We got in late and were dirty last night, so the rest day’s morning was spent getting the gear back in good shape.

I have read some books about bicycle touring and the most boring is to hear about what people eat and have for dinner. We will have to highlight, though, this breakfast as one of the trip’s best. Part of the breakfast carte had closed down because we arrived late, and the dish I ordered in confusion over the lack of breakfast choices was some scrambled egg and two cinnamon rolls with banana, cream and syrup. Before this became evident we had further ordered a bomb of a cinnamon roll to share, so the foundation was built for a good day of sightseeing.

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This was not my first visit to Chicago, and I played the role as guide. Before Troels got tired of listening we had a beer on the 95th floor of 360 Chicago (formerly Hancock Center) followed by a river boat tour, two things new to me. The story about how the Chicago River was reversed from running into the Lake Michigan to run out of Lake Michigan is interesting. Chicago gets its drinking water from Lake Michigan which is incompatible with using the lake as the sewerage outlet. So a new piece of river was dug, so that the Chicago River could flow inland and eventually into the Mississippi. In US there are many disputes on who actually owns water. States, Counties and individuals have an opinion. After reversing the river Missouri sued Illinois for polluting their drinking water but it was ruled that St. Louis along the Mississippi should clean the water which they wanted to use for drinking water.

The day ended at Buddy Guy’s “Legends” Blues Bar. Harmonica Hinds played some guitar while we had our dinner. The bar happened to be just around the corner from our hotel. A good tune to listen to today could be Elmore James’ “Dust my Broom”.

For the first time, we do not have to write the name of the city on the map, it is pre-printed:

My kind of town – Chicago is

When we finally hit the lakeshore bike path it was easy to remember, why I love Chicago. The high rise buildings, people having fun along Lake Michigan playing volleyball, cycling and not least swimming. At least a hundred people were taking their laps.

But Chicago is like most of the US the bright side and the flip side. We know that year to date 1770 people haver been shot in Chicago of which 294 have been shot and killed. More than one person per day.

We got in late and had only time for a quick dinner. I hope to show Troels some of my favorite places in Chicago tomorrow.

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Today’s ride in torrential rain

It was 135 miles (218k) and from around noon to around 4 pm it simply poured down on us. Only good thing to say about that is, that we have finally tested our equipment – the bags, and they passed the test brilliantly. Everything was dry but the bicycles will need some care and attention on our rest day Wednesday.

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.

Found out that we should have taken a PhD in Tractor or made some source checking when I wrote about the Charles City tractor yesterday. I was not aware that there was a feud taking place with Iowa as the battleground about who invented the tractor. One of the first towns we came to today was Froelich named after an inventor who lived here around 1900. He more or less invented everything which Edison and Benjamin Franklin did not invent – from Froelich Museum’s website: “John Froelich is listed in the Iowa Inventors Hall of Fame. He is credited with having invented many things: a washing machine, dish washer and dryer, a mechanical corn picker, and the mounting of a gasoline engine on his well drilling outfit. It is this invention that led him to modify the gasoline engine for a tractor for threshing. John Froelich also invented the first air conditioner, which went on to become the Carrier Air Conditioning Company”. Froelich’s tractor company later became part of John Deere and I even sense that the big and mighty John Deere is on a mission to write out yesterday’s Hart and Parr tractor for history, see this time line:

Mississippi

As written earlier the eastern border of Iowa is defined by the Mississippi River. I had played Mississippi Kisses for Troels this morning. I have been looking forward to seeing the river and think of the concert Charlotte purchased tickets for in Hollywood Bowl while we were still on family vacation. Charlotte did not know Leon Bridges, she just thought we should try a concert in the outdoor arena. Try to find it on your music streaming app. As opposed to Missouri which we crossed at a lake, you had the sensation of crossing a huge river used for both leisure activities and commercial purposes. In Prairie du Chien on the Wisconsin side there were several RV campgrounds with boat landings.

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Wisconsin is slightly more hilly than Iowa but much curvier, if you can use that word of a landscape. Rolling hills and a lot of trees cut through the fields. Dairy farms are now seen from the road and we could agree that it resembles a Danish landscape.

Amish

For days we have seen a sign like this in the roadside:

but without seeing any horse carriages. Today we overtook a cart with a driver and two passengers. There are more than 15,000 Amish in Wisconsin. We saw five or six of them today.

First night in Wisconsin and the coming days

Tomorrow we hope to meet Jakob from work. We are starting to have a little sore muscles after having run out of hydrolysate in South Dakota. Thereafter we will head southeast towards Chicago. If we can make it down there by Tuesday evening we plan our second rest day to be in Chicago Wednesday before the final 1000 miles towards New York.

Before we left Garner we had our breakfast and talked with a Nebraskan who was on a tour with some friends. They rode the three wheelers, which I hypothesize are for bikers who because of age and lack of strength become too nervous to handle a big two wheeler.

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He enjoyed not encapsulating himself in a car – he liked to smell the different states and claimed that he could smell the difference between manure from Beef and Dairy cattle. We have gotten there yet, and when we do, we will definitely take the shortest route home.

