Today was a close second for new worst day of the trip. We planned on going 92 miles today but we only went 70 and that was being on the road at 7 am and not getting to camp at Wabasha, Minnesota until 7 pm. About 3 pm we new we were to far away from our intended camping spot in Winona so we decided where we could get to and I started phoning and here we are in Wabasha. It was an all time record high temperature for Minnesota today! We would pedal for a ways and then it would thunder so loud it would startle me and then pour rain. Then it would quit, the sun would come out, and it would be 90 degrees and 90 % humidity. I would get soaked from the rain than soaked from sweat.

everything was up and down today. We went up a bunch of hills that were 8 % grade and steeper. I can’t bicycle that steep so I would walk the hills pushing my bike. The last one I walked for two miles at 8% grade.  None of the hills,passes, and Mountains we had in Oregon, Montana, or Idaho were near as tough as the ones here in Minnesota.  We are going to sleep in until 7 am tomorrow and have a short and easy day of 30 miles, and then we are having a rest day in Winona, Minnesota on Saturday. These back to back to back killer days are wearing me out. I am ready for a rest day!

love you all. Dee

This is what I look like after peddling up a big hill. Today was a new worst day! Started out with torrential downpour all morning. It did some serious raining. It rains 17 inches a year in this area and it seemed like it was going to do it all today. I put a bunch of mosquito repellent on this morning and I put a bunch in my hair because the mosquitos get ento my helmet and drive me crazy. The rain was running into my eyes with mosquito repellent from my head mixed in and it burned like crazy. I kept stopping and rubbing my eyes because they hurt so bad.

i imagine things happening all day long, and with my creative and crazy imagination it is usually pretty crazy. Today I kept imagining that a nice old lady who saw us struggling in the rain out her window would come out and yell at us to take a break, and come in and drink a cup of hot coffee, and rest for a bit. Every house we rode by I would look at expectantly and longingly but to no avail. 

it was super hilly today. It was a series of hills one after the other and a bunch were super steep. I had to get off and push my bike 5 times, that is a new record for me.  Usually when I get off and walk John keeps on pedaling right by me. Today he did  that and he got to the top of the hill and was so cold that didn’t get his feet unlocked and fell over. I looked up the hill and he was on the ground with his bike on him. If I had thought faster I would have taken a picture of him.

besides the rain and the hills we also had wind, like in head wind, like in strong head wind. We biked 10 hours and still had ony bicycled 63 miles, lowest mph average for the day for the trip. 

We called to reserve a spot in the campground and the lady said all the other tent campers had pulled out or cancelled because a big storm was coming in tonight so we decided to stay in a motel. Good choice because it is pouring outside as I write this.

so tomorrow we need to bicycle 86 miles to get to the camp sight we reserved. I hope it doesn’t rain and that there aren’t a bunch of hills, but I know I can’t control that  so I will “Enjoy the Suck”

i don’t know it was great scenery today as we ride next to the Mississippi because I couldn’t see anything most of the day! 

Now this may sound like grumbling, but I am not, really. Just sharing with you the circumstances of our day so you can feel sorry for me, no, no, just kidding 🙂 So you can pray lots of strength for me!

love you all very much. Dee

Rode 73 miles today. Lots of hills but no wind and very nice weather. The highlight of today was the people we met at cafe’s, convient stores, and our host home tonight. With all of our panniers on our bicycles we attract a lot of attention and people like to talk to us about what we are doing. We met a fellow from Germany that sold his $40,000 car and all that he owned and is living on his bicycle touring the USA for three years. Very nice guy but I had to work hard to understand him. Talked to a fellow who was doing the route we are but in reverse but he is doing it in a month! He did 140 miles the day before we talked to him. Made me feel like a wimp though his packs were half what ours are because he is Hoteling it and doing all his eating in restaurants. The people who we are staying with tonight compliments of “Warm Showers” are super nice and we ate a wonderful dinner with them including ice cream! They are going to get up and fix us breakfast as well. 

