Day 32. Enderlin to Glyndon, MN, 80 miles

I AM IN MINNESOTA!!

Today I made it through North Dakota, which I feel like I’ve been running from since I arrived. It’s been a hard state to ride a bike through—just like the first time—and while I have much love for it, I am glad to be out of the plains.

I was initially aiming for Fargo today, but I got out of the motel at 6 and the riding was beautiful, and by 20 or so miles in I’d decided to make a break for Minnesota.

It is an indescribable feeling to ride a flat and empty county road just after sunrise, to have the whole countryside to yourself and to be smelling it and hearing it and rolling through it without the wind whistling in your ears; it’s one of the things bike tour is for. I was elated.

A couple of people had told me the land flattened out after Jamestown, but Jamestown isn’t on my route—it’s north of me—so I’d tucked that bit of intel away and forgotten about it. Then, late in my ride yesterday, I saw a sign for the Jamestown junction, and soon after the landscape indeed smoothed out. Today was remarkably flat—under 600 feet of climbing—which, paired with the wind starting to turn in my favor, made for faster riding than I’ve done in quite some time.

I knew there was a storm coming (sound familiar?), but all there was to do was ride. I’m off the ACA route through the Midwest as of Fargo, so I was using paper and Google maps to make my way. Googlemaps can be idiosyncratic, though, and by the second gravel road it put me on—which I raced through hoping to be off it before the rain arrived and turned it to mud—I’d decided to do some of my own decision making. I’ll have to see if I like this method or want to use RideWithGPS to map out the route ahead of time and then load it into my device. Problem is I don’t much trust RWGPS either—at one point in Issaquah it routed me down a mountain bike trail, all “Bikes are bikes! Crush it on dirt!”

Early in the day I saw this churchlet from the road, with a little cemetery next door, but something about the building seemed off and made me do a double take. When I stopped to take a closer look, I realized it was a fake, a dummy building presumably there to anchor the small cemetery that remained on the land.

I’ve started seeing more cemeteries in the last couple of days; I saw so few in Washington and Montana that I wondered where they put their dead. In the south Joyce and I had seen a lot more family plots on residential land, and I wondered if that was the case out west. Anyone know?

In any case, I’m seeing more now, and it was the purest and most unbelievable luck that right as the storm hit I happened on a cemetery that was encircled by trees. Trees are hard to come by in the plains, and when you see them they usually signify private property within their bounds. Cemeteries are the sometimes exception, making them a desirable rest spot; I’d stopped in one for a break outside Napoleon, only to realize it was set up for a burial and likely not the best hangout spot.

This one was totally deserted, with no church nearby, and I made my way in and under the perfect hiding tree right as the rain hit. It was magical. The tree had a wonderful canopy with a convenient entrance, and I leaned my bike against it and stood behind the tree as the sky turned completely dark and the worst of the rain lashed the trees and lightning and thunder did their business. After 15 minutes or so, I saw the light reappear behind me as the sound of thunder moved off, and soon it slowed to a drizzle, and then it was just damp. I walked through the cemetery reading the headstones of my benefactors: lots of Hoffmann, Freitags, and Walburgs.

Then I rode some more. After miles of eastern North Dakota nothingness, I wended my way through the ugly exurbs of Fargo, the biggest city I’ve encountered on bike tour at 125k people. It was muggy and the scenery unattractive—West Fargo, Riverside industrial wasteland—but I could feel Minnesota on the other side, and my mood was solid. I put a Subway in Moorhead, MN into Googlemaps and aimed myself toward it. And one veggie 6-inch (WITH AVOCADO!) later I was in Minnesota.

I made my way to the Buffalo River State Park, where I chatted with a lovely ranger named Sara and stood around cooling my feet in the river for which the park is named.

Thrilled to be back in the Midwest, I ate two hard boiled eggs, a cheese bar, and an apple for dinner and watched the ground squirrels frolic until it got dark(ish), then headed to bed content.