Finally we get to the centerpiece of this trip - the High Trestle Trail. This is one of Iowa's newer Rails to Trails efforts, and it's a beauty! The trail itself is fairly long, but we just rode the segment between Woodward and Madrid where the High Trestle is (round trip 13 miles). The Woodward trailhead is great - parking, green space, flush toilets and picnic tables. It's less than 3 miles to the main attraction - The Trestle.

The bridge is just beautiful, decorated with concrete pillars with shiny stuff embedded in them and these crazy self-rusting decorative... arches?  Not sure what to call them. But the best thing about the bridge is the silence. I've been on bridges that high before, but not without the roar of traffic. This is just bikes and peds.
 

And when we finally get to Madrid (rhymes with "bad kid"), we find the best amenity of all - a trailside bar. With Blue Moon on tap!

If you can have fun on a trip to Des Moines, you can have fun anywhere, right?  Well, we had fun. Briefly, we drove to Des Moines to use up a free hotel night that was worth more in Iowa than in Minnesota. The centerpiece of the trip was actually a bike ride on the High Trestle Trail north of Des Moines, which did not disappoint. But for bonus fun we stopped on the way down to bike at a MN state park, visited the Science Center of Iowa, and enjoyed an excellent tour of the spectacular Iowa capitol building. Oh, and had a lovely evening in Owatonna on the way home.

Driving down we marvelled at the fighter jet sculpture at the Owatonna airport and an enormous wind farm just south of the Iowa border. The weather was picture-book perfect the whole way.


We stopped at Myre Big Island State Park just outside Albert Lea for a little biking. It was very scenic, but hillier than anticipated, so our 5-6 mile ride pretty much wore us out.


After our biking stop it was only another 2 hours to Des Moines. Checked into our hotel (Residence Inn Des Moines) and wandered over to the nearby Iowa Science Center. The museum was definitely kid stuff, but amusing enough for a quiet evening. We really enjoyed the Imax Show: Mysteries of the Unseen World.


A lively restaurant/bar district was just a short walk from the hotel on Court St. We had a delicious dinner at Dos Rios Cantina. The empanadas were a work of art. Finished up Wednesday evening in the hotel hot tub, which we had all to ourselves.

Slide show in reverse order, since that's just how Photobucket rolls.

Thursday turned out to be a beautiful, brisk fall day. Good timing because this was the day we'd planned to spend biking on Madeline Island, the centerpiece of the trip. Madeline Island looks like such an idyllic place to live, but I couldn't help thinking about the logistics as we rode across on the ferry. The friendly woman in the tiny Chamber of Commerce office answered some of my questions. Yes, the natives get a discount card for the ferry, but it is still expensive: several hundreds of dollars per year even if you leave your car behind and do all your mainland errands on foot. Apparently having friends on the mainland who you can carpool to the store with is a godsend, and almost a necessity once your kids outgrow the elementary school on the island and need places to stay overnight so they can participate in afterschool activities.

Besides chatting with the locals, we hung around town long enough to stock up on cheese and crackers for lunch, then hopped on our bikes and headed for beautiful Big Bay State Park on the other side of the island for a few hours, then back to the ferry, taking the longer route along the south shore to get us to 20 miles, our unofficial goal for the day. It was near sunset when we got back to the mainland, but we had time to pick up a couple of wearable souvenirs in the little tourist stores (earrings for me, a tie-dyed sweatshirt for Richard). Oh, and and a bottle of wine to drink by the fireplace back at the B&B.

Madeline Island Ferry (Thursday, Sept 10) Thursday brought us a beautiful, brisk fall day. We rode our bikes down the long hill to the docks and took the 10am ferry to the island.

( More pictures behind cut )

The last 2 years Richard and I did a lot of biking, including a few overnight bike trips that were a lot of fun. This year we haven't done much biking, partly because of the weather and partly because Richard was having alternating problems with a knee and a hip most of the summer and I was obsessed with skating and Pilates. His joints finally got better about the time the weather started looking pleasantly cool, so I took Labor Day week off work for a 3-night bike trip Up North. The weather turned out not quite as great as initially predicted, but it was good enough. We did a lot of driving, a bit of sight-seeing, and 72 miles of biking. We also did quite a lot of eating and drinking, which kind of cancelled out all the exercise in the health department but added to the fun. 

Outside Aquarium, watching lift bridge descend Starting off with the quintessential Duluth tourist picture. Look, look! The bridge is moving! See, there it goes. Isn't the little control house right in the middle adorable? That's where I'd live if I were looking for a place to roost in a post-apocalyptic Duluth. ( Read more... )

After a thoroughly dismal October we finally had a short taste of Indian summer last week, so I impulsively took a couple of days off work and dragged Richard down to Lanesboro for an overnight bike trip. One nice thing about November - you can get a room in the nicest Bed and Breakfast in town with no notice and no reservations. So we did. We managed to get in a little biking each day on the Root River Trail. We also did a little shopping, coming home with a case of local wine and a hand-made solid oak Amish wastebasket.