Freedom Rocks in Iowa

The group was on tour around 16 counties to find the “Freedom Rock” of eachcounty. Iowa has got 99 counties in total and it is a state initiative to erect a rock in each county to honor veterans. Maybe this concept is not 100% transferable to Denmark but with 98 counties in Denmark you could find a common theme and create some attention and tourism in some of the “kommuner” which are not on the common tourist path.

Birthtown of the tractor

Tractors have not always been Troels’ and my main interest but today the tractor suddenly became a talking point. We had turned our mental radars off and were mainly thinking of getting to West Union with the least possible effort in the head wind.

At our lunch stop, however, we spoke with an older gentleman who was working at Charles City scrap yard. He could tell that the tractor was invented in Charles City and as bonus info he could inform that the Little Brown Church was just 10 miles south east of Charles. As he expressed it: “Strange to grow up with the Little Brown Church in your back yard”. The Little Brown Church in Bradford is famous because there is an old song, supposedly known by all Americans, in which this exact little brown church plays a role. According to the Church’s website William Pitts wrote the song before the church was built, forgot about his song, but remembered it, when he later visited Bradford and saw that a brown church had been built on the spot, he had envisioned. Sweet story and a very old fashioned song.

But as mentioned, Charles City is known for the role it played in the history of the American tractor. If tractor is a piece of machinery that can replace horses on a farm there is probably some debate about where the first tractor was built, but the partners Hart and Parr called their construction “a gasoline-powered traction engine” around 1900. The company does not exist anymore – John Deere rules in Iowa

West Union, probably our last night in Iowa

We have found our new blood vein through a state. Route 18 is our road through Iowa. Though we are not enthusiastic about the quality of the road’s shoulder. Yesterday it was very narrow, most of today it was gravel and we had to ride on the road and rely on our Garmin radars to warn against traffic coming from behind.

More sustainable energy

Towns are along our route more frequently and we do not have to plan lunch and refreshment breaks so far in advance. We can just decide to find a watering hole when we need it. Most interesting towns on our way today were Spencer and Emmetsburg. Spencer looked like the Marty McFly’s Hill Valley of “Back to the future” – the part were we are in 1950’ies. It appeared as if shop owners were encouraged to preserve old neon signs and house fronts – but Troels commented that they might not have left the 50’ies yet.

Emmetsburg did not have the same charm but it was a lunch rest stop and we got a small conversation with a worker from Vestas who was part of a crew which was assempling 170 turbines east of the town. Though the project had been opposed by some of the neighbors to the mills it was the worker’s verdict that Iowa wanted the mills because it belives in renewable energy and currently 20-30% of the State’s energy comes from wind. Speaking of wind, we enjoyed another day of tailwind. We travelled a little over 120 miles and have one more full leg in Iowa and one that takes us into Wisconsin.

Garner

Now we are in Garner in the middle of Iowa. Probably not a place you would pick for a vacation as there are more interesting names around with “Lake”, “River” and “Falls” as components. As mentioned earlier it is a day’s travel distance which makes a town appealing.

Probably there were more good target cities for today but Sheldon could remind us about Sheldon Cooper from The Bing Bang Theory. There are no connections whatsoever, but that is not necessary for a fan.

But let us not forget Parkston just yet. After yesterday’s post we took the bicycles around the town. Some of the towns we have seen in South Dakota have looked worn out and as if they were built in the 1960’ies or 70’ies and not maintained since, but Parkston was very manicured and orderly to look at. All churches, it looked, were represented and then we found a nice café in which to have our dinner. Schuvers Café had just changed its owner to a lovely couple who had overtaken recipes and goodwill and preserved the chicken dense carte. But why change a winning recipe? The chicken was fabolous, very moist and delicious. I doubt that many of this blog’s readers will be driving on route 44 in South Dakota any time soon, but if you do, you should leave the road in Parkston and go 3-4 blocks north to the Main Street and find Schuvers Café (non-sponsored recommendation).

Energy Preservation and Sustainability

Despite the current government’s lack of focus on sustainable energy sources, it cannot stop good initiatives around the country. In the news we saw that the city of Minneapolis is going to ban, at least new, drive through fast food outlets. There was a calculation that if 50 million (not only in the US) cars and trucks drive through every day and have their engines running for 3 minutes per order then it equates 1,750,000 gallons of gasoline per day. So times are a’changin – at least in Minneapolis. In Sheldon people do not see ready for initiatives of this kind. But somewhere near Sheldon people do seem ready to put up windwills. Three big blades came through town before sunset.

Today’s ride

The lady at Schuvers Café promised us a virtually flat landscape and our total ascent was about 758 meters, so she was right but unlike most of the previous days we had a sidewind, so 121 miles was an acceptable which kept us between 7 and 8 hours in our saddles. And finally got out of South Dakota and into Iowa. South Dakota has been good and we were not desperate to leave but the sign of progress of crossing a state border feels good. The photo does not do Iowa justice. It was our first sign of crossing the border at Sioux River. Later, however, there was a proper “Welcome” sign but having been just off the bicycles to take the photo below we did not bother to get off again.

