Eating Well
Our last day of riding on Sunday involved one primary goal beyond the joy of riding: breakfast at Greenwood’s Cafe in Reedsburg. It’s not very difficult to imagine you’ve stepped into the world of The Andy Griffith Show when greeted by the small town diner atmosphere, friendly service, and delicious food.
We jumped on the 400 State Trail near the north end of Wonewoc and rode about 15 miles to where the trail ends in Reedsburg. That stretch of trail is pretty flat. All of the trail riding we did over the last four days was railroad grade, so I didn’t even bother adding the weight of the motor and battery pack on my bike. I have a cover that fits over that space on the downtube.
It would have been blissful except for the click that developed somewhere in the vicinity of the bottom bracket as I pedaled, similar to the problem I encountered last year while riding in the Tour of Minnesota. I ended up having the bike shop deal with the situation last year. This time, I’m hoping to see if I can figure out the source myself and solve it by tightening any screws that may be vibrating loose.
At least we didn’t need to stop and remove downed trees from the trail on the last day of our adventure. However, the easy riding we did –the wind was at our back on the return leg to our cars– failed to balance the breakfast calories consumed. Well, and all of the other excellent restaurant meals we enjoyed and augmented with a bounty of snacks and treats we munched on back at our campsite each day. (Cyndie sent along some of her caramel rolls and walnut chocolate chunk cookies with me.)
It was an absolute joy to share the adventure with some of my favorite people, but returning to a full night’s sleep in my own freshly made bed just might be an equal experience on the scale of joys.
Home, sweet home.
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Storm Debris
We made it into our tents just as the storm front arrived Friday night. It was noteworthy, but we’ve slept through worse. However, the area the trail crossed just to our southeast must have experienced much stronger winds.
We risked our wellbeing to move what we could, and crawled over and under anything too big to lift.
The thick fog from morning dissipated as soon as the sun appeared, but lingered near the cool openings of the tunnels.
A good time is being had by all.
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Tunnel Vision
We didn’t get rained on while riding, but the 3,810-foot tunnel out of Norwalk that was cut through Summit Ridge, and its natural spring that constantly drips and flows to this day, might as well have been a rain storm.
Another Adventure
It is proving to be a banner year for pine cone production. Several different species on our land are dropping them in large quantities. I needed to do some raking before mowing the front lawn yesterday.
I completed all of the grass cutting and some of the fence line trimming when time ran out on home chores yesterday, and I needed to start packing all my biking and camping gear. Six, possibly seven, of us who met on the annual “Jaunt with Jim” (Klobuchar) bike trips years ago are meeting today in Onalaska, WI, for a 4-day adventure of our own on the trails of the Sparta/Elroy region.
As a result, my posts for tomorrow and over the weekend will be created on the touchscreen surface of my phone. Maybe I can force myself to use a little more brevity than is typical for my habits.
Partly due to my clumsy touch and partly to my lack of familiarity with using a smartphone to create posts in WordPress, it is never certain that the result will align with my intentions. The next three days will be an adventure in posting for me, while I am on a cycling adventure with friends and tenting on the hard ground.
If I am successful in keeping my phone sufficiently charged, you can expect to find daily reports from the trail with a few snapshots of the scenery we encounter.
May the weather gods be kind to us.
Oh, and…
Happy Birthday today, Cyndie!
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Questions Answered
I got my question answered last night as to what the competition would look like between the Carolina Hurricanes and the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Championship series. Both teams were so dominant in their semi-final series that I was curious how it would look when they went up against each other.
Pretty evenly matched, as one might expect. The hometown Carolina fans went home disappointed. It had started so well for them, with a goal in the first 25 seconds of the game.
I also got a question about my crumbling tooth answered. It wasn’t the tooth; it was an old filling. I’ve been chewing on one side of my mouth for a week, hoping it wouldn’t fall apart more than it already had. My appointment for a repair was yesterday morning.