Tomorrow we are doing 72 miles again and we will be riding along the Mississippi River all day and camping right on the river. The word that we got from our host is that it will be a very hilly ride. Every place a river runs into the Mississippi there is a steep down followed by a steep up, Oh joy!

Just for your information this morning I weighed 208 lbs. that is 17 lbs less than the day we started when I weighed 225 lbs. My goal is to lose 20 more lbs before the end of the trip and weigh 188 lbs, what I weighed when Patty and I got married. By the way I bought a small light portable scale and it packs nicely in one of my panniers and only weighs 2.8 lbs. I used at home for several weeks before we left comparing it to our good bathroom scales and it was right on for accuracy.

 I haven’t been getting very much studying in as was my goal because the days on the bicycle have been so long and I have been so tired in the evening, I usually just get in my normal Bible reading done with a little reading in. I have been getting in many hours of praying each day while I ride my bicycle and work at remembering each of you.

love you all. Dee

Rode 73 miles today. Lots of hills but no wind and very nice weather. The highlight of today was the people we met at cafe’s, convient stores, and our host home tonight. With all of our panniers on our bicycles we attract a lot of attention and people like to talk to us about what we are doing. We met a fellow from Germany that sold his $40,000 car and all that he owned and is living on his bicycle touring the USA for three years. Very nice guy but I had to work hard to understand him. Talked to a fellow who was doing the route we are but in reverse but he is doing it in a month! He did 140 miles the day before we talked to him. Made me feel like a wimp though his packs were half what ours are because he is Hoteling it and doing all his eating in restaurants. The people who we are staying with tonight compliments of “Warm Showers” are super nice and we ate a wonderful dinner with them including ice cream! They are going to get up and fix us breakfast as well. 

Tomorrow we are doing 72 miles again and we will be riding along the Mississippi River all day and camping right on the river. The word that we got from our host is that it will be a very hilly ride. Every place a river runs into the Mississippi there is a steep down followed by a steep up, Oh joy!

Just for your information this morning I weighed 208 lbs. that is 17 lbs less than the day we started when I weighed 225 lbs. My goal is to lose 20 more lbs before the end of the trip and weigh 188 lbs, what I weighed when Patty and I got married. By the way I bought a small light portable scale and it packs nicely in one of my panniers and only weighs 2.8 lbs. I used at home for several weeks before we left comparing it to our good bathroom scales and it was right on for accuracy.

 I haven’t been getting very much studying in as was my goal because the days on the bicycle have been so long and I have been so tired in the evening, I usually just get in my normal Bible reading done with a little reading in. I have been getting in many hours of praying each day while I ride my bicycle and work at remembering each of you.

love you all. Dee

We bicycled 84 miles today and were on the road 10 hours, and it was a great day. The weather was perfect, sunny with big, white, puffy clouds, and the temperature was around 75 most of the day. We had a tail wind of about 5 mph most of the day and that was very,very nice. There were no mosquito’s harassing us at all, a totally bug free day, except for bazillions of grasshoppers but they haven’t bitten me yet. There were no hills just a few small ones that were no problem peddling up. We got to bike the first 40 miles on the Wobegon bicycle trail which is so relaxing with no traffic to worry about. The second 40 miles was on rural farm roads with very little traffic, and the cars that we did see went way around us, and waved and gave us thumbs up . We road by lots of dairies and the sweet aroma of the cow manure gave me a nice warm feeling inside as it prompted lots of memories of growing up on the farm. We talked to lots of very friendly people who were very interested in our trip and asked lots of questions. Yep, nice day. Tomorrow we are scheduled to ride 70 miles to St Croix, Wisconsin and stay with a “Warm Shower” host couple.

tomorrow after 38 miles of riding we will be at 2000 miles and I will dance and sing. Look for it. Love you all. Dee

