Day 23, August 17: Excelsior!

(medium resolution photos)

Litchfield, MN to Excelsior, MN http://cyclemeter.com/85ef50859d8f1e5c/Cycle-20150817-0752
Distance: 59.0 miles
Total trip distance: 1508.9 miles
Average speed: 12.9 mph
Maximum speed: 25.0 mph
Riding time: 4:34
Weather: a cold front moved through and brought a lot of rain yesterday afternoon and evening. Some areas got more than two inches of rain. It was 63° at my 7:50am start and rose only to the mid 70s because of cloudiness. The dew point was in the low 60s. The wind started from the north at about 5 mph and varied in direction but was NE at about 7 mph more often than not.
Terrain: uphill 1167 feet, downhill 1332 feet. Elevations changed a lot because of frequent hills associated with the moraines in this area, but most hills had 100 feet of vertical or less. As noted in an earlier post, moraines are accumulations of earth and stones carried and finally deposited by a glacier.

The last day of the first half (or more precisely, the first three fifths) of my bike trip takes me from Litchfield, MN to my parent's house in Excelsior, about 17 miles west of Minneapolis. The route goes through an area of glaciated terrain with lots of lakes, moraines, and outwash plains, as seen in the two maps below.

Bike route superimposed on a section of an Erwin Raisz landform map.

Start and finish of the bike route on a Google Map in terrain view.

In the late 1970s my graduate school friend Mike Albert and I took a road and camping trip to the Dakotas. We headed west on US 12 and saw the world's largest ball of twine in Darwin, MN. The twine ball is still there, although it has been moved a few miles to a museum inside the town of Darwin. We also saw a mushroom-shaped building in Dassel, MN. Mike and I were about an hour into that trip when we somehow remembered that we forgot to bring the main pole for the tent and several other items, so we drove back to Minneapolis to get the stuff. We then created a detailed checklist to use before departing on any trip. I have used revised versions of that checklist ever since, but almost always still manage to forget something when traveling.

The world's largest ball of twine is in a wood and plexiglass gazebo in Darwin, MN. Several other places in the US, according to RoadAmerica.com, also claim to have the world's largest ball of twine.

This newspaper clipping inside the gazebo shows the size of the twine ball in Darwin, MN.

'Shroom-shaped building in Dassel, MN.

Each day on the road I see tools, cords, bolts, car wheel nuts, red flags, pieces of clothing, and other objects on the road shoulders that somehow got separated from their owners.

Somebody lost a screwdriver.

The bungee cord is the lost object I see most often on the roadside.

As I approached the Twin Cities on US 12 the traffic picked up and evidence of exurban development popped up here and there.

These trees mark the entrance to a future housing subdivision off US 12. The use of large glacial boulders for landscaping is common in the newer, upscale areas of the Twin Cities.

The last part of my route threaded through several bays of Lake Minnetonka (see the Google map screen capture above).

Excelsior's public beach on Lake Minnetonka. It's a cool day with few swimmers. The swimming dock needs some work. When I swam there in the early 1960s there was a diving board and a high dive.

I reached Excelsior, my destination, in the mid afternoon. My parents have lived in Excelsior since 1960, and I lived there from 1960 to 1973. It's where I learned to bike in the early 1960s. I began on a bike that originally belonged to my Mom. I think it was a Schwinn. She got it in the late 1930s and rode the streets of north Minneapolis. The Waterford bike I ride now is a descendant of the Schwinn Paramount. What goes around comes around. My dad had a beautiful bike as a kid. He recalls that his father spent $30 on it, an unimaginable sum in the 1930s. Dad stopped riding it when he went to North High School in Minneapolis, because that was something that young kids did. Times have changed. I haven't stopped biking since the 1960s, except for three years in the 1980s when I taught at a Nigerian university. 

A late 1930s photo shows my Mom on her bike in north Minneapolis.

When I was about 12 years old, Dad bought me a nice one-speed bike from Wheel Goods in Minneapolis, a store that has since closed. I bought a second hand Peugot UO8 ten-speed a few years later. It got stolen from a house I rented in Minneapolis. I then bought a Motobecane Grand Record from Freewheel Bike in Minneapolis. The day after arriving in Excelsior I returned to Freewheel to make sure my bike was in safe riding condition. It's nice to see that Freewheel is still chugging along. The day I brought in the bike, it rained all day long and it had rained the night before, spoiling my only two opportunities to play pickle ball. Oh well. It was a good time to be resting and not biking. 

Freewheel Bike in Minneapolis, during rainfall. It was my favorite bike store during my undergraduate and graduate college years.