Adventure time... Part 1.

Last week was the Nerstrand trip and boy was it a lot of fun.

Weather was beginning to concern me but it ended up not being as bad as I thought. I went to Brian's place with all the gear and we figured out who was carrying what. He had prepared breakfast burritos and they were delicious. I went back and loaded up my bike and he met me where I was. It started raining as soon as he showed up and we headed out. It would rain the entire way.

My rig all loaded up.

Brian and the bikes.

The trek was pretty easy through Minneapolis and into Apple Valley. It wasn't raining too hard and luckily I had purchased a rain jacket the night before from work. We had a tail wind and the first 25 miles were easy. We stopped at a CVS to utilize the bathroom and I took the opportunity to stretch and snack on some munchies to hopefully warm up. The more we stood around the colder I got. When we were ready to leave Brian's front tire was flat. He changed the tube, used his frame pump to pump up the tire, and then ripped the valve core out of the stem and the tire went flat again. He changed that tube out and I let him use one of my Co2 cartridges and we were off to get some warm coffee.

Pee break.

Look at that handsome guy.



So we went into Farmington and right about at mile 30 we hit Dunn Bros and stopped for some nice hot coffee. If you are ever heading through Farmington you need to stop here. The manager was super friendly and offered to refill our water bottles and even gave us a Dunn Bros water bottle. We also had some random fellow stop and ask where we were headed and if we needed to crash in a warm house for the night. At first I was kind of creeped out but then he mentioned he was with adventure cycling and it all came into focus. So we drank our coffee and headed out. It started raining a bit harder at this point as I became thoroughly soaked after that.

Coffee to warm the soul.

I was trying to photobomb his selfie, little did I know he was trying to get me in there anyway.

The ride between Farmington was farm land and the roads were rolling hills. The tail wind picked up and we were moving along at a good clip, most of the time it was over 20 miles an hour, I was impressed at our bikes going that fast with all that gear and handling as good as they did. So ten miles of that and we were in Northfield. We were both famished and we stopped at a local diner called The Quarter Back club. If you are passing through Northfield and looking for some cheap eats, the food is pretty decent for the price and you get a lot of it. I pretty much inhaled my food and then felt sick from eating way too much. So now cold and sick I was eager to get to camp. The rain was till coming down pretty good and I was getting fatigued from being cold and wet. So we headed to the beverage store and got some beverages. We then checked with Google for the nearest grocery store. It was about a mile in the opposite direction that we needed to go. I made the call to skip it because I had some bike food with me, it was a bad decision. Another 17 miles of biking in head winds, off the side of a horrible highway and we finally arrived at the entrance to the camp. I thought I saw a dead body, but it was the rib cage of a decaying deer. It scared the hell out of me.

So we finally got to camp and got the tent set up and then it stopped raining. Once we had everything situated we headed out to find the showers. We found them, there was hot water, it was life changing. After the shower we headed back to camp with a bundle of fire wood and tried to get a fire going. It was a major fail. We were also really hungry and I had not really packed as many cliff bars and such as I thought I did. So we pigged out on some trail mix and called it a night. Mistake number two happened before we even set out on the trip, we had no sleeping bags. I did not expect it to dip down into the low thirties over night. We spent the entire night not sleeping and freezing our collective asses off. It made for an interesting second day.

We had an inappropriate knick name for that lower shower head, I'll let you guess what it was.

(To be continued...)