Day 25 Dodgeville to Fort Atkinson

Not just another day on the road. Wyoming, South Dakota and Iowa had lulled us into a daily routine, which we welcomed to be pulled out of today.

Jakob bring lunch and “gunpowder”

Jakob from Arla Foods Ingredients who is preparing the soil for our joint venture with Foremost Farms here in Wisconsin replenished our stock of whey protein hydrolysate by taking the trip from Madison to Dodgeville and have a cup of breakfast coffee with us. It was a little emotional to see a person from the old real world after so many days on the road in our small cocoon, and Jakob had even made three open rye bread sandwiches per person for our trip. With four small tomatoes per meal bag. He also in a very indiscrete way handed us two bags of whey protein hydrolysate in the breakfast room where we sat. Enough to serve a tour de France team, we left a little at the hotel and are now travelling with ample stock to carry us to New York.

Jakob’s lunch came in handy

Along the way we got confirmation that we were welcome at TREK’s headquarters in Waterloo, WI and in order to be there before end of work day we had to push hard to make it. First on route 18, which became very busy and dirty, so Troels wanted to get off to enjoy Jakob’s lunch pack. Troels was about to park his bicycle on the ramp up to 18, which by the way said “No bicycles on the highway”. He was observed by a police man, who told us to take another route and was very careful to take down our names with telephone numbers. Followingly we suddenly found ourselves on a nice bike path through Madison. We avoided all the hassle of a highway and only had to deal with a lot of stop and goes because we had to cross some roads now and then. We know that the Danish addiction to rye bread is a little trivial but having fought in the central states to get some proper food – many small towns have a gas station and one or two fast food restaurants – we did hail the rye bread and sent our regards to Jakob.

TREK in Waterloo

The time we saved from having our lunch on the go meant that we could arrive at TREK’s headquarters before 3 pm. A lady by the name of Cindy Wagner was our contact but soon we had been introduce to John Burke, CEO of TREK, Jim who helped us with directions to our next town and Mitchell who gave us a royal tour around the facilities. When you look at a (small) map of the US, Waterloo is just a little outside Madision but in real life, it felt as a bit of detour when we wanted to head SE from Madison to Chicago. But is was all worth it. We got an image of a company with heart and brain. Compassion for the bicycles produced with an emphasis on Science and Human Resources. If our bicycles behave the way they have until now, we both felt a little more inclined to make our next purchase a bicycle from Waterloo as well.

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Fort Atkinson

On Jim’s guidance and a little help from our GPS, we had a beautiful ride from Waterloo down to Fort Atkinson. We are still in Wisconsin and the border to Illinois is only 20-30 miles from here. We have booked our hotel for two nights in Chicago, so we will get up early and make it 125 miles tomorrow.