First Bike trip of the year...
 

My friend Jen and I are going on a crazy adventure tomorrow morning. I'd put a map up, but we're not really sure where we're going. We know we want to hit the Elroy-Sparta trail, but beyond that we're in search of the scariest, weirdest places Wisconsin has to offer.

Hope to be able to post photos of trolls, which are promised at one site. You may also get photos of 20-foot high metal birds, underwater ancient pyramids, Ed Gein's house, a tunnel that winds for 3/4 of a mile and rains on you the entire way, creepy creepy clowns, house on the rock and rock on the house, and a road where the screams of hanged witches still reverberates.


Moooooooohahaha!!!!!!!

Watch this space.

Have a blast! Good to see you out and about again. :D

I'm confused..........will you be riding somewhere of posting here on BF?

Ride the Elroy-Sparta trail ... then ride all the roads that criss-cross the trail for some great hills. You can get maps in most of the depot towns.

Sounds like a lot of fun! Enjoy the ride:thumb:

I will be doing both. My laptop gets the internet via my cell phone.

Wow! Do I ever wish I was going on that ride :D

Here are some of our first creeps. We drove backroads to House on the Rock, and we're getting on the bikes tomorrow morning unless it's pouring.

our loaded car: http://homepage.mac.com/sbacig/.Pict...i/DSCF0001.jpg

creepy things we saw at House on the Rock:

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And Maddmaxx was kind enough to meet us there...

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Been to House on the Rock twice now. The first time we were unprepared
in that we were pressed for time. The second time we had two very bored
teenagers with us. We are scheduled to deliver one of those two to M.S.O.E.
(Milwaukee School of Engineering) in late August, and I've started dropping
hints to my wise Bride that it would be nice to take a detour on the way home.
I would like to go back to Spring Green and spend a looong time at the
House on the Rock, and being fans of Frank Lloyd Wright we would definately
have to swing by Taliesin. You are touring a very interseting part of the
Country. Enjoy and keep the reports and pictures coming. Thanks.

Happy Trails

We just did Camp Douglas-Elroy-Sparta-Onalaska-Trempealeau. Twice in the last month and will do so again in a week. This trail is a treasure.
Hotel and Restaurant Trempealeau are a worthwhile goal with good food and wine. It offers a great view of the Mississippi North of Lake Onalaska. The Perot State Park is near by and another attraction.

Our bike ride this morning really sucked. Even though we looked at the map on the internet, from the official rail trails site, we could not find parking where the map said there was parking. We drove around for about over an hour, getting to the area and then trying to find the trailhead. We never did find a place for the bike path parking, but we found a campsite parking lot. By then it was 10, and 78 degrees with...honest to god, a "real feel of 92". There was 70% humidity and the dewpoint was at 68.

I have done very little riding since my kansas bite incident, and am still not 100%, so I literally thought I was going to pass out. It was a decent bike trail, typical urban type with a few lovely spots.

Got back to the car at about 12, turned the AC down to 60 and went to Mt. Horeb for an art festival. I drank a great* dark beer there that tasted like coffee and chocolate. We went to the Mustard Museum.

Then we went to Little Norway, but were too tired to take the tour.

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Hee hee, when you said you'ld post pictures of Trolls I thought they'ld
be walking, talking real live Trolls. :D

Try not to overdo things and enjoy the rest of your trip. Scout out a
bunch of good places to come back to in the Autumn for biking when the
weather is much more co-operative.

UPDATE: So.....

The spookiest part of the trip so far is that my GPS has become haunted. Seriously haunted. It's trying to kill us. We went to a movie last night and it gave us directions which were incorrect, which isn't unusual because it's 10 years old. It has been doing that quite a lot in Madison, and we keep ending up at the same road, which I think is called McMooney but Jen thinks is called McFee. Anyway, we were going to a movie 1 mile north from the hotel, and it kept telling us to go south. So we ignored it and went to the theater on our own, and it kept telling us to turn around. When we pulled into the parking lot, it told us we had arrived, so it wasn't like we typed in the wrong thing.

So, coming home, Jen took a wrong turn and we ended up going back to this McMooney road, and we were laughing. So I turned on the GPS, because it's good for knowing how to get out of a mistake, and it told us to take a U turn on a road coming up. We were unsure about this, because we were on the main Madison Loop freeway! So we watched the GPS, and it said "make a U turn in .5 miles....make a U turn in .2 miles..... make a U turn in 300 feet...." and THERE WAS NO BREAK IN THE FREEWAY. It wanted us to just drive into the meridian! There was no cross road anywhere near us!