Today we rode all day, 70 miles on the Wobegon trail. It is an old railroad track that was cleaned up and paved. No motor vehicles allowed. You can see from the picture that it was very pretty. Went along a lot of lakes and farms. It was nice because we didn’t have to worry about cars and trucks. The only thing that wasn’t perfect today was the wind. We had a 13 to18 mph head wind all morning. You can see in the picture with my coat being blown sideways. We had to pedal like a dog to go 6 or 7 mph. Really made for a long day.  According to the weather report we were supposed to get rained on today, but the thunder storms all seemed to miss us. We get to ride on the trail for about half the day tomorrow and the weather report says 5 mph winds at our backs! Whooooeeeee that will be nice! We are camping at the city park in Sauk Center, Minnesota. Funny name for a town. This morning when we were fighting the wind I was calling the town Suck Center in honor of my motto for the trip adopted from the book on training Navy Seals. “Enjoy the suck”, the suck being when you are gasping for breath, your tongue is hanging out and you keep going. This campground had a shower and it felt so good. I looked in the mirror when I went in to shower and I had salt crystals all over me. I must have sweated a lot. Tomorrow we are going 90 miles, but it should be an easier day if the weatherman is right, hoping so.

Today as we rode along the bike trail there were billions of grasshoppers. They would be on the trail and would fly off right as we got to them. There so many it looked like the parting of the waves, but only it was grasshoppers. There are lots of dead critters along the road. Deer, saw an elk someone had hit, skunks, lots of birds, snakes. Do know what animal is most often dead along the road? Frogs! Lots of dead frogs. Almost all of them are laying on their backs with their legs sticking out sideways. Looks like they are taking a nap. There are so many of them that I can’t help not running over some of them regularly. Do you know what happens when a bicycle tire runs over a deaf frog? It explodes and frog guts fly everywhere and it gets all over my bike. Cleaned it off a couple days ago because it was looking kind of gross.

we are just 20 miles short of 1900 miles which will be half way done for the trip.  We are going to call 2000 the “official half way point for the sake of my next dance and song along the road celebrating making it that far. Hope you don’t miss it. Love you all. Dee

Last night we calculated today’s ride at 55 miles. I was quite happy with the prospect of a shorter ride. After 20 miles we realized that we had made a mistake so we recalculate the distance and it was 80 miles.. It actually turned out to be 82 miles. We pulled in to camp at 6:30 pm, almost 11 hours on the road. As we discussed the mistake I couldn’t rememember how we came up with the number and whether it was me or John, and John couldn’t remember either so I am saying it was John. I will have to read John’s to see if he blamed me.

lots of rolling hills today. I have three sprockets in the front on my bike and 9 in the back. The small sprocket is the lowest geared one. Today I was on the small sprocket the entire day. I could have shifted out of it going downhill, but I just coast then and stand up on my pedals to give my butt a rest.

but it was a good day and I enjoyed the ride very much in spite of the miles and the hills. Reason #1 is even though we are in Minnesota I got no mosquito bites, Hallelejah! I am a mosquito magnet so to have a day with no mosquito bites is near miraculous. Reason #2 is that it didn’t rain, I hate riding in the rain! Reason #3 it was 65 degrees most of day and overcast so riding was very comfortable temperature wise. Reason #4 there was a 6 foot shoulder most of the day so there wasn’t the constant looking in my mirror worrying about drivers behind me hitting me, and ruining Patty’s day. Reason #5 the country side and scenery was great making riding way less monotonous and boring. Reason #6 because . of the wide shoulders on the rode I felt comfortable listening to a sermon as I rode by John Piper and it was superb and I was very blessed by it. Reason #7 we stopped at a little cafe in Cormorant, Minnesota and I had the best cup of coffee I have ever had in my life, wow, it was good, and the roast beef and cheddar cheese sandwich on toasted rye bread was amazing as well. And to top it all off I am laying in my warm comfortable tent writing this, reading and snacking on the dried pears my wife mailed to me, doesn’t get much better than that!.

tomorrow we have a treat. We will be riding on a bicycle trail that used to be a railroad track but cleared of the tracks and ties and paved. It is 184 miles long. We will ride on 65 miles of it tomorrow. No cars or trucks. I think I will listen to 4 or 5 sermons! 

