Myrna CG Mibus - Idyllwild

Two weeks ago I was hiking up a mountain in Montana. Tomorrow I am heading out on another grand adventure - I'm biking to Canada from North Branch, Minnesota (north of Minneapolis/St. Paul) in three days. I'll post more about that later. For now, a bit about my grand Montana adventure. Our church, Bethel Lutheran Church in Northfield, sends a group of rising 10th graders on a hiking trip through Christikon Camp in Montana each year. My daughter, Rose, went on this trip when she was a 10th grader. I had wanted to go along as a chaperone back then but couldn't make it happen at that time. Last year when my Dad was so sick and Owen headed off on the Tour Divide bike ride and it felt like everything in my world was falling apart I told Owen "Ok, you get to do the Tour and get away from it all for awhile. Next summer, I'm going on the Christikon trip with Ryan." I told our youth director, Barb, that I wanted to go on the trip, too. I think she took pity on me ...

It's been a goal of mine for quite some time to actually have an "adventure coffee" bike ride. Many of my bicycling friends post pictures on Instagram with the hash tags of #coffeeoutside and #adventurecoffee and it always looked like a fun thing to do but I didn't even have a suitable pot in which to boil water let alone know the first thing about what sort of equipment I might need. So, I talked to some of my bicycling friends, most notably Michael L. and Christopher T., to ask them what I needed to get set up to make coffee outside and come up with some suitable gravel bike routes to ideal coffee break locations. I discovered that the little Esbit pocket stove my son Ryan has would work well enough for a stove. I still needed a pot and a coffee making system of some sort so I went to Milltown Cycles last week and talked to Curtis about getting set up to make coffee outside. Curtis was very helpful and I ended up purchasing a nice little GSI Outdoors Pinnacle ...

Our bike packing trip is complete and now, three weeks later, I'm finally getting around to writing up what is probably my last blog post about the trip. The first thing to address is the big question - do we want to go bike packing again?  The answer? Yes! We definitely want to do more bike packing and include camping into future adventures. Bucket list routes include (but are not limited to) the Katy Trail in Missouri and the Elroy Sparta Trail in Wisconsin. Secondly, a big Thank you is in order to the good people of Milltown Cycles, aka Milltown Premium Adventure Goods for equipping us with our bikes, our seat bags and for fielding lots and lots of questions about bike packing. Now here's our bike packing wrap-up report with info on equipment, weather, coffee and other stats! Not interested in bike packing? Well, this might be kinda dry stuff so you might want to skip down to the bottom to the Coffee section of this post and call it a day. Bikes : Owen rode ...

We have wrapped up our four day bike adventure and, to reward ourselves, have settled in at a B&B for the evening. Since Sunday we have biked about 170 miles. The bikes worked great. Our bodies worked great. I'm a bit sore (methinks I need to lower the nose of my saddle a bit) and really can feel that my legs have been working. Other than that, though, I felt like my body was more machine than anything and once I got pedaling, I just kept on going.  I'll write more about yesterday's ride later (in short, 54 miles from Luck to St. Croix Falls back through Luck and overnight in Siren) but here's a brief recap of today... Today we slept in and got riding at 11 a.m.  Gorgeous day! Had a wonderful 30 mile ride from Siren to Shell Lake where we had lunch at The Pottery Shed (one of my favorite places). Rode to our van which was parked at our son's camp in Shell Lake, packed up the bikes and are now showered and settled in for the evening.  I'm going to eat now! He...

Well we are safe and sound in Siren, Wisconsin and have finished day 1 of our bike packing adventure.  We took off from Shell Lake just before 4 p.m. and headed west on county road B for Siren. At mile 3.5 Owen got stung by a bee or something so we stopped to check him out. Owen reacts terribly to mosquito bites so I was quite worried he'd swell up and have an allergic reaction. But he didn't, thank goodness. We biked on.  We had about a 15 mph headwind all the way to Siren. That was a bummer but we managed. The ride went well. The scenery was beautiful.  After 2 1/2 hours (27.8 miles) of biking we rolled into Siren. We're staying at a little motel, the Pinewood Motel, and we're having dinner right now at the Pour House.  My foot is a little sore. Other than that, I'm feeling strong.  Planning on 70 miles (Owen says it's all downhill) tomorrow. 

Tomorrow Owen and I take off on our bike packing adventure. We are mostly packed but will finish up in the morning. We have some time as we are not due to drop our son off at camp until 1:30 p.m. at the earliest. It's likely we'll leave our home for Shell Lake, Wisconsin around 10 a.m. and be biking by mid-afternoon. At present, our plan is to bike 30 miles to Siren on Sunday afternoon and overnight there. We talked about biking to Danbury, another 10 miles further north, but I could not find a non-smoking hotel room open (at a reasonable price) at the local casino hotels. It's not that we are really picky about non-smoking vs. smoking rooms but that combined with the fact that we have just a few hours to get anywhere on Sunday made us decide we'd bike a shorter distance on our first day. Seems less stressful. On Monday we plan to bike about 70 miles all the way to Superior. We'd make it a shorter day except that hotels appear to be scarce along the Gandy Dancer...