Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Bike Trip day 6
Believe it, or not, we return to Grand Marais again. This will be deja vu.
My normal view, since I usually don't find myself in front of everyone else.
The 6th day of the trip is a very special one. We have really gotten close to each other by this point and we are reaching the end of the trip, and sense it. We usually have some kind of festive gathering in the evening and celebrate our good fortune and bask in the moment.
Bike Trip day 5
Spreadin' out on the country roads
I’m sure hoping our weather this year turns out as nice as this shot from last year’s trip looks.
We are at the Gunflint Lodge today and get to pick our choice of canoeing, hiking, tours, or biking to the end of the Gunflint Trail. Weeeee!
Bike Trip day 4
Sometimes, you just gotta stop and pose with the local landmarks… It’s good practice to take notes to keep track of identifying information for your pictures. This shot from last year is one that I didn’t take any notes for. I have absolutely no idea where I was when I found this corn cob photo opportunity.
Today, we ride the Gunflint Trail to Gunflint Lodge where we will enjoy the unique opportunity to leave our tents packed and take advantage of staying in their cabins for a couple of nights!
Bike Trip day 3
Riding bikes is all about balance.
Bruce and Curt with me, balancing our water bottles.
Today, we ride back to Grand Marais, according to the itinerary. We aren’t lost yet, are we?
Bike Trip day 2
Today we ride from Grand Marais to Grand Portage near the Canadian Border. I don’t think I’ll bring my passport, so there’ll be no jaunting to Canada while we’re here. Years ago, on a “Jaunt with Jim” to International Falls, I had the wonderful opportunity to ride my bicycle across the border. It was a completely different experience to deal with the border patrol from a bike rather than a car. They showed no change in their normal humorless attitude with us.
Cyndie and I were just in Grand Portage in the fall of ’06 during a little trip in which we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. I love this part of the world.
Bike Trip!
The first Saturday morning of the ride begins the routine that we follow for a week. We wake early and figure out what we will carry with us on the bike and what gets packed in our duffel that will be trucked to the next camp site. We take down our tents, pack up and haul our bags to the truck and head off to breakfast.
Today we ride to Temperance River Gorge and then to Grand Marais
My sister, Mary, and me, from the first year she rode the Jaunt with Jim.
Getting Close to Ready
There is a wonderful feeling in the moment you leave work on the last day before a vacation, even if you still haven’t packed and need to rush home to get the lawn mowed. I did my best to enjoy that moment. Then I mowed the lawn. After that, I started pulling everything I own out of storage to find the item I can’t remember where I put. I was really hoping to find out from Cyndie, when she got back from out of town, that she had seen it and moved it to somewhere that I wasn’t looking. No luck. My last hope was dashed. I began looking for an alternative. Then, for whatever strange reason, I went back to a place I had looked in my closet a bunch of times already, but this time I brought a flash light and suddenly I spotted my item, tied up in a semi-logical storage place. It is the stuff-sack for my sleeping bag.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste.
It seems a little weird that this stuff-sack has become so important to me. There is a certain amount of sentimental value to it. It has served me well for over 30 years, traveling to camping trips that have included the Grand Teton Mountains of Wyoming when I was young, and almost every Jaunt with Jim bike trip I’ve been on. But it’s just a stinkin’ stuff-sack. Well, there was one other year when I couldn’t find it and I borrowed one from Cyndie to store my sleeping bag in. Hers was a heavier material and it originally had some coating on the inside that, with time, had begun to flake off. And it just didn’t have the stretch that mine does. It really bugged me. But geez, it’s just a sack. It seems silly that it has become so important to me.
But I’ve found it and I think also, pretty much everything on my list of things to pack. That’s close enough to ready that I can get some sleep. I’ll pack it all up in the moments before Gary comes to pick me up for the drive north to Tofte. And like my song says, I’ll have much more than I meant to bring. Happens every year. And yes, that is Gary from my Himalayan trek in Nepal. We met on last year’s bike trip and are partnering again on this adventure, driving together to the 35th annual Jaunt with Jim week-long bike trip. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.
