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 ...

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...

We're in Luck, Wisconsin this evening instead of Superior and we feel lucky to be here! We had breakfast at a little cafe in Siren this morning and were on the Gandy Dancer Trail heading north by 9:00.  The going was somewhat slow but the crushed limestone trail was good and we made Danbury by 11:00. We had lunch then I bought some fudge and made a comment to the lady in the fudge shop that we were heading to Superior. When she figured out we were on bikes she got worried and told us the trail turned into an ATV trail and said the trail wasn't good for bikes. We knew that to some degree  - but have never seem ATV trails so didn't know what to expect. We had done as much online research as we could but still didn't know how the trail would work for our bikes. We just knew we had a long 50 miles ahead of us to make Superior and that there were basically no towns in between.  Well, we got on the trail and soon discovered why the fudge shop lady was worri...

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...

My family recently returned home from a huge vacation to Saratoga Springs, NY with a quick visit to New York City adding in. Our plan was to fly our little Pacer to Saratoga Springs for our 11th Short Wing Piper Club convention. I wrote about the start of our trip in a recent post, The Airplane Notebook . In that post I mentioned we had taken off for NY in our Pacer but were waiting out the weather in Rushford, MN. Guess what? The weather never got better so we flew the Pacer back home and decided to drive to New York. It took us 22 hours to drive to Saratoga Springs - that's a whole lot of driving! After the convention we drove to Yonkers, NY where we left our car with Short Wing friends, Andy and Gloria, then took the train to NYC. We spent a day and a half in NYC then it was train back to car and car back to home. We drove the return trip without stopping to sleep at a hotel. I don't think we'll do that again though, I will admit, it was nice to get back home earlier...

Yesterday I went on a one day road trip to Hackensack, MN, with my daughter, Rose, my mom, Char, and my son, Ryan.  Why so much driving in one day? Because we dropped off Rose at Lago del Bosco - Concordia Language Villages Italian Language Camp - where she will spend two weeks immersed in Italian language and cultural activities. Rose attended Italian camp for one week last summer and had a great experience. Last year was Rose's first ever summer camp experience - and I was a bit worried about her. I wrote about my worries and Rose's experience in my blog last year (Concordia Language Villages even posted the blog on the Lago del Bosco Village Pages !) You can read that blog if you click  HERE : This year, dropping Rose off at camp was a much less worrisome experience because she had such a great time last year and we knew what to expect. Things that were overwhelming last year were much easier to deal with. We knew where to park and unload Rose's gear. We u...

With our trip to the Short Wing Piper Club convention in Saratoga Springs, New York right on the horizon, I realized it was past time for me to write down hotel reservation information and the like. I set off in search of a nice little notebook to write things in and discovered what I call The Airplane Notebook. It's a smallish, spiral bound, blue notebook with lined pages. The cover has a cut out with a little silver airplane in the window. I picked it up in about 2005 to use as a travel journal for our SWPC trip to Vancouver, Washington. I haven't taken The Airplane Notebook on every trip to the SWPC Convention but it has gone with us to most of them. It's also traveled with us on other trips, too, like a flying trip to Custer, South Dakota one October, as well as a trip I took via commercial airline back to Washington State to write about Stewart Systems, a environmentally friendly airplane paint system. The Airplane Notebook turned out to be more of a place to jo...

Look Up - beautiful balloons in my back yard It's been three months since I wrote about my Vacation State of Mind project - a project in which I decided I would pretend I was on vacation for at least a moment each day and look at the things around me as though I'm a visitor instead of a person anxious to go somewhere else. I meant to post pictures and updates of my Vacation State project several times but, well, I haven't. But I am posting something now! Here's something that has put me in a Vacation State of Mind many, many times since I started my project - I can always get a Vacation State moment when I Look Up. Look Up at the ceiling of the Pantages Theatre in Minnapolis Let me explain... I spent a January Term in England back in 1996 and one of the things I remember most about that trip was something a tour guide said. I was on a group tour of Oxford. As we were walking around Oxford our tour guide said that one thing we should remember to do as...

I love to travel.  I love the adventure of going somewhere new, of finding fun little places for a cup of tea or perfect pastry. I enjoy meeting new people and exploring areas that are off the beaten path. Traveling gives me a chance to see the world and how other people live and come back home with a fresh perspective. I'm hardly lacking when it comes to travel adventures. I get the chance to go on a big trip to our Short Wing Piper Club convention each year ( like our trip to Utah last summer ) and have gone many, many other places and have been on amazing adventures. But the silly thing is I have this tendency to compare myself with people who get to travel more than I do. And when I compare I start thinking that I don't get to go anywhere. And that's a total lie. I've realized a few things lately: I've gone more places and seen more things than most people I am so lucky and truly blessed to have had so many great opportunities to travel! I have a great...

