June 14 - Fargo, North Dakota - Bike

Since Fargo had a 25 kilometer bike route as well as the walk route, we decided to try that with our newly-adjusted bikes. But first we had to purchase the new anti-sway bar from an RV dealer in the town of West Fargo, which lies, naturally enough, just to the west of Fargo. The dealer didn't have it in stock but he did find it in the wholesale warehouse downtown, so we paid for it and picked it up at the warehouse on our way back to the Howard Johnson's hotel. The net cost of that little bit of carelessness was $100.70, which hurt a bit, but I also was quite cognizant of the fact that it could have been a lot worse. If the bar had fallen underneath the trailer and punctured one of the water tanks as we ran over it, I imagine that would have been a couple of hundred. In any case, it was no use crying over spilt milk, so we parked the truck in the hotel's parking lot and I prepared the bikes while Monika went inside and officially signed us up.

The Volksbike event in Fargo is a very large loop from downtown to the south and west, basically in the shape of a comma. The first part of the bicycle trail was south along the banks of the Red River, and that segment is also the final leg of the return from the loop. I liked that part of our route very much--it was a pretty winding trail through the trees with no cars or road crossings to worry about. After making a short jog through a golf course we continued south on neighborhood streets, and I enjoyed watching the neighborhoods shift from 50s and 60s style ranch houses to the midsize houses of the 70s and 80s and finally to the mini-mansions of the 90s in the neighborhood furthest to the south. It was fairly clearly a progression of "suburbs" spreading out from downtown in the decades after World War II.

We then turned eastward for a while and started to work our way back north along another nice bicycle trail. Despite having a fairly short bicycling season, Minnesota and North Dakota seemed to have quite a number of bicycle trails and I was impressed. We paused for a snack of trail mix at a playground that was being resurfaced and continued north across I-94. Here I made (yet another) mistake: our map and directions clearly indicated a bicycle "cloverleaf", but never having even heard of such a thing I went blasting across the I-94 exit ramps while wildly looking for cars in all directions. For anyone else doing this bike event, please believe what you read in the directions and turn right just after you cross I-94 but BEFORE the lights for the exit ramps; the "cloverleaf" is essentially a bicycle underpass for those ramps that obviates the need to cross them at the light and would be a much safer way to proceed north.

Anyway, we reached the Stop 'n Go at the next corner without incident and then turned east along some side streets parallel to I-94 until we again reached the park where we caught the riverside bike trail north to the hotel. The bike route is valuable because it lets you see a completely different side of Fargo than the walk, although on some streets you still get to ride under a canopy of elms. So if you have a bike I would definitely recommend doing both events while you are in the vicinity.

The other thing that happened along our final push up through downtown to the hotel was that I was walking my bike across a pedestrian crosswalk at a traffic light, and a car and a truck were sitting across the crosswalk. As I pushed my bike around them I muttered something like "How rude!" under my breath (I think), and the gentleman in the truck actually apologized for having driven on the crosswalk! I have never had anyone apologize for something like that in my entire life, and it made me think of other things we had experienced with the people in Fargo. On two separate occasions in Wal Mart and Target when someone accidentally bumped into me, they immediately apologized. When road construction hampered traffic, people actually waited at the green lights rather than try to push through the intersection and block the other lanes when the light turned. When multiple traffic lanes narrowed down to one, the drivers all got in line very early and patiently waited rather than roaring around in the empty lane until the cones would force them to merge.

Similarly, at the Culver's where we had lunch, the cashier, the server, and just passing personnel were all pleasant and cheerful. Somehow they got to know us well enough in those brief encounters that when Monika ordered a double scoop cone for desert, the server yelled over the person making the cone to be sure to put two spoons in it because we were going to share it, which was true, by the way. Now in general I seemed to be meeting pleasant people as we traveled through Wisconsin and Minnesota, but the people in Fargo were so nice in so many different ways that I began to wonder if there was something unusual in the water! No kidding, even the police were polite and courteous and joked with me while I was unloading the bicycles from the truck (I had thought I was going to get a ticket or a warming when the cruiser pulled up right behind me and a policewoman popped out). If it is something in the water, I certainly wish they'd bottle it and sell it in the rest of the U.S.--I can see the ad campaign now, "Old Cheerful Water: Makes You Feel Good Again!". Ah well, I can dream, can't I? Seriously, unless my experiences were a mere fluke, I wonder what aspect of the culture, history, or environmental conditions tends to produce or preserve that type of considerate, civilized behavior.

Maybe it was the lilac bushes that were blooming all over the Fargo and Moorhead area while we were there. It happened more times than I can count that we would suddenly smell the heavy, fragrant scent of lilac, and then we'd both look around to spot the bush it was coming from. Other flowers were also blooming but mostly of the late spring variety such as irises, and people were just putting in their annuals. All in all, it was a beautiful time of the year to see the area, and for us almost like getting a second spring season after already seeing these flowers bloom in Virginia in May.

We rested during the aforementioned lunch at Culver's and I felt surprisingly good. The "comfort bike" I was riding was, sure enough, comfortable and that made all the difference in the world to how I felt after 2 hours of riding. The front and rear suspension and springy seat really did soak up all the bumps typical of a bike trail and city streets. It was certainly odd to get on a bike that kind of went "squish" underneath you and the springiness was at first a little unsettling, but oh my goodness how much better my rump felt after we had ridden the 25 kilometers. We did, however, stop every 20-30 minutes on this ride, in part to check where we were on the map and what we should be doing next, but the actual ride was so comfortable and I had enough gears to adjust my pedaling pace so as to make the cycling feel almost effortless.

