All was quiet on the Midwestern front at St. Cloud’s Rivers Edge Park… Til the midnight bell tolled. Quietly nestled in our sleeping bags like stuffed stockings under the mantel, we lay blissfully unaware of the terrors that would soon unfold.
Dark obelisks rose from the earth one by one, whirring to life with sinister hydraulic intent…
Sprinklers.
The demon shafts arced frigid rainbows across us in the dead of night, soaking our tents and unprotected bikes. We scrambled like Denny’s sous chefs to the safety of floodlit cement, caught between wet socks and a hard place to rest our heads. There we lay, petrified in
petrichor till the morning sun banished our wet torment back to the troposphere.
It wasn’t our best night’s sleep, so we eased back into biking shape with a comforting breakfast at Ronald McDonald’s fine dining establishment #37,674 and got to work with a grimace on our 83 miler to the Mall of America. The terrain rolled gently in tandem with the clouds, so we followed suit and enjoyed a pleasant ride into Minneapolis. Emerson’s relatives surprised us again with a clutch refuel of water, bars and delicious Gatorlyte along the way, keeping us rolling when the afternoon lethargy came knocking.
Dane once more guided us home, a coup de grace navigation performance which capped his time riding with us. We are liable to end up somewhere between Lisbon and Lesotho without his adept spatial reasoning and real time problem solving ability, but we will do our best to decipher elevation in his stead.
Our ride through thrumming Minneapolis downtown at the lovely Best Western Plus, where we met Dane’s mom Kristin, who treated us to a warm welcome and a delicious dinner at Chevy’s, restoring the mana we left on the tarmac.
Now we roost in comfort with down pillows and high thread count sheets, enjoying the buzz of humanity in contrast to the hum of cicadas and rattle of cornstalks. Tomorrow we become Macaulay Culkin archetypes and parlay with indoor SpongeBob roller coasters before we say our final goodbyes to our Charleston Chew-obsessed Magellan.
Until then… All quiet on the Best Western front.