Mile 2908.2 – On Wisconsin!

Because I hadn’t gotten nearly as far as I wanted the day before on account of the rain, I wanted to get a solid day of riding in today. So my goal for day 41 was to get from Ashland down to Medford, about 120 miles away. I managed to get myself onto the road early (for me, around 8:20am) and due to it not raining and the relatively easy terrain, I was making good time. About 11 miles outside of Ashland, I hit mile 2800 for the trip. Woo hoo, only about 1200 more miles to go!

About 25 miles into the day, I came to the town of Mellen. Mellen has something I love and wish more towns had, benches lining the main road every so often. I stopped at one of them and sat down for a short break. Mellen also has a willow tree that grew from a sprig of the willow that shades the grave of Joan of Arc, which is pretty cool. I still had a long way to go, so I continued down the road.

This part of the state actually has the oldest mountains in North America, but hundreds of millions of years of rain, wind and snow have whittled them down to unremarkable hills. They are covered with the dense forests that a century early had been thoroughly logged to produce the timber that built the west. Now most of the original sugar maple and hemlock forest is gone, but the white and red pine and have flourished, now protected as part of the Chequamegon-Nicollet National Forest.

I came to a wayside with a historical marker noting that I was now on the Great Divide. The waters north of me flowed into Lake Superior and thus eventually through the St. Lawrence and into the Atlantic. The waters south of me flow into the Mississippi and exit into the Gulf of Mexico. Given what’s going on in the gulf right now, if I was the water, I’d rather take the longer northern route. But water, for its part, obeys gravity and doesn’t get much choice in the matter.

As I sat on a picnic table eating some cold pizza, a woman drove up in her car. We talked a moment about where I was riding to and from, and she asked if I minded if she sat down and shared lunch with me. Of course not. This was Diane, who was having a frustrating day. We sat on the table, she in a pale yellow raincoat and no shoes, I still had my biking gloves still on. We talked for a long while about the area, about gasoline consumption and the frustrations of home and family. Her boyfriend owns a restaurant that is struggling to break even in the current economic climate. She lives on a large ranch and has three horses, but is employed in Pine Falls, about 50 miles away. Not wanting to leave the land she’s been on for several decades, she has no choice but to drive 100 miles a day getting to and from work. This doesn’t leave her any time to ride her horses. She told me about the terrain and towns coming up and informed be that most of the hills were now behind me. That’s always a good thing to hear. Eventually she had to get going back to work, but offered to take my picture before she left. Since I have very few pictures of myself on the trip, I assented. It was yet another of the chance encounters that have really made this journey enjoyable. Good luck with everything, Diane.

Continuing along, I was making a steady pace of about 17mph. Diane had told me that in Butternut, they had a record black bear in a glass display case. Sure enough, there was a 686lb bear that had been killed in 1968, taxidermed, and put up for display. Out of Butternut, I crossed the Flambeau River and well into the afternoon, made it to Phillip, where I had wanted to end on the rain-shortened day before. I stopped at the A&W and enjoyed some cheese curds and root beer. Mmm, fried cheese…

One of the other roadside attractions Diane suggested I check out is just south of Phillip, Fred Smith’s Concrete Park. Fred Smith could neither read nor write, but spent his life making concrete sculpture that he studded with shards of glass. Sounds dangerous to play on, yes. The larger than life-sized folk art covered topics from the natives helping the original European settlers of the area to the farmers plowing up the cleared forests, to the Budweiser wagon, loaded with casks of beer and pulled by a team of horses. It was really something to behold. I stopped for a while, but knowing I had more than 40 miles left ahead of me, didn’t stay long enough to see everything.

Further down the road, I came to a wayside where the Ice Age Trail crossed highway 13. The Ice Age Trail is a 400 mile long hiking trail that coils around from the southwest corner of the state, up through the national forests to Timm’s Hill and then east towards Lake Michigan. It is a work in progress, and eventually, they hope to complete the loop, basically encircling all of central Wisconsin. I did ride past Timm’s Hill, the highest point in the state at 1951’. Even though it lies only a couple miles east of the highway, I couldn’t see the peak over the tall pine trees along the road. Oh well.

After that, I did something that I had not yet done. I hit my second 00 mile in one day. A little more than six and a half hours after reaching mile 2800, I was now at mile 2900. Unlike mile 2800, which happened in an unremarkable cluster of birch, 2900 happened at a well defined spot, a few yards before the intersection of Highway 13 and Alfalfa Ave in the town of Whittlesey. Woo hoo, only about 1100 miles left to go!

I finally made it into Medford. While I really should have camped out for the night, between the Cubs/Brewers game and the Blackhawks playing to try to win the Stanley Cup, I wanted to find a place where I could sit down, have a couple beers and watch the game. The first motel I tried only had double rooms left for $78. That was quite a bit more than I wanted to pay, so I doubled back to the Medford Inn. Walking into the hotel office, I was greeted by a large brown dog. As it turned out, this was Moosie, who lent his name to the ice cream parlor next door. Finally a young woman came out to help me. I got a room, but the only singles she had left were on the second floor. I brought the bike in to go upstairs and she asked about my trip. Just as I was starting with ‘Well, I started in San Francisco…’, the owner walked in. They listened to my story and asked some questions, and by the end of it, the owner had offered to give me one of the doubles on the first floor instead. Perfect. I also asked where I could go to watch the games, and as it turned out his brother owned the tavern next door.

I took a quick shower and went next door, brazenly wearing my Cubs hat amid the room packed with Brewers fans. The Cubs won that game. As I was preparing to leave, one of the guys sitting at the bar asked if I wanted to do a shot, so we had a couple shots of Jameson. Since the baseball game was over, the owner changed the tv to the hockey game, in time to see the presentation of the trophies. The Blackhawks had won the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1961. Now 4 of the 5 major sports teams in Chicago have won a championship in my lifetime. The one remaining, the one that I care about the most by far however, hasn’t won in my grandmothers’ lifetimes. Oh well. I got another round of shots to toast the Blackhawks victory, then made my way back to the room.

Day 41, Ashland, WI – Medford, WI
119.4 miles in 7:17:24. 2908.2 miles total in 241:10:00 and a top speed of 33.4