Love vet you all very much. Dee

Yesterday when we were riding from Fargo, North Dakota to Moorhead, Minnesota we had to break a little, itty bitty rule of sorts. All that divides the two cities is the Red River and in looking at our maps we saw that there was a bicycle/foot bridge that we could cross that would save us a lot of miles, time, and riding in heavy traffic. When we got to the bridge it had a barrier across it because of major road work on the Minnesota side. It was getting close to 6 pm by then and work should be done for the day and we really didn’t want to go the extra miles to get to the big bridge so we went around the barrier. As we road on the other side there was zero traffic 🙂 I was wondering to myself if there was a big ticket for riding where we were. Motivated me to pedal faster. There were a couple other barriers as we went along but we got around them by riding on the grass. Got to the very end and there were more barriers and a number of trucks and workers, but as we pushed our bikes around the final barriers on the grass to freedom they never said a word to us. Probably didn’t matter to them. Me with my extra wild imagination, imagined helicopters zooming in over our heads with someone on a bull horn yelling at us telling us we were going to get arrested, and then as we pedaled faster ignoring their warnings a couple of big German shepherd dogs were released to chase us down prompting us to pedal even faster. Life is so much more exciting if you can have adventures in your head. I am totally drug free, really. Love you all. Dee

Have you ever felt tired? I have for sure and the older I get the more I feel tired, and now with this Parkinson’s disease as part of my life tiredness is pretty much a constant. But with that said, I have never felt more intense, numbing tiredness than I have on this bicycle trip. Tiredness if dwelt on for long can almost paralyze a person, and can quickly move from our body to our mind. Once that shift has happened we become unmotivated, lethargic, indifferent, sad, complacent, even depressed. Physical and mental tiredness will influence greatly our choices, our relationships, and practically every area of our life. 

So what should a tired person do to fight this? Well here is my plan and strategy, because I want to fight against every negative thing in my life, not just give into it.

(1) remind myself that every one gets tired, that is the way life is. Don’t consider it a strange thing, a bad thing, a curse, or a respecter  of persons.

(2) because of truth #1, I will never allow self-pity to stay in my thoughts. I will exercise self-control over my thinking and take every thought captive.  Self-pity is a killer of everything good in us.

(3) controlling my thoughts is the primary way of dealing with tiredness so I need to continually grow in the skill and discipline of doing that. Memorizing Key Bible verses and choosing to meditate on them when my thinking goes bad is my primary strategy. It becomes a habit if worked on faithfully.

(4) we were created by God for accomplishment. When we work hard at accomplishing significant things with our life we will feel tired, and the harder we work the tireder we will feel. Tiredness is a badge of accomplishment. “It feels so good to be tired!” That is what I say to myself, instead of, “Whooeee I am so tired!”

(5) God gives energy and strength, and He gives it to those who depend on Him, who trust Him, who love Him, who serve Him, and He gives it to those who ask for it, and the more we ask, the more He gives.

Two of my key verses I meditate on when tired is Psalms 18:1, “I love You, O Lord, my strength”. 

Psalms 18:31′ “Who is God, but The Lord? And who is a rock except our God, the God who girds me with strength and makes me successful?”

“It feels so good to be tire! O Lord, give me Your strength so I can do more”

(6) Rest is critical for strength. Jesus rested. Today is a rest day and we have one each week. We rest every 5 miles for a couple of minutes just standing over our bikes. We take a longer break several times each day to eat and recover.  While riding I stand up on the pedals and quit pedaling for about 10 seconds just about every mile. It feels so good!  I get to bed so I can get plenty of sleep for the next days accomplishments.

(7) gratitude and joy give lots of strength and energy. I say, “Thank You, Lord!” All day long, over and over again. 

This is my simple plan and it works quite well for me. I am not a bundle of energy, but I am not defeated by hard things, and I look forward to the next big goals in my life that God leads me to set.

We went 70+ miles on this road and there wasn’t even a teensy bend in it . Straight  forever!