In fact, I still felt good enough after the ride that I proposed doing the 10 kilometer walk across the river in Moorhead, Minnesota for which we already had signed up and had the directions. Monika agreed so we took I-94 back across the river and drove back north near the river to find a (free) parking space. I must admit that my old scotch heart was much happier with the free parking we had in the small cities and towns compared to the expensive parking we had experienced in Minneapolis (and earlier in other big cities like Atlanta). The walk route for Moorhead was basically the shape of a rectangle with a few bulges, and we started working our way east and then south.

The first surprise was a really curious looking Episcopalian Church that turned out to have been constructed along the lines of an Elizabethan church in England. The bell tower was kind of in the middle of the cross of the church rather than being at the front end as we expect in modern churches, and it gave an all together different impression.

Just down the street was the Comstock House, named after poor young lawyer who migrated out this way in the late 1800s and had a successful career as a lawyer and a politician. The house stayed in the family for 3 generations and was given to the state in 1965 by the family. The house is now a museum and given that provenance it might just have a lot of the original Comstock stuff still in it, but unfortunately for us the museum was only open on weekends. But if you take this walk and like local history museums, remember to plan your walk for the weekend where you can see the museum and then email me about what was in it!

From the Comstock House our route turned east through a state university campus where I saw a tourist train full of young students and, I think, their parents. Apparently this was a novel way of giving campus orientations to all interested parties. That just struck me as a wonderfully creative and efficient idea that other campuses could copy. Using the train allows one guide to give information to quite a few more people than would be possible in the normal walking group, and the folks probably can pay better attention because they are rested rather than tired out with all the walking necessary to traverse a large campus. Our checkpoint was a dragon on a pedestal in the middle of campus, a mascot or symbol of some kind, I presume. It was a nice sculpture, particularly if you like dragons, and Monika counted 13 talons on all four feet, which was the information required for the checkpoint.

From that campus we walked further south along residential streets for a while before turning back west to visit the Concordia College campus, a Lutheran sectarian school. The campus contained so many new buildings that at first I thought it was a fairly new school, but the northern end had some older buildings and plaques that implied the college had been there since at least the 1890s. They had placed some very nice modern sculpture around the campus, and the carillon tower was particularly pretty with its golden brick gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight.

From the Concordia campus we headed further west to a riverside path. On the Moorhead side of the river, however, the path was not paved and some sections were just dried mud, which I imagine would be treacherous after any significant rainfall. We came to a rapids in the Red River and were both totally surprised to see that the river was clearly, undeniably, and vigorously flowing pretty much due north. We had both expected it to flow south and join the Mississippi in some kind of orderly fashion, so the question we both had was where in the world did the Red River finally end up? Discussing that thorny issue, we exited eastward through a Frisbee golf course and turned northwards yet again to walk into City Hall, the ground floor of which is a shopping mall. Combining a municipal and commercial center was a first for me, and the number of vacant storefronts indicated to me that the mall was struggling, as are many downtown shopping areas nowadays.

Leaving the city hall we found the right overpass and re-entered the parkland along the banks of the Red River, but somehow we got the wrong entrance and missed seeing the Stav Church, which I would very much like to have seen. We could have turned around to try to find it, but we were both rather tired at this point and decided it just wasn't worth the effort. Instead we worked our way around a bend in the river back to where we had parked the truck and clambered aboard. I should mention that we were parked at point #2 on the directions for the walk rather than the actual beginning, but with the truck safely parked we had decided to just start the walk from there and come back around to it rather than trying to jockey it around the downtown area looking for the correct parking lot. The main bridge across the Red River for U.S. Route 10 is currently being rebuilt, and if you come after that is finished you ought to have a far easier time getting around Fargo and Moorhead than we did. To be fair, however, at its very worst the traffic in this area can't hold a candle to the delays and frustration caused by the massive tie ups that characterize the traffic in northern Virginia every day of the year.

Still, we were grateful to just slowly drive back to camp, beat off the clouds of mosquitoes when we got out of the truck and ran for the trailer, and take our shoes off and put our feet up after a simple dinner. Monika processed the pictures while I composed the journal for a while after dinner before reading and turning in for the night. Having biked and walked 35 kilometers total we were, of course, tired and a bit sore. I was happy to feel my muscles tighten up within a couple of hours after we stopped and then gradually loosen up again. In my experience, the timing for getting stiff muscles after exercise seems to be one of the best indicators of what kind of condition I'm in. If I'm totally out of condition, the muscles don't set tight and sore until the next day, which means you can easily fool yourself into thinking "Boy am I in great shape--I didn't even get sore after that!" when in fact you are in awful condition. When I'm in moderate condition, the muscles get sore and tighten up the evening after we have exercised, which is a real nuisance for getting to sleep. But the absolute best condition that I've been in is when the muscles tighten up during the hour right after the exercise and then loosen up again. I think this is merely reflecting the body's rate of recovery from accumulations of lactic acid and other waste products in the muscles, but I'm not sure and would be glad to be enlightened by anyone who knows the physiological facts. Anyway, it did seem like we were slowly climbing our way back into condition after our walking hiatus, and having seen Fargo and Moorhead fairly well I was ready to push on and do walks in the central parts of North Dakota. That is the Heart of the Heartland, so to speak, and who knew what we would see in darkest Dakota?