We had our lunch in Red Barn in Lennox. Here we sat next to a family of which the parents were teachers and their son was in fourth grade. They seemed genuinely interested in the long talk about what we have experienced until now (they might just have been polite like all other folks we have met in South Dakota) and they got the blog address, so they can follow us to New York, which I hope they will do. Theywere marking the final day of their summer vacation as school starts tomorrow. So from now on we will probably meet a lot of yellow school buses.

The centre of the world (for us) right now

Had we gone by car, we would probably just have said “we just crossed the Missouri”, but now we happen to travel on bicycles and a crossing of the Missouri River is something you build up to. We had 35 miles from Winner to the river. It looked broad and quiet, which is due to the fact that it is a lake or a reservoir created by a dam down the river where we crossed on route 44. The bridge crossing the reservoir is the longest in South Dakota.

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Approaching the river you, or at least I, could sit and wonder how long time it takes a water molecule or a small object in the river to travel a certain distance. Maybe some of the water we have seen in Yellowstone, Shoshone, Big Horn, Cheyenne and White Rivers we saw again this morning? All these rivers run into Missouri which is the longest river in North America and itself a tributary to Mississippi River close to St. Louis.

Green Landscape and Mosquitos, Avenues and Streets

Everybody we meet tells us that it is an usual year we are crossing South Dakota. A lot of rain has painted the countryside in green colors and also created perfect conditions for the South Dakotan Mosquito. When we see a lake or a pool of water, we do not think “how nice”, rather we say “There is another mosquito breeding site”. They are very aggressive but luckily their bites do not keep us awake at night.

Maybe it is perfectly normal but we consider it a little strange that the country roads out here are called avenues (north-south) and streets (east-west). Maybe some DOT (Department of Transportation) people at State Level are just forward thinking and envision that South Dakota could become the new New York some day. It might happen – but by my guesstimate not before the Crazy Horse Monument is finished in the 22nd century.

Today’s Map

You have a set of tactics until you change them. Our idea was to stay close to Interstate 90 but yesterday we fell in love with that neglected and overlooked ole road 44 which runs west to east here in the southern part of South Dakota.

The landscape changed from “Badlands” to more agricultural. Fields of corn, blooming sunflower and milo (sorghum). We were hit by a little photo fatigue today. The landscape is very monotonous and twhat we thought would be cruising without a lot of disturbance ended up being 130 miles with a much uphill (>1500 m total ascent) and much downhill. Which is not the same as if the undulations had been evened out.

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Little River, Adrian and time zones

When we rather seamlessly crossed the border between Jackson and Mellette County we also drove into the central time zone and lost an hour. We had our lunch in Little River and thought about the native American, Adrian, whom we had bought an ice-cream in Rapid City yesterday. He told us that we were destined to come through his home town Little River on our way to Interior. Maybe he did not know what he was talking about, since Little River was 80 miles on the other side of Interior or maybe it was just his pathfinding and spiritual skills that told him that we would somehow end up in Little River. I was not sure, if mentioning Adrian’s name in Little River would give us some cheap points or if we would get kicked out of town, so I dared only mention his name a couple of times when we had our Indian Taco. Let us not hope that Adrian thinks he is missed severely back home in Little River – at least nobody I spoke with showed any sign of recognition, though Little River is a town of less than 100 souls.

Tonight we stay in Winner

Apart from being the world capital for pheasants (every town is the world’s something around here) and the birth town of Frank Leahy a football coach who made it outside the county there is not much to report unless we decide to stay and do some real original investigations ourselves, which I hope we will not. We’d rather get on our bicycles tomorrow and find what we expect to be our last town in South Dakota to visit.

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One of the important milestones, Mt. Rushmore was reached early in the morning after we left our home away from home, two nights in the same motel:

Mt Rushmore

“Google tries to cheat you” a guy said earlier in the week. And yes, as a bicyclist, you have to look at a map once in a while, otherwise you are sent on all possible detours. The shortest route up to Mt. Rushmore was about 20 miles, very beautiful and with a significant part of the 20 miles uphill. We had a long day ahead of us, so it was quickly in and out with just enough time to ask a lady to take a couple of pictures:

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Rapid City to Interior

After a spectacular morning, we had our lunch in Rapid City opposite a bike store, where we could buy a few supplies. I had our only spare tire, Troels bought another, so we have two. Our tires start to show signs of what they have been through, around 2500 km not slick asphalt all of it.

Our cunning plan was to stay close to the west to east blood vein of South Dakota: Interstate 90. Also in South Dakota, you are allowed as a bicyclist to pedal the freeways. At least the first part, though, we had decided on the more southerly route 44 which would take us through the Badlands. With a noticeable tailwind and an inspiring scenery we made it to Interior before 5 pm. Population 67 people before we rolled in and a very scenic place with some houses thrown in some order so it can be called a small town. Enjoy some of the photos:

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One Forth through South Dakota