Ever since we bought our Piper Pacer, a classic tube and fabric four-passenger airplane, our family has loaded it up each summer and flown off to the annual Short Wing Piper Club convention. This airplane type-club convention has taken us all over the country - as far west as Vancouver, WA, as far east as Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and many points in between. We’ve attended every convention since 2003 - this year marks our tenth in a row! When we tell people we have a plane and fly it across the country they usually think we fly fast and get places quickly. They also often have this idea that our plane is big and expensive. In reality my Pacer is about the size of a VW Bug and a person can buy one for far less than they would spend on a full-sized SUV (I call our plane our SUV - ShortWing Utility Vehicle). And though we do average around 124 miles per hour we only fly about four to five hours per day so getting places still takes a long time. It's kind of squishy in the ...

One of the fun things about writing stories is that I get to meet neat people and explore new places. I just spent two days in Northern Iowa - which may not sound like an exciting place to visit but the area is full of treasures and at less than two hours drive from Minneapolis is a reasonable option for a day or weekend trip. Right now I'm writing a story about a group of women from the Forest City area who have been gathering together twice a week for about 30 years to paint porcelain. Porcelain painting is a nearly lost art and I discovered these women through a distant cousin of mine, Carolyn, who runs a bed and breakfast in Forest City, Iowa. I actually met Carolyn when I was in Forest City for a Sons of Norway meeting where my mom was a guest speaker and, well, it gets to be a long story. Suffice it to say this is my third trip back to Forest City since late summer and the second time I have been a guest at Carolyn's lovely inn, The Elderberry Inn B&B . My suite a...

The weather has not been good for riding my bike lately but I have been out riding every day for 30 Days of Biking. Only three days left. Hard to believe! After days of rain finally tonight the sun came out and Owen and I headed out on our road bikes for a quick 5.25 mile ride at almost a 13 mph pace. It felt great to get out and ride with some speed - at last! Quite a change from riding on the gravel in the rain . Shadows - proving the sun was out today The weather has been good for writing, however. And I've been doing a lot of writing in the last few weeks. And editing. Lots of editing. In the last two weeks I've been working on a travel piece for the Star Tribune . This story, on the town of Cannon Falls, will be my second for the Star Tribune. It's due out on Sunday. Look for it! The Oxford Mill Ruins - near Cannon Falls It was great fun checking out the sites in Cannon Falls , talking to people who work at various business, learning about the town's history...

Even though I loved the surf and the sun of Anna Maria Island the thing I'm missing the most, I think, is Island Time. Yep, time just didn't seem to matter much while we were there. What's Island Time? It's more a feeling than a thing. It's all about forgetting about time and trying to get places. It's about forgetting you have a cell phone or clock. Its, well, a lot of things and probably something different for everyone. Perhaps I can explain what it is to me, at least somewhat, in pictures. Island Time = Single speed bikes and pedaling slowly around town. 90% of the bikes I saw on Anna Maria Island were single speed bikes. I only saw two road bikes and rarely saw anyone pedal faster than 10 mph. I liked wandering around on my rental bike. I liked getting lost. I liked moving slowly. It was relaxing. It was fun. Island Time = Reading Time (or DS Time, in Ryan's case). Sitting Still Time. It stormed the first full day of our vacation. And while the ra...

30 Days of Biking begins tomorrow, April 1st, and I'm ready! I'm actually on vacation right now in Florida. We're in a darling little rental on Anna Maria Island. Normally it's sunny here but today it's raining like crazy. Tornado warnings. Extreme winds. It's weather we are used to having in Minnesota. Oh well. We're hoping things clear up by tomorrow so I don't have to bike in the rain. If it's still raining I'll still be biking. And when it's time to ride I have a nice little island cruiser ready for me. I rented a nice little ladies bike from Fun and More Rentals for Day 1 and Day 2 of 30 Days of Biking . It's pretty - and it even has a basket! Even with the rain we're having a fine time. We've had to regroup a bit on our plans - instead of hitting the beach today we played games indoors. Rose and I planned to take the island trolley to the store but we haven't had the rain let up enough yet to go anywhere. Granted, the...