dreamshark, posts by tag: biketrip - LiveJournal

The last stop of our great Iowa Road Trip was actually in Minnesota. We stopped in Owatonna for dinner and what turned out to be a lovely evening. I found the sushi restaurant (Mizuki Fusion) on Yelp, where the reviews tended towards "surprisingly good sushi for rural Minnesota." Let's just dispense with the obligatory big-city condescension and say that the sushi was every bit as good as city sushi. The fried wonton appetizer was the 2nd best fried tofu I've had (and it's really hard to beat Peninsula for that).

After dinner we strolled across the street to the Historic Central Park Bandstand for a free outdoor concert. While we listened, I wandered around taking pictures of the Historic Fountain (restored in 1977) and the Historic Baby Alligator Water Fountains (1904). Owatonna is proud of its history, and there are plaques everywhere.


Then, it being Golden Hour and all, I started in on the obviously old, handsome, and well-preserved downtown buildings (which probably had plaques too, but I didn't walk over to see). The most striking one turned out to be an architectural landmark even to people who are not from Owatonna. Can you identify the Louis Sullivan "jewel box"?

Finally we get to the centerpiece of this trip - the High Trestle Trail. This is one of Iowa's newer Rails to Trails efforts, and it's a beauty! The trail itself is fairly long, but we just rode the segment between Woodward and Madrid where the High Trestle is (round trip 13 miles). The Woodward trailhead is great - parking, green space, flush toilets and picnic tables. It's less than 3 miles to the main attraction - The Trestle.

The bridge is just beautiful, decorated with concrete pillars with shiny stuff embedded in them and these crazy self-rusting decorative... arches?  Not sure what to call them. But the best thing about the bridge is the silence. I've been on bridges that high before, but not without the roar of traffic. This is just bikes and peds.
 

And when we finally get to Madrid (rhymes with "bad kid"), we find the best amenity of all - a trailside bar. With Blue Moon on tap!

Thursday was our Big Day. We got up early, took advantage of the better-than-average free breakfast in the lobby, and were checked out by 9am. Our first adventure of the day was a tour of the spectacular state capitol. This has to be the best tourist deal in Iowa - the tour guide obviously loves his job and the whole thing was free. It really is quite a building. If Minnesota thinks it's going to catch up with Iowa in the upcoming capitol building renovation I hope they have invested in a ton of gold leaf.

The first floor looks pretty much like any stately government building if you don't peer too closely at the ornamentation on the ceilings and door frames.

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But once you head up the stairs to the 2nd floor things get really out of hand. Those hand-painted frescoes around the top of the rotunda representing "the functions of government" are a great example of what happens when the repressed sexuality of the Victorian era meets classical art under the guise of sober civic reflection.

 The hike between the House and Senate Chambers is decorated with incredibly elaborate Italian-made mosaics, topped with more gilding. The Chambers themselves do not disappoint.


Our tour guide informs us that this is "the most photographed law library in the world." I'm not surprised. All it needs is an orangutan librarian to make it complete. Click through on this picture to see the incredible spiral staircase that appears to be the only way to reach the stacks on the upper level. There's another one just like it at the other end of the library.


And finally, if you have the stamina, you can run up a completely different spiral staircase (103 steps!) to the Whispering Gallery way up under the dome. I went up - Richard waited below.

If you can have fun on a trip to Des Moines, you can have fun anywhere, right?  Well, we had fun. Briefly, we drove to Des Moines to use up a free hotel night that was worth more in Iowa than in Minnesota. The centerpiece of the trip was actually a bike ride on the High Trestle Trail north of Des Moines, which did not disappoint. But for bonus fun we stopped on the way down to bike at a MN state park, visited the Science Center of Iowa, and enjoyed an excellent tour of the spectacular Iowa capitol building. Oh, and had a lovely evening in Owatonna on the way home.

Driving down we marvelled at the fighter jet sculpture at the Owatonna airport and an enormous wind farm just south of the Iowa border. The weather was picture-book perfect the whole way.


We stopped at Myre Big Island State Park just outside Albert Lea for a little biking. It was very scenic, but hillier than anticipated, so our 5-6 mile ride pretty much wore us out.


After our biking stop it was only another 2 hours to Des Moines. Checked into our hotel (Residence Inn Des Moines) and wandered over to the nearby Iowa Science Center. The museum was definitely kid stuff, but amusing enough for a quiet evening. We really enjoyed the Imax Show: Mysteries of the Unseen World.


A lively restaurant/bar district was just a short walk from the hotel on Court St. We had a delicious dinner at Dos Rios Cantina. The empanadas were a work of art. Finished up Wednesday evening in the hotel hot tub, which we had all to ourselves.

The trip to Chicago happened because I got these credit cards that gave me free Hilton nights, and one thing led to another. That mini-vacation was such a success that I think it's time for another, albeit more modest one. I have a free night to use up at a Marriott Category 4 hotel. Turns out that Cat 4 doesn't go very far in Minnesota (even Duluth has no Marriotts below Cat 5!). Oh, but what of our gentle neighbor to the south? All sorts of possibilities.

We like to take overnight bike trips, sleeping in a nice hotel or B&B rather than on the ground by the bikes. I'm kind of tired of Lanesboro and realized that if we're willing to drive to Lanesboro it's only a stone's throw further to Iowa. So I'm thinking of a trip to Des Moines, stopping along the way at Big Island State Park in Minnesota and the High Trestle Bridge Trail in Iowa. It appears to be only 3-4 hours to Des Moines, so even with a biking stop along the way we should have time for a little touristing and a nice meal.

I have my eye on The Residence Inn Des Moines, which looks quite pleasant. Any ideas for spending a day or so in Des Moines?