In the mean time, I’ll share some pictures of bike trips from the past and a mention of where we plan to be each night in posts throughout the coming week. Enjoy!
Warmer Days Ahead?
It has been a pretty cool spring, thus far. After serious drought-like conditions, we’ve now had several days of rain in a row. Cold and wet is not my favorite way to ride bike. The good news is that maybe the gloomy weather we’ve had recently will be spent and as often happens, get followed by warm sunny days! I’ll pack some warm clothes, just as insurance, based on the old adage that if I have it, I won’t need it, but if I don’t bring it along, I’ll absolutely regret it.
Looks like good sleeping weather, too. Those of you who need to be awakened by an alarm clock may recognize this phenomenon: often times waking just minutes before the alarm is scheduled to signal. I wonder what is going on to trigger that? This morning, I woke about a half hour early and lingered in bed, doing the snooze thing, fading in and out of sleep. Some really interesting dreams happen in the morning after I fall back asleep, or at least it’s that I am better able to remember the dreams that happen then. This morning I was dreaming that it was now just 2 minutes before the alarm was going to trigger and for some reason that startled me awake, only to find that it wasn’t that close and I still had 13 minutes till alarm. Hmmm. Was I anxious about waking on time this morning?
In a few days, I will have Jim Klobuchar blowing a whistle in short bursts for an alarm. Often times I’m already awake and listening to the early bird bikers clicking their tent poles as they take down their tents and head off to find morning coffee. I fall more in the middle, not the earliest and not one of the ones that sleep until the last minute. I like to avoid living out the dreams where I am coming out of my tent to find everyone is already packed up and I am the only one left and then can’t find something I am needing to pack. You know, those classic anxiety dreams. I find I have less anxiety dreams when I manage my life well enough to experience less anxiety. The logic works for me.
Maybe I was anxious this morning because when I went to sleep, I was struggling with another interesting phenomenon: I am sure that when I got home from Nepal and unpacked, I placed one of the stuff sacks I used, somewhere special, knowing I would need it again for this bike trip. For the life of me I couldn’t recall last night and it wasn’t anywhere logical that I could think to look. Don’t you just love that?
It’s All About Packing
It’s not as if there isn’t a lot to write about, what with everything going to hell in a hand basket and death and disaster everywhere we turn all at the same time that everything is coming up roses and love is all around, but there is hardly enough time between periods of Stanley Cup playoff games on nights when I should be setting up my tent to see if everything is present and accounted for, or giving my bike a deserving once-over inspection and superficial clean and lube in preparation for the week-long trip. Not to mention that I need to prepare things tonight for my early departure in the morning for soccer at the health club, and in the interest of best health it behooves me to get myself to sleep before that notable 11 o’clock hour.
Next week, I’ll have all sorts of time. But I won’t have my internet connection. It’ll be back to the hand-written journal. That’s ok. I know how to make that work. I gotta go [watch hockey] do some packing. Yeah, that’s it, I’m working on packing…
Plannin’ to Pack
It is sort of a deja vu for me to be packing for a trip so soon after returning from the big trek in Nepal, but it is time to do it again. This Friday, I depart for a week-long bike trip “through the land and among the waters where those rollicking Frenchmen roamed,” referring to the fur trading voyageurs of days gone by. I will be joining friends and fellow bicyclists for the 35th annual Jaunt with Jim bicycle trip in the middle of June. This year we explore the upper reaches of the Minnesota portion of the north shore of Lake Superior, all the way to Grand Portage, and make a foray up the Gunflint Trail for a bit. I haven’t done any packing yet, but I’ve started my planning to pack.
The first time I rode “the Klobuchar” –one of several nicknames for this annual week of biking and camping that has visited just about every nook and cranny of the state of Minnesota, as well as several jaunts to neighboring territories– was back in 1994 on the occasion of the 20th ride. I have missed 3 or possibly 4 of these trips in the years since, but it is something almost automatic for me to decide I will ride the Jaunt with Jim every June. When I got home after the ride in 2000, I composed a song about the experience. It ended up being so wordy that I had a hard time establishing phrasing that worked well with my melody and made it almost impossible for me to memorize. I decided to share it with the group a couple of years later, as a poem; reading from the page instead of reciting from memory.