Unfortunately, to make me all better, the dentist went medieval on my jaw. It’s too bad that fixing our bodies can cause pain in the process of ending pain. My head really hurt after the Novocaine wore off. However, I was able to eat dinner on both sides of my mouth. Gimme a “V” for victory!
There is no question that the new blade motor on my riding mower is working better than the original did. I haven’t had an error since I replaced it.
One question that has yet to be answered is whether I will get packed and ready to go on my next biking/camping adventure before today is over, or wait until tomorrow morning to finish, leaving only minutes until departure. I’m not usually one to wait until the deadline is so close to complete my preparations, but I am prone to procrastination.
I guess I’ll surprise myself by waiting to decide if I value sleep more than being prepared in advance. At least I won’t have the distraction of a hockey game tonight.
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Unlikely Plan
It seemed like an unlikely plan, but somehow I pulled it off. After a short errand to River Falls in the morning, I felt overcome by sleep when I got home. A 45-minute period of deep slumber in the recliner followed. I did not wake full of zest and pondered the possibility of illness brewing within.
The hour of lunching had arrived, so I decided to try fueling my body to see if that helped me feel more alive. I asked Cyndie if it seemed dry enough outside to mow after our overnight rainfall watered all the growing things. Her answer was rather noncommittal, but it wasn’t a no.
It had gotten late enough in the day that it was entirely uncharacteristic of me to start a project like mowing the back pasture with the diesel tractor and brush cutter, but that is what I decided to do. I hadn’t used the New Holland 3415 since mid-April, so I checked the oil, added air to the tires, added liquid grease to the brush cutter gearbox, and greased the universal joint. For good measure, I got under the brush cutter and used the grinder to touch up the cutting edge of the blades.
By the time I got in the field, it was almost 4:00, but I didn’t let it bother me. My intuition was telling me I could make worthy progress, and if I couldn’t finish by a reasonable time, it didn’t really matter.
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Well, I did finish. It was about 6:00 when I stopped the tractor in front of the garage to blow it off with compressed air.
When I first rolled into the field, the grass looked to be a little wetter than I expected, but not enough to be a problem. It actually seemed to get drier as I went along. This is the earliest in the summer that we have mowed the back pasture. We always waited in the past because we anticipated it would get cut for hay along with the front field, but the guy doesn’t want to bother with the short distances back there.
Now that we know that, there is no reason to wait. It was an easier job to cut it before it got too tall, and the sooner we nip the weeds, the better. And, gosh darn, it just looks so sharp freshly mowed. I don’t know if the horses are as thrilled with it as I am, but how can they not like it?
Probably the most exciting for me is that I succeeded in pulling off such an unlikely plan for my comfort level in getting things done. I credit the nap. I think it might be my new superpower.
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Sour Dock
Also called Curly Dock, we learned of sour dock from a local farmer who was supplying us with small squares of hay back when we had the Arabian horses. He pointed out that it was the only weed in his hay and that horses didn’t like it. It’s toxic for livestock, so I don’t blame horses for not liking it.
Yesterday, Cyndie and I took a crack at digging up the larger sprouts around the paddock, since they are too much for the string trimmer to chew through.
Some of the stalks are beginning to swallow our fence wires. While we were working, the horses wandered over to inspect our progress.
Cyndie had been putting the stalks into old feed bags, but they filled up so fast that she went back and got a wheelbarrow. Mia came over, grabbed a mouthful, and pulled a bunch of them back out of the bag. I thought she was going to eat some, but no, she just dropped them on the ground. She knows sour dock is toxic. I think she was just messing with us.
Then the mares turned around and formed a line to graze the short grass in the paddock.
Each time I finished digging up one plant, I would find another one nearby. Soon, I realized that this would become an endless task. Our two big fields may not look like there is a lot of sour dock at first glance, but wherever there is one, you can find another close at hand.
The weed is difficult to pull up because the main root is carrot-shaped and can reach ridiculous depths. I wish our attempts at growing carrots looked as good as some of these.
