Mile 2729.1 – The Greatest Lake

I had stopped in Superior the night before because of the increasing rain and then managed to drink quite a bit without really eating. Apparently I didn’t factor in the decreased tolerance to alcohol when my caloric output so vastly exceeds my intake. I walked back to the room and passed out without touching the pizza I had brought back. What can I say, I’m back in Wisconsin and the beer is cheap.

I woke up rather disoriented, the tv and lights were still on. I felt like I had just nodded off for maybe 15-20 minutes, but looked at the clock in the room which said 4:53. I didn’t believe that, but not too much later the sky started to get lighter. I tried to sleep a bit more, but never got fully asleep or awake. Combined with how cold it was, I really didn’t want to get out of bed. Finally I did and groggily took a very hot shower. The showerhead was one of the best I’d found in any motel so far. I got everything together and opened the door to find a steady rain coming down.

I shut the door.

Opening up my clothing bag, I pulled out my rain gear. I had gotten rain covers for my shoes back in San Fransisco, but discovered in Wyoming that they did not actually keep my shoes dry. So I had thrown them into the box of stuff I sent home from Minneapolis.

There is a bike path along the lake in the city and was pleased to not be elbow to mirror with the traffic on the highway. One thing I liked about this trail is that half of it is paved for bikes and half is gravel for horses, joggers, etc. Unfortunately, I’d say the conditions of the pavement were poor to fair, but fair pavement is far better than gravel in the rain. I came to a sign announcing the Tri-County Corridor, a multi use trail that stretched 62 miles to Ashland. It wasn’t quite the route I had planned, but I’d happily take their bike trail instead of the highway.

Well, as soon as I hit the city limit, the trail turned entirely to gravel. More accurately, a gravel-based soup. I rode on it for less than 100 feet then decided that I did not want to take 60 more miles of it. I swung over a block back to Highway 2 to find that the highway was now becoming a four lane limited access road with a plain, uninviting sign barring cyclists. I found a back roads way to get me down to Highway 13 and soon enough was rolling along in the the highway's 3’ paved shoulder.

This part of the road was fairly flat until it crossed rivers. At rivers the road would drop downhill to meet the bridge then rise back up to its previous height immediately afterwards. Given that I was within a couple miles of the lake and that there are lots of rivers and streams that feed in Lake Superior, I was doing quite a bit of up and down. About 20 miles out of the city of Superior, I came to the well spread out town of Cloverfield. By this point, my shoes and socks were pretty damp, but still manageable. Then, I came to a puddle that crossed the width of the shoulder just as several cars were coming up from behind me. I had no choice but to go through the puddle, and that completely saturated my footwear. Ug.

There were a couple abandoned buildings in various states of falling apart. I found the old Cloverfield town hall, within sight of the new one. The building’s doors had been removed, so I decided to get out of the rain to take a food break. Inside there were stacks of dusty, forgotten folding chairs, a couple large closed barrels and an undeniable reek of petroleum. There was another room off to one side that seemed to be a depository for misused and broken firefighter equipment. I saw old jackets, several lengths of hose and a couple cracked helmets. Tacked to a wall was a placard advertising a firefightering supplier in Minneapolis that at best guess had been there since the early 50s. I gingerly set Penny against some faded wallpaper instead of the large swaths of exposed insulation. I pulled out some cold pizza and the bag of raspberry gummy candy I got in Minneapolis. In the 15 minutes I was under the roof, I did not see a single car pass. More importantly, the rain finally came to a stop.

A while later, after I had crossed the valley containing the Brule River, the sun had gotten strong enough that I was actually casting a vague shadow below me. I like casting shadows.

For this whole stretch, the highway runs a couple miles inland from the lake. There were a couple left turns in the road to get closer to the water, but 13 kept teasing me by turning east before I got there.

Riding along, I started seeing individual deer along the road that would let me approach to within a couple hundred feet then bolted into the trees. There was also a pack of a dozen motorcyclists that all waved back to me as we passed each other. Finally, nearly 40 miles into my day, I got my first clear view of Lake Superior. Crossing from Duluth I went over the wide mouth of the St. Louis River. In Superior itself, even though I rode along the waterfront, it was a harbor created by a barrier island half a mile offshore. This, then, was my first ever fully unobstructed view of the largest freshwater lake on the planet. I could see the northern shore at this point, on 23 miles away. That part of the shore is still Minnesota, I hadn’t gotten far enough east for it to be Canada yet. At the line of the international boundary, the lake is too wide across to see the opposite shore.