Occasionally, I bring a guitar along on the trip. I don’t do it every year, because it does add one more thing to be concerned about and sometimes I enjoy having a break. But I do miss it when I don’t bring it along and I receive a fair amount of requests from others to make sure to bring it the next time. Last summer was one of those years I didn’t bring it, so when I got home, I mentioned how nice it would be to have a small travel guitar for just such occasions. My wish was granted on my birthday when Cyndie and Julian took me guitar shopping and I picked out a Baby Taylor guitar.
So in honor of the new guitar, this year I worked on memorizing that poem as a song again, the way it was originally intended. It really is targeted to a specific audience, so I’m not sure how well it comes across to others, but I will share the lyrics here because they really do paint a picture of what a week of riding the Jaunt with Jim is like. Don’t worry about getting the itch to sign up to join us this year, after reading it, we’re beyond his maximum already and he’d have to turn you away. But, there’s always next year… we hope.
The Middle of June
What if it fit in the form of a perfect song?
The trial of surviving a ride through a daylong storm?
Some things come ‘round only one time a year
you need to grab and hold tight or chance missing the magic parts
that live in the stories and sweet spots of our minds
You know so many friends who can’t fathom that you do this
And fashioned a bond with the rest of us
who’ve joined you once again
Chorus:
It’s the middle of June
And here I go again
I’m getting back on my bike
To go Jaunting with Jim
You might call it neurotic, that pallid look that arises
when all too quickly I discover my time for packing has expired
and I’m suddenly in some form of campground of some outstate small town
The faces are familiar, though sometimes names come too slow
A ritual of pack and lock the auto, a parting glimpse to ways of yore
You can watch it as it blossoms and the trip so deftly is born
It’s so great to see you, tell me how have you been?
I want to share within your laughter and bow my head to hear your tears
Who is it brought a new bike there, who hasn’t changed theirs in twenty years?
If you put a piece of tape there, it might work fine, just look at his
Can I be your tent neighbor, will you snore more than me?
Once I’m packed in the morning, I’ll have much more than I meant to bring
How can that be Jim’s whistle? Good Morning right back at you
Do I wear my new tights yet or will it be 95 degrees?
I can’t see yet if it’s cloudy, nor discern if there’s any wind
Where’d I put my water bottles and oh my god do I have to pee
We thank you oh Conductor for this special opportunity
Please forgive me if I waiver and consider a jaunt to a B & B
We eat like we think we have to, then have some more when it tastes so good
wait in line to use a restroom and see our bottles all start out full
Then just repeat Jim’s instructions, did he say 59 not 23?
We’ll snack in eighteen hill-free miles, can it be this easy?
The road just rolls past our tires, “On your left” so you say
Who’s that singing while they’re riding? Haven’t you passed me twice today?
We fan out across the horizon, dodging roadkill and debris
Shouting Gravel! Hole! & Bump! while speaking with whomever we happen to be
We notice wild flowers ‘tween the farm fields, gaze on lakes as well as woods
Wave at gawking rural town folk and race with dogs past the point they should
It isn’t always smooth sunny tailwinds, yet it always ends up manageable
And we shout out the joys of elation the sight a water tower can tend to bring
Soon one day gets confused with others, it’s hard to say where we’ve been when
I remember bits of one funny incident, though which town I can’t quite claim
The shared meals more than nourish us, the joint accomplishments give common bond
Communal showering to humble us, and ties like family are coming on
Mere words can’t describe it, when you ride with us then you know
After years of having done this, it gets more important for me to go
All too soon the trip is over, the time just comes, the dancing’s done
Bittersweet to reach the start again, don’t want to stop, can’t wait to get home
What will it feel like back in my bed again, how’ll I do riding on my own
I’ll pretend I hear a morning whistle, the sound of tent poles breaking down
But I’ll rarely find convenience, such as the freedom from planning out
All the details of my day’s plan, as on Jim’s annual ride around
It’s the middle of June
And here I go again
I’m getting back on my bike
To go Jaunting with Jim
© 2000 JWHays
