80 miles

It’s morning as I write this—I woke up at 4:00 am, fully on the ground. My sleeping pad has had a slow leak for some time now. It was getting progressively worse yesterday, and driving me a little crazy. In the quiet of the morning, I donned my headlamp, over-inflated it, and found the leak, finally. I patched it. Hopefully there’s not more than one.

Now it’s almost 6:00 am, and I would like to have made some coffee, but it’s in Danielle’s tent, and she is still asleep, which after yesterday’s difficulties, I have no intention of disturbing. I think my task today will be remembering to enjoy what is.

Fortunately, with fresh legs from our day off, today we hit the magical section of Minnesota that is all rail trails. Our ride started on about 20 miles of highway, but it was quiet and cloudy and smooth. 

We stopped in Rothsay to eat a second breakfast—they had great pie, and we met two cyclists there, heading west, so chatting with them was a nice chance to look into our future. They started their ride in Boston—Ravi is a doctor and Noah is moving to the west coast to study neuroscience. They were very nice. They told us we were headed into “paradise”, and they were not wrong. The smoothly paved, nicely canopied bike trails were so encouraging, and our morale hit an all-time high. We were chatting and enjoying ourselves. I found some raspberry bushes and ate a handful. We did about 80 miles in all, one of our longest days. I felt like I could have kept riding forever.