Anyway....
We are altering our trip.

I was online, trying to figure out how we could alter our trip for cooler biking. We're basically screwed up at this point, we really want to see the weird sculpture garden in Baraboo and ride through the long tunnel. But to bike in the morning would require driving halfway home and coming back towards madison, and then the timing of the day wouldn't be right.

As I was researching the weather, I saw that it was 55 degrees up at my cabin. So we're bailing on Wisconsin and basically going home this morning with a stop at the sculpture garden. We'll pick my dogs up, and then head straight up north and ride the lake or rail trail this evening and the state park in the morning and spend the rest of the time in the lake.

It's just unbelievably hot in Wisconsin, and we it's just too hard to have as much fun as we want. So, my first real bike trip ANYWHERE, EVER kinda flopped.

Y'know, I don't think I've ever read on this forum about bike trips which fizzled. Let's hear some other stories about that. What makes a bike adventure bad?

You never know what sort of strange people you will meet when your GPS is "drifting". Stick to the pills that mother gives you.



Nice pictures!

I was really nervous about the clowns part, but thank goodness, none to be found. That beer you had sounds like it was terrific.

We drove all day to the lake with a stop at Dr. Evermore's sculpture garden.

Now, this was supposed to be a creepy vacation, and the things we had planned to see...well, they weren't so creepy. But it was, on the whole, very creepy. Besides the GPS being possessed and trying to kill us, when we were at the sculture garden I was playing one of the musical instruments and something fell out of it and stung me like a bee. Now, I'm just getting over being sick for over 2 months from an insect bite, so we really tried to find out what it was. It had some good size to it, and it didn't fly. So it swelled up, and everything tingled, and then my tongue started to swell! So I took some Benedryl and that took care of it. You can't even see the bite/sting this evening. But that was very* creepy. This big thing just fell from the inside of a bell and bites!

So it was a scare-filled trip anyway, and kind of in a legitimate way in that it was real and not forced.

Now we're at my cabin after driving all day and we got in too late for a bike ride, but we're leaving at dawn tomorrow morning.

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Wow, what an adventure! Maybe not the one you wanted to have, but still a real adventure!

Road Fan

I thought California had some interesting attractions and strange people, but next to the Frozen Dead Man Festival in Nederland, Co (seems like the last vestige of real hippies) your trip in Wisconsin has to be filled with more unusual experiences than I would have expected from Wisconsin.

Neat pictures Solveg! Hope you are having a great time!

So, the trip is carrying on its theme, even though we're back in MN. We got up early to ride through the forest. Almost immediately Jen's Deraileur got totally screwed up, but I fixed it!!! Yay! Then we rode until a big hill slowed us down and we were attacked by hundreds of deer flies. Hundreds. I had so many swarming around my head I felt like The Candyman with his swarm of bees encompassing his head. We race back to the car, covered in welts, and a mother bear and 3 babies walked in front of us! Of course, I wasn't ready to take a picture, and couldn't get the camera out in time, because we were so terrorized by the deer flys.

We stopped for breakfast on the way back, and the take out tray was black, which was very suiting for our trip!

This afternoon we're going to look for albino deer which live in the other state park up here. There's a bunch of them, but they're hard to find. I hope I get a photo for you.

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Me fixing Jen's Bike.
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The Black Take-Out Box
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The wine we drank last night
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solveg, in the first picture, what is that thing between the saddle and seatpost of your friend's bike?

A pogo stick. Here is a better version.

Do you own one? If so, how good is it for long bike rides and handling the common road bumps?

Chick bike mechanics. What's next?

Cool trip.

Have it on the stokers saddle on the tandem and it does work. It is called a Cane Creek Thudbuster and the elastomers vary for weight of the rider. Bit on the pricey side but when the Pilot forgets to call a bump on the trail- I hardly feel it.

Long bike rides are not a problem (14 hours long enough?) but the saddle stills hurts after about 8 hours. This is the long travel version and there is a road version that is short travel. The Long travel is overkill on the road.

Very popular on Tandems so perhaps other tandem teams can confirm the usefullness. I have used it on night rides on the MTB as the post fits both bikes and it does work. Only problem is that you start to rely on it and it can put extra strain on the rear tyre. I use one heavy stoker and we are always getting pinch flats on the offroad downhills because he sits in the saddle instead of taking the weight on the legs. Hit a rock at 50 mph and we are stopping to repair a puncture within 200 yards.