A few miles later, there was a wayside park, so I sat on a picnic table, shed my wet windbreaker and ate some more. By now, many of the clouds had blown past me, so there was actual blue in the sky again. From here, the day improved drastically. The sun came out fully, which both warmed things up and dried me out quite a bit. Not completely dry, but I moved from being wet to damp, and I see that as an improvement.

I came to the town of Port Wing, which is credited as having the first unified rural school district in the state that offered free busing for its students. Behind the historical marker mentioning this and touting the quality of the local brownstone, there was a replica of the early school bus. Since it was 1903, it was a horse drawn wood covered wagon that looked like it could have been used to transport inmates as well as students. Across the street from all this was a convenience store, and I enjoyed a bottle of Sprecher Cherry Soda. I prefer their root beer, but most of their sodas and beers are great.

In the 7 miles between Port Wing and the next unincorporated burg called Herbster, the road did some climbing. From a base height of 612’ in Port Wing, there were three consecutive climbs, first to 720’, then a flat stretch, then to 830’, a bit of flat, then up to 925’. Then, in the same three step sequence, the road dropped back into Herbster coming in at an altitude of 612’.

Just east of Herbster, I got to mile 2700 for the trip. I kinda wonder how many more centuries I will cover before I see my home again. The next town after Herbster is Cornucopia. If I was in charge of naming the high school sports team, I would call them the Cornucopia Everythings. I doubt there is a sports team called the Everythings out there, but this would be a good place for them. I stopped at the Village Inn for dinner. It was still a little on the early side to be eating, but I hadn’t had any hot food since my roadside fried cheese curds coming into Duluth more than 24 hours previously and still hadn’t entirely warmed up from the morning’s rain.

What came next was possibly the best meal I’ve had on the trip that I didn’t cook myself. It started with a beer-cheese soup that was garnished with popcorn. I like the idea and I’m totally going to steal it. After a rather forgettable salad, there was the entrée, trout covered in a spinach and artichoke sauce all wrapped in puff pastry and then topped with a hollandaise. The trout, as I learned, was still swimming in the lake when I woke up this morning. I could taste it too. I talked to the waitress for a while about my trip, apparently she had passed me on the road sometime earlier. Her son and husband who were in the kitchen are cyclists, and through her asked about various aspects of the ride. The Inn also has rooms available that sound very nice, but I wanted to get the next 20 miles down the road to Bayfield. Anyway, great food, reasonable prices, I’d definitely go back.

The road continues north and east, following the peninsula that juts out towards the Apostle Islands. Near Sand Bay, I hit what I imagine with be the northernmost point on this trip. Going up a hill and down, I came to the Red Cliff Reservation. If I smoked tobacco, I would have stocked up here. But, as cigarettes and long distance cycling are not a good match, I passed it up along with the local casino. In Red Cliff there were signs posted about the local tribal council elections. The road hit the water and swung back south towards Bayfield and I could start to see the islands.

It was now getting to be 8pm and I needed a place to stop for the night. I didn’t want to camp, so I started calling some of the several hotels in town. Bayfield, it seems, is one of those places where there just is not a room for less than $100 a night. I got a few quotes, called one place where I got no answer and another where I got a machine. Then I called the Old Rittenhouse Inn. The man who answered was not the regular receptionist who was busy at the moment, but he invited me to come down and check out the rooms. So I did. Yeah, I’m glad I wound up there. The Inn is in an old, grand Victorian home, is beautiful, well appointed and well kept, and has a whirlpool in most of the rooms. Yes, this is where I was going to stay the night. I didn’t go for one of the two empty suites on the top floor, though if I had a week and the money, that is exactly where I would want to stay. I chose one of the more modest rooms and I even got a decent discount off the regular price. And by modest, it was still the most luxurious room I have stayed in on the tour. My legs were quite relaxed after getting out of the hottub and the bed was so comfortable that I got the best night sleep I had since John and Shelley’s place in Minneapolis.

Day 38, Superior, WI – Bayfield WI
81.4 miles in 7:02:11. Now up to 2729.1 miles in 229:39:59