Day 25: 66 Miles

Sunday July 10th


Today was a scorcher, 98 degrees with 88% humidity. However, today we only had 66 miles to travel until we reached our next destination: Stillwater, MN. About 10 miles into our ride we came upon Kaffe Stuga, which has been owned by the Ramberg family for over 50 years! The current owner, Monica, even though she didn’t open until lunch, gladly opened up the doors to her restaurant for us and made us breakfast sandwiches and hash browns. We were amazed by her generosity and kindness. The food was DELICIOUS! We continued our journey and battled the heat throughout the day. Day by day we are amazed by people’s willingness to give and their magnanimity. For example, today a woman pulled us over on the side of the road and insisted we take the bottled water she had in the back of her truck because it was such a hot day out. I was awestruck. The one thing I can already tell that I will take away from this trip is the knowledge of how nice, caring, and united the people of America, wherever you go, are. Sometimes it is hard to notice these things in the busy hustle and bustle of our lives, but if we remove ourselves from our typical element we begin to realize how the people of our nation are extraordinary and warm-hearted—even to complete strangers!
Aside from the immense heat and humidity, there were some big hills to climb which made our 66 mile journey feel a lot longer and more like a 100 mile day. Anna Richardson and I acquired some awful sunburns on our backs because we forgot to put on our Badger Balm. Poor decision on our part. However, our journey became a lot ‘sweeter’ when we finally arrived in Stillwater and stopped at Nelson’s Ice-Cream Shop. The portions were enormous! The child-sized ice-cream was the equivalent to any normal ice-cream shop’s large! It was just what we needed on this extremely hot day. After this treat we had finally reached our rest day. Woohoo! We showered and napped then were off to Anne Keyser’s friend’s house for dinner. They prepared a wonderful dinner for us and were magnificent hosts. We were grateful of their benevolence and enjoyed their company greatly. It was very nice to have a home cooked meal! Even though it was a hot day we had a lot of cool experiences and met some great people along the way. These people make the unbearable days seem a lot easier to handle and get through and truly help us wake up every morning to keep pedalin’ to our final destination. T-Minus 19 days until Maine. The countdown begins.

-Brittany Marien

p.s. Sorry for the delay on the blogs. This is the first time we've had internet in a while. So read below for more recent blog posts for this past week. Thank you!