Ride to Hastings
Without planning it and without a map, I set out on Monday to “ride east until I could jump into the St. Croix River”. I rode out to Battle Creek park and then through Woodbury and Cottage Grove I picked up Trading Post road near Afton and followed that to Point Douglas recreation area where I jumped into the river.
Here is the route (without the mistakes and backtracks)
I love the rolling hills and secret farms near Afton. In the gaps in the trees I spotted a pack of baby lamas.
The morning didn’t feel all that humid, but after sitting in the air conditioning reading after lunch, my legs buckled when I walked back outside. The air felt heavy and hard to breathe. There were too many bugs to stand still outside for any amount of time.
My route took me through areas of the twin cities that are completely foreign. “Old Afton Trail”?? Ojibwa park? Cottage Grove Ravine? St. Paul Park deserves its own blog post. The city planners must have been on drugs. “Let’s put a megachurch here, next to the oil refinery. Next to that, lets put a boat marina, a school, and a pizza shop. Lets put a parking lot here in the middle of nowhere. And let’s put a bunch of random “bike route” signs here and there. Then, we’ll import a bunch of hillbillies and give them free houses. The empty space we’ll fill with giant rusting tank farms. Then, to really weird people out, here is the Ashland Avenue Grocery. It is a grocery store with a row of gulf coast apartments upstairs. I think Lee Harvey Oswald might have spent a few nights there in the early 60s.
I passed cookouts and baseball games and laughed to see a guy trying to light his grill in the humid air laden with refining by-products.
Some of the route follows the Mississippi River Trail (MRT). The MRT is really strange. It winks in and out. It is easy to lose. It takes the rider on insanely busy divided highways with chopped up shoulders.
about 80 miles. My legs feel like sacks of sand today.
Tags: cycling