Snuffy's last shake
George Harrison is right: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” It is also true you can reach a single destination many different ways.
On our first day of riding we tested both ideas at once.
I plan our bicycle route meticulously for these trips. It’s a necessity when you’re purposefully placing yourself hundreds of miles away from your vehicle and must get yourself back. I am also a father, responsible for the safety and happiness of my son and tandem partner. He is a great riding companion, essential to the physical effort, and mostly game for the work required and the challenges faced as a cost of reaping the rewards of beefsteak and desserts. But I need to detail our route and our days to include a bunch of options and to be able to accurately convey expectations.
I do this for the ride down the river as well as for our own little prelude to the main tour. We are spending two nights in St. Paul. On our second day in Minnesota’s seat of government we will do a little shakedown cruise, test out the tandem and its setup, and in the process get a day of gawking tourist fun while pedaling along St. Paul’s legion bike trails.
Land of One Thousand Lakes? More like land of 1,000 bike trails.
I mention above my particular and idiosyncratic approach to route planning to serve as counterpoint to the haphazard way I constructed our route in St. PauI. I figured you couldn’t get lost on a bike trail. You go this way, then you go that way. It’s a binary system. Upstream or downstream, one or the other. Go as far as you wish, then turn around and go back the way you came.
Not so in the People’s Collective of St. NordicTrack, where many bike paths wend their way to and fro, hither and yon, up one side and down the other. To quote the greatest single source of cultural education in my life, I knew I should have taken that left at Albuquerque (special thanks to the memory of my seventh grade math teacher, Mr. Tim Roberts, for ensuring I would always know how to spell the largest city in New Mexico because of the punishments he doled out) and as a result Avery and I took the scenic route to the capitol in St. Paul. We got there – the building is grand, a worthy addition to our collection – by a circuitous, unsanctioned route engendered in part by my own misapprehension of north. On a paper map, north is at the top of the page. My brain is trained to translate the world onto a physical map where north is at the top. On a device with a gyroscope inside it, the map turns to orient to the world around the phone. The top of the map is the direction you’re pointing the top of your phone, not necessarily north, but it sure seems like north to me and my brain accustomed to reading a map that way.
Nonetheless, the day of riding and sight-seeing could not have been better. Following the capitol tour -- including a perambulation of the walkway encircling the base of the dome high above the ground where I suitably entertained the boy with my frankly hilarious acrophobia, a fear that leads to me comically hugging the wall of the building, always keeping my hands in physical contact with the solidity of the exterior wall, crouching into a widened stance against an accidental fall, and pleading with the 15-year-old to please, for the love of all that’s holy, step back from the edge and the imminent danger posed by any wayward gust of wind which could, at any moment, lift him up and cast him over the high barrier; they don’t call it an irrational fear for nothing – we ride down famed Summit Avenue and gawk at the splendor of the grand homes lining it toward and through the campuses of multiple church-affiliated small liberal arts colleges clustered in this section of the upper Midwest. We ate burgers and ordered fries at Snuffy’s Malt Shop during the week before the place closed up for good. I now have a memory of a sweet place smack dab between St. Catherine’s and St. Thomas colleges, a fond remembrance of a spot that no longer exists. The chocolate malt I had was not the only treat.
After lunch we rode the bike trail along the river, a lovely winding route mostly along the top of the bluff until it dropped down to the Mississippi and carried on into ever-more industrial sectors. Our route took us through washed-out sections and, at last to the metaphorical Albuquerque where I’d originally gone wrong all those hours ago. At least then I knew where we were and was assured we could reach our hotel room destination without having to turn around. All we had to do was ride three miles uphill.
Present was prologue. Tomorrow, the Great River Road ride begins in earnest. Though we’ll be making progress toward our car, it would feel like leaving safety and setting out on the unknown. Because we were.