( B&B pictures behind the cut. )

I got so carried away with political posts and complaining about traffic snarls that I haven't posted anything about what I've been doing for the past two months. I don't remember anything I did that I didn't take pictures of, which mostly seems to be bike trips. This one was just a little afternoon trip with my friend Trisha. I had ridden a the entire eastern portion of the stupidly named "Southwest LRT Corridor," which actually comprises two or three different trails traversing several western suburbs. However, I have never ridden on either of the segments west of Hopkins. The 6-mile stretch from Excelsior to Victoria was one I wanted to try. I rode with my friend Trisha.

We put our bikes in the van and drove to Excelsior, unfortunately arriving in the middle of a festive local event called "Apple Days." We were still able to find street parking, picked our way through the bacchanalian throngs to the trail, and rode west to the little town of Victoria. The trail is quite pleasant, mostly shaded and flat. Crushed limestone rather than asphalt, but in good condition. Most of the trail runs through a posh region of lakeside exurb, with a little open prairie as it approaches Victoria. At the point where the trail hits Carver Park there is a choice of not one but TWO taverns. Whee! We picked the more upscale Victoria House and had beer and burgers on the terrace with a view of Steiger Lake. We considered riding on into the park, but the weather was looking threatening so we headed back, arriving at our car shortly after it started to drizzle.

This is part of a series of bike trips documented by phone-camera, as my regular camera had gone missing. ( Pictures here. )

The walk-around exhibit at the top of the pit offers so many irresistible photo ops...

( why is my LJ cut not working??? )

	And they're still scraping away at it Last time I was here this part of the mine was full of water. Hibbing Taconite decided to come back and take some more ore out, so they drained it again. And you know where all that water goes? They pump it up over the ridge and down the road into the Hibbing storm sewers! That town must have the most overbuilt storm sewer system in the country. See that cute little steam shovel down there? Do you realize just how big it really is? Expand this picture and see if you an find the people.
	And this isn't even the biggest ore truck And here's where we find out just what the scale of this mining equipment really is. This is the little 170-ton truck. (the newer ones are 240 tons). Looks like something Fisher-Price would build if their target market was the Jolly Green Giant's family.
	Here's Richard in a little ore bucket
	And here's Sharon in another ore bucket
	This seemed like a really big tire until we saw the ones on the other side
	These photo ops are just irresistible
	And we thought the last tire was big!
	Oh no! This one is bigger yet! This tire is, no lie, 12 feet tall!
	This is just too much fun!

We really didn't mind when we woke up on Tuesday to a dreary all day rain. We'd been vacationing pretty strenuously up to that point, and a day without biking or swimming didn't sound so bad. I've been trying to see the Tower-Soudan Mine for over 20 years, but have never managed to get there in time for the last tour of the day. I finally made it, and had a great time.

Remember how proud Mountain Iron is about being the first mine on the range? What they neglected to mention is that they were just the first on the Mesabi Range. The Soudan mine, on the Vermilion Range, had about a 10-year jump on them. I now know that plus a ton of other fun facts, like how long it takes to drop half a mile into the earth inside a 100-year-old miner's cage, and why iron mining is so much safer than coal mining (except for the hearing loss), and why the mine bosses made a point of integrating the mining teams, and why they shut down the mine with untold tons of high-grade ore still left in it. But the most amazing thing was how much the inside of a 19th-century iron mine looks like a modern first person shooter. Holy crap, there is even a top-secret physics lab down there on the 27th level!! It really is Black Mesa! I forgot to bring my camera for the underground portion of the tour, so you don't get to see the view from the ore car that looks exactly like the point I quit playing Half Life 1 because I couldn't find my way out of the endless miles of mining tunnel. But the pictures I took on the upper level are almost as much fun. Some sights really do look better in the rain.

( pictures here )

We got up on Sunday and indulged in the hotel's free DIY breakfast. The food was about what you'd get at McDonald's (flat eggs, sausage, biscuits, waffles, muffins) but it was free and quick. We'd been considering a morning bike ride, but when we realized how hot it already was at 10am we decided to just head for the lake. The reason we'd started our trip in the midst of Labor Day Weekend was to take advantage of the surprising burst of swimming weather, which was not expected to last past the weekend. 

To my great relief, McCarthy Beach State Park is just as beautiful as I remembered: best state park in Minnesota!  Big Sturgeon Lake is a natural sand-bottom lake with an enormous sandy beach bordered by majestic pines. The park service has scattered numerous picnic tables and benches in the shade of the pines with strategically placed retaining walls between the pines and the sand that provide even more places to sit. The lake is crystal clear and has no weeds or rocks on the bottom - just sand and snails.  There's a big new changing house with flush toilets, and a big parking lot that wasn't close to full. And best of all, still no lifeguards to stop you from using float toys.  A good thing, since my whole vacation had been planned around float toys and bicycles!

The most amazing thing about this gorgeous park is how obscure it is. Judging by my brief survey of people near us on the beach, it seems to be used exclusively by 1) Iron Range locals and 2) people who heard about it from Iron Range locals "Yeah, my wife's cousin used to work at the park...").
( more behind the cut )

Picture are here