We filled two wheelbarrows full and are now left with figuring out where to dump them so as to avoid any possibility of spontaneous regeneration. It does enough of that on its own.
Away from the fence lines, we resort to mowing the fields to disturb the cycle of growth. The back pasture is more than ready for me to bring out the big tractor and brush hog to knock down the weeds and shorten the grasses to a more enticing blade height for the mares.
The front field we let go until the guy who grazes cattle on the neighboring field has someone cut and bale for feeding his cattle in the winter.
It was so fun having the horses come mingle with us as we worked that we’ve decided to find other activities to do in their spaces that might add a little excitement to their day. Their life of retirement is pretty much filled with napping, grazing, and waiting around for feed bucket servings.
They could benefit from occasional disruptions to their routine, triggering an urge to satisfy their curiosity.
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Visiting History
I went for a little bike ride yesterday that took me into the stomping grounds of three of my ancestors’ families from 1860 to 1880 in Pierce County, Wisconsin.
Destination Esdaile brought me to some road construction.
I sure am loving my new, more aggressive tires.
The portion of the road under construction that I needed to travel was not very long. You can see my right turn ahead of the trees in the distance. That rough surface was still probably an improvement on the terrain my ancestors were traveling on in the 1800s.
Much of my ride was along Isabelle Creek that powered the mill my great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Sleeper, ran. It’s wild thinking about the decisions made before any infrastructure existed to utilize this creek for powering a mill.
It felt like I had ridden back in time to pedal the gravel road that follows the winding creek valley. I am repeatedly amazed at the unlikelihood of our choosing to move to this county without having a clue about my family’s temporary connections to the land. I suppose it is the transient nature of their subsequent generations that explains the detachment.
Searching through old newspapers from the time period reveals details of my great-grandparents’ accomplishments in school. They were just kids romping around the woods and ravines along the creek. It’s wild to think about.
It made for a thought-provoking ride while pedaling up and down the rolling hills between Esdaile and our current home.
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Getting Bit
Before the horses came into view on my way to the barn, I heard an uncharacteristic whinny from one of the horses. As I came around the wall of the overhang, I found three of the horses coping fine, but Mia was flinching and stomping her feet and whipping her tail. She was obviously uncomfortable with the amount of harassment being dished out by the flies.
A day or two earlier, Cyndie had spotted big welts on Mia from her reaction to the bites. I returned to the house to interrupt Cyndie and her three lunch guests for a consultation. Since she hadn’t covered Mia with a fly sheet earlier, she decided to leave her friends and come with me to help Mia without delay.
The sheet is white, so at a glance from a distance, I couldn’t tell her apart from Mix. This morning, Mia was walking with an awkward timidity because the straps around her back legs bugged her. We agreed that the sheet could come off for the time being.
She still has on her extremely fashionable hand-me-down fly boots to protect her lower legs. A brisk wind would do wonders to reduce the abuse they suffer from flies, but we don’t have much say in making that happen.
I suffered an insect bite of my own yesterday. Found a tick firmly attached to my upper arm that I needed to enlist Cyndie’s help, again, to extract. We will be monitoring the site for evidence that demands professional analysis. In the meantime, I will seek to ensure I have all my critical affairs in order.
My dreary attempt at bleak humor aside, I have been bitten by so many ticks in my life and dodged major consequences that I’m fully expecting this to resolve similarly. You’d think I would take it more seriously, given Cyndie’s experience with Lyme Disease, but her situation involved an unknown source of infection and a lengthy period of confusing symptoms before being identified.
My distress would be much greater if I didn’t see the tick that bit me and know it hadn’t been on me for more than a few hours. Experiencing symptoms of illness with no known cause, like getting bitten by a tick that is almost microscopically small and never realizing it, scares me a lot more.
Both Cyndie and I chose long ago to accept the gamble of risking exposure to ticks in order to fully experience our outdoor activities at Wintervale.
This latest tick bite does have me missing the chickens a little more than usual today. They would have gobbled this critter up long before he had a chance to get me, I’m sure of it.
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Relative Something 