towering structure behind the house is a mine hoist, working one of the many copper lodes that made Hancock (temporarily) prosperous and populous. Between the cows in the foreground and the house in the middle ground is a trolley car, running up Ingot Street to mine locations further east. None of that is there any more, of course – except as ruins: heavy concrete foundations hiding in the woods, a few scary-looking openings in the earth, that kind of thing.

Keweenaw Bay, Near and Far

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 lucky with the weather. It was spectacular. The water was the definition of “limpid.”

Hancock

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 Lake ship canal. The Copper Country is a gorgeous place, and only rarely more gorgeous than it was on Sunday afternoon. It had been seven or eight years since I’d visited – far too long. I hope I can go back (with the family!) next summer.

All of these photos were taken from the patio of the Keweenaw Brewing Company, an excellent microbrewery in Houghton – which is roughly ten thousand times cooler now than it was in 1990.

The view to the northeast, of the picturesquely abandoned Quincy copper-smelting works in Ripley, MI.

The view straight north, of Quincy Hill, outside Hancock.

The view to the west-northwest, of the Portage Lake Lift Bridge – one of the most beautiful bridges in the world.

Strange Roadsign

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

Poncho-Wearing Poodle-Walkers Only

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

Betsy-Tacy Spectacular

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 the tour (even answering some of the guide’s questions), and eager to see everything we could – and to pick up a Betsy-Tacy coloring book for each of them.

A few shots from the day are below; I especially like the picture of the girls at a stove like the one that B, T, and T used to make “Everything Pudding.”

* I must note that I’m especially happy the outing was such a success since it was my idea. I had no idea if any of the other members of the family would think it was a good idea, much less enjoy the trip, so I’m pleased that they all did.

Betsy-Tacy Road Trip!

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 detail to get a smart kid thinking. I mean, she knows what shirtwaists are, and who ruled Spain in 1900, and why one of the character’s brothers died as a baby.

Julia has three of the novels, and she’s read each of them at least a dozen times. If she’s awake and in the house, she’s probably reading one of them or being dragged away from one of them or scheming to get back to one of them. It’s not too much to say that she has them memorized: if by intention or omission I skip a word while reading one of the books aloud, Julia instantly corrects me. Half the time, Vivi does, too.

All this is more than great of course, but for present purposes, the best thing about the Betsy-Tacy books is that they’re set in a fictionalized version of Mankato, Minnesota, which is an hour away from us. And as luck would have it, the Betsy-Tacy Society there owns and maintains the houses in which Maud Hart Lovelace (“Betsy”) and her best friend Frances ‘Bick’ Kenney (“Tacy”) grew up.

I dunno about you, but this means a road trip, and this weekend we’re taking a day trip to “Deep Valley” to see the houses and walk around the neighborhood and have lunch in the park where Betsy, Tacy, and Tib (who joined the two of them later on) picnicked and sit on the bench on which they sat and looked down at their little river town. Who knows – we might even pick up a copy or two of the official Betsy-Tacy coloring book.

Black River Harbor

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 the Yoop.

If I’m recalling things correctly, the bridge connects a small campground to a beach along Lake Superior – one of the few sand beaches on the lake. I distinctly remember the thrill of walking over this bridge: the gaps between the planks, the shudder as everyone stepped on it, the view of the water below…

“Bridge At Black River Harbor,” by Siskokid via Flickr

Andy Goldsworthy, “Prairie Cairn”

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 has a big write-up in Wikipedia. A couple more of my pictures of the cairn: