Day 24 - Tuesday September 15th

I have renumbered my days to only include days I ride. Therefore today was my 24th day of riding instead of my 26th day on the road + a week at home.

Here are the stats!

Hudson, WI to Chaska, MN
71.85 miles
5:12.32 hrs
28.4 max
12.5 avg

Leaving home was very difficult both emotionally and physically. I had not been on my bike for more than 2 hours during my week off and Hudson seemed like a place that I should be ending my bike trip, my final destination versus a midpoint. I knew this portion of the trip would be challenging mentally as well. Western MN is full of flat land and rolling hills (if you can even call them that) giving me much time to ponder the vast unknown and think about my life in general. This, of course, is something that I feel I need but is not something that I looked forward to. Knowing that this was going to be an emotional, mental, and physical challenge I decided to face it head on by not listening to my ipod. I did this also for safety because making my way through MSP would have have been safe while listening to an ipod.

My mood was pretty gloomy today with all the emotion running. I met up with another biker on a 30 mile ride who joined me for 10 miles or so, just over the boarder of MN. It was fun to chat with him and he seemed very impressed with my trip. I was impressed with the half ironman that he just completed the previous weekend!

I never would have thought that I would ever have any trouble navigating through Minneapolis/Saint Paul. I guess it is because I know how things should work in this area and when things weren't exactly how I thought, or roads were closed, it was overly frustrating. It took me a VERY long time to get through these cities and therefore I did not get as far as I hoped during today's ride. I made it to Chaska, MN, the birth place of my grandfather Raymond, and I spent the night illegally in some wildlife preserve on the south side of the 41/60 intersection. I was nervous the whole night that someone was going to come by and kick me off or even worse; give me an expensive ticket!

When I pulled into Chaska and it was starting to get dark, I spent about an hour and a half asking people if they knew of a place to camp near by. I had high hopes for someone from MN to offer me a place to stay (their back yard), but was unfortunately not granted this privilege. Come on' Minnesota, you people are supposed to be some of the nicest in the country! I suppose it doesn't help that I was asking people coming out of Wallgreen's.

Since I did not make very good time today, tomorrow will be quite a long ride; at least 115 miles. At least I know that I have a place to stay in Cottonwood, MN.