I ride from Uptown to NW Plymouth, I say stay on the road and ride a bit away from the curb so people know you are there and do not try and zoom past you.

This is a good MPLS/STPL spot to look for routes or ask others for suggestions:

https://www.bikeped.org/cgi-bin/forum/forum_show.pl

I'm not familiar with the Bloomington Towers area... but there is a way to stay on your bike and get over the river by going east on BlackDog road. You can actually get across right next to 77 and the route isn't tough. I actually just checked it out last weekend... unfortunately, I was riding at night and my lights went out so my trip pretty much ended right across the river. I'm hoping to take that route to the MOA on Sunday.

On some suburban sidewalks, you're more likely to see a Martian than a pedestrian. The "no bikes on sidewalks" laws are done out of respect for pedestrians, but in some municipalities with no pedestrians, this would be a meaningless law.

A few summers ago, I had a consulting project in the NW Chicago suburbs. At the end of my morning Metra commute, I had a bicycle locked up at the Metra station. The only problem was that to get the remaining distance between the Metra station and the job site was a long suburban collector road where cars travelled at highway speeds. Although I normally avoid sidewalks, I made an exception that summer. In three months of daily commutes, I never once encountered a single pedestrian on that sidewalk. Neither did I see a bicycle on the road.

I'm an experienceed cyclist -- I can cycle in Chicago's financial district during Friday afternoon rush hour and I can cycle in the Loop in the middle of winter. But cycling on some suburban collector roads feels far too much like riding on a highway....

I had lived in Minneapolis the past four years and did a fair amount of commuting there (Uptown to UMN, Uptown to Mendota Heights), but I will say this, some of the burbs are really laid out terrible for biking. St.Louis Park comes to mind where the streets are laid out like the branches on a tree trunk. The secondary streets branch off and eventually dead end and there is one main artery, which is way to busy and fast for a bike. In these cases you are forced to take the high traffic route and I rode on the side-walk because I thought it was absolutely insane to ride in that traffic. But I had to slow it way done when I did that.

I live in a small city in Virginia. I always ride on street and have several times seen inexperienced cyclists almost get themselves run over by riding on sidewalks. For the last week I've been in Tokyo on business and cyclists on sidewalks are everywhere. There are also many cyclists who ride with traffic. I have seen some cyclist pedestrian conflicts but not nearly as many as you'd expect given the number of peds on the sidewalks. The crosswalks (at least in the Tamachi section of Tokyo) have a separate section painted with a bike icon. That tells me that cycling on sidewalks is legal and it reminds drivers to be alert for cyclists crossing side streets on the sidewalks. I still don't like cycling on the sidewalks. But it seems to work well here. Perhaps that's because cars, cyclists, and pedestrians all seem to be more alert for and more tolerant of the presence of others. As crowded as the streets are (especially during rush hour) I hear almost no horn blowing or engine gunning and see almost no impatient lane shifting. A real change from how things are back home.

Cars always are telling me to "get up on the sidewalk where you belong"

That's funny...
I had two ladies (older and a younger one) yelling at me that it was against the Law to ride on the Sidewalks in my Town. Then the younger one told me of her friend on a bike got hit in the road. Duh.

I told them both to check with the Police Department (I had), if there is no Sign or Markings it is legal.
Which means every sidewalk in my town is legal.
There are a few Grocery Stores or Department Stores that have signs: NO Rollerblading, NO Skateboarding, No Bicycling.

Like I said, I tend to stay on the Pavement, Sidewalks are there if we need them!