The hotel says, "The NEW Residence Inn by Marriott, the only all- suite, extended stay hotel in downtown Des Moines sits on the scenic river, close to Principal Park, Court Avenue Entertainment District, Science Center of Iowa and the Iowa Events Center "

So in the absence of a better idea, I'm thinking Science Center of Iowa sounds promising. Some place air-conditioned would probably be a good idea, considering the climate in Iowa. Any ideas from Iowa folks?

Slide show in reverse order, since that's just how Photobucket rolls.

Another sparkling fall day, so we decided to try a guided kayak tour of the "sea caves" along the shore north of Bayfield. But that didn't work out. Some of the outfits that do these tours had already closed up for the summer and the one that was left couldn't fit us with a boat that worked. Getting into those little kayak holes requires more bending, folding and spindling than Richard's joints can manage, and the tacky looking plastic canoe that Kayak John offered us instead didn't look all that sea worthy. So we wandered over to Tom's Bike Shop (aka Bayfield Bike Route) to look for a map of local bike routes. This was a perfect move. There aren't a lot of dedicated bike paths in the area, but good old Tom knows the road routes like the back of his hand and was able to suggest a poorly marked but perfectly paved forestry road that was actually on our way back to the cities. It really was a lovely bike route, although hillier than we expected. Still, by breaking our jaunt into two parts we achieved our 20 miles and headed home.

	National Forest Road #237 (Friday, Sept 10) Tom the bike shop owner tipped us off to this lovely road ride west of Washburn. Turn off to the south just before Hwy 13 swings north towards Cornucopia. It's like a great big bike path - 20 miles of brand new smooth asphalt with practically no traffic.
	More of NF 237 About this time we had figured out the catch with this lovely ride - it's pretty much all downhill north to south. Which means, since we started at the north end, that we'd be riding uphill all the way back to our car. Into the wind. Ouch. So we sensibly stopped at 5 miles and rode back to the car.
	Ino Bar Since we were trying for 20 miles a day of biking, we came up with this great solution to the hill problem. We drove to the south end of NF #237, where our intel told us we would find a bar. After fortifying ourselves with beer and fried chicken fingers we set out from the south end of the trail, heading uphill.
	NF 237, south end We made it 5 miles up the trail, and now it's downhill all the way! Whee!

Thursday turned out to be a beautiful, brisk fall day. Good timing because this was the day we'd planned to spend biking on Madeline Island, the centerpiece of the trip. Madeline Island looks like such an idyllic place to live, but I couldn't help thinking about the logistics as we rode across on the ferry. The friendly woman in the tiny Chamber of Commerce office answered some of my questions. Yes, the natives get a discount card for the ferry, but it is still expensive: several hundreds of dollars per year even if you leave your car behind and do all your mainland errands on foot. Apparently having friends on the mainland who you can carpool to the store with is a godsend, and almost a necessity once your kids outgrow the elementary school on the island and need places to stay overnight so they can participate in afterschool activities.

Besides chatting with the locals, we hung around town long enough to stock up on cheese and crackers for lunch, then hopped on our bikes and headed for beautiful Big Bay State Park on the other side of the island for a few hours, then back to the ferry, taking the longer route along the south shore to get us to 20 miles, our unofficial goal for the day. It was near sunset when we got back to the mainland, but we had time to pick up a couple of wearable souvenirs in the little tourist stores (earrings for me, a tie-dyed sweatshirt for Richard). Oh, and and a bottle of wine to drink by the fireplace back at the B&B.

Madeline Island Ferry (Thursday, Sept 10) Thursday brought us a beautiful, brisk fall day. We rode our bikes down the long hill to the docks and took the 10am ferry to the island.

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In the afternoon, after our ride on the Munger Trail, we headed over the Wisconsin border to Bayfield, passing many miles of scenery that looks exactly like northern Minnesota. Pines and Aspen. Aspen and Pine. More pines and aspen. Okay, some of the pines are actually fir and some of the aspen are actually birch, but it's pretty much the same thing. I can't help but think that if there is an ecology in the world that could clearly benefit from a little global warming, this is it. It has a kind of pristine rural sincerity to it, but not a lot of variety. I won't subject you to any pictures of this scenery - you all know what it looks like.

Bayfield itself is, of course, utterly charming. That's how it makes its living after all.

Grey Oak B&B - Bayfield, Wisconsin (Sept 8, 2010) The B&B is the usual handsome, well-preserved Victorian, but the really impressive sight is the tree in the center of the picture - the largest living American chestnut tree in Wisconsin. Possibly in the country, since Wisconsin is one of the few states that has ANY mature American chestnuts (they were mostly wiped out 100 years ago by chestnut blight). Although it has recently lost its head, it's still alive and valiantly producing chestnuts. Sterile chestnuts, nfortunately, since there are no male chestnut trees left to fertilize them.

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The last 2 years Richard and I did a lot of biking, including a few overnight bike trips that were a lot of fun. This year we haven't done much biking, partly because of the weather and partly because Richard was having alternating problems with a knee and a hip most of the summer and I was obsessed with skating and Pilates. His joints finally got better about the time the weather started looking pleasantly cool, so I took Labor Day week off work for a 3-night bike trip Up North. The weather turned out not quite as great as initially predicted, but it was good enough. We did a lot of driving, a bit of sight-seeing, and 72 miles of biking. We also did quite a lot of eating and drinking, which kind of cancelled out all the exercise in the health department but added to the fun. 

Outside Aquarium, watching lift bridge descend Starting off with the quintessential Duluth tourist picture. Look, look! The bridge is moving! See, there it goes. Isn't the little control house right in the middle adorable? That's where I'd live if I were looking for a place to roost in a post-apocalyptic Duluth. ( Collapse )