Fargo + 1

We left Elsie’s and headed back towards downtown on the Cedar Creek Trail, which took us past Target Field once more before carrying us across the river to the north side of the city. The day would be off the grid again, since we’d come off the Northern Tier to reach Minneapolis, which meant sixty-five miles due north on secondary roads to reach the small town of Dalbo and pick the trail back up.

The Garmin was running low, so I resorted to checking paper maps at every gas station to confirm we were still on the right roads. The last ten miles brought rain, and we arrived dripping at the porch of Donn Olsen’s, home to the legendary Adventure Cyclists Bunkhouse, an old barn Donn had converted on his own farm to house cyclists passing through on the Northern Tier. He is one of the small handful of trail angels to have received the June Curry award from Adventure Cycling, for exactly the kind of generosity and dedication that name is meant to honour.

The bunkhouse itself was wonderful, and we had company that night besides, David and Pata, an older couple also heading west. Funnily enough I’d told Eal on the way in that I had a feeling we’d see other cyclists that evening, and privately guessed it might be Flavia, who we’d crossed paths with a week earlier. An hour later, in she walked.

We sat around the bunkhouse trading stories long into the evening. Donn had a wealth of tales from previous years and a laugh infectious enough to set the whole room off, a genuinely great man. He also gave us maps and directions for a bike trail running over a hundred miles straight to Fergus Falls, and I still couldn’t quite work out why the Northern Tier doesn’t follow it, though we intended to.

Cedar Creek Trail.

Dalbo Bicycle Bunkhouse!

Eal with Donn Olsen.

The outhouse and shower, also built by Donn.

To pick up the trail Donn had told us about, we first needed to reach Bowlus, where it begins. The riding was glorious, flat, sunny, a tailwind pushing us the whole way. Eal and I left the bunkhouse last that morning, but arrived in Bowlus to find David, Pata and Flavia already setting up camp at the city park. The cafe across the street supplied ice cream, and we spent another evening in good company, including an eastbounder named Bill, who had plenty of useful advice for the road ahead. David and Pata were riding shorter days than us, but Flavia, Eal and I agreed to make an early start of it the next morning and aim for Fergus Falls, roughly a hundred and five miles off.

It was an earlier start than Eal and I had grown used to, not since our wild camps in Spain had we seen the day at that hour. We broke camp alongside Flavia, stopped at the cafe for breakfast, and hit the trail around half past seven. Getting the miles racked up before midday matters on a century ride, and I had a good sense of us being on pace early. The trail itself was flat, paved, and lined with a steady run of towns and services, the kind of surface that should have lent itself to fast riding, but I found I enjoyed the time too much to hurry, chatting casually with our new travelling companion. Flavia was terrific fun to ride alongside, and spent much of the day attempting a British accent, working through the local terms we’d been teaching her.

By the time we’d put a hundred miles behind us, the sky had turned black, and with it our plan of reaching Fergus Falls. Camping options weren’t obvious, but Flavia’s iPad turned up a spot on the edge of town, at the cost of some backtracking and a stretch of gravel road. Spirits stayed intact, and we pitched beside a lake at the recreation area, where I finally gave in and accepted the green pepper Flavia had been trying to press on me since the night before, and it went rather well with dinner. The three of us collapsed into our tents after what turned out to be a hundred-and-twelve-mile day, asleep before I’d even settled onto the pillow.

Flavia!

Flavia gets colder easier than my sister. Unthinkable.

Unpleasant gravel road.

We’d camped a few miles short of Fergus Falls the night before, so rode in the next morning for breakfast at the Viking Cafe, on Flavia’s recommendation, a great little place. From there we were heading for Fargo, home to one of my favourite films of all time, appropriately titled Fargo. Being a Sunday, the roads stayed quiet apart from the ten o’clock rush to church. Partway through the ride we stopped in a small town, our second Brownsville of the trip, apparently famous for its Potato Days festival, though we’d missed it by a week or two. At the town cafe, over pie and coffee, an older man named Arlan quietly squared things up with the waitress so our bill went on his tab. A genuine hero.

We finished the ride wondering what the bright lights of Fargo and a motel bed might hold for us. The Howard Johnson did the job nicely, not a bad rate once split three ways. We cleaned up and found a local bar for food and beers. Flavia is vegetarian, and when she asked whether they did veggie burgers, the man behind the counter told her, without missing a beat, that they didn’t, but their burgers were good enough that vegetarians would eat them anyway. She settled for fries and a salad. Eal and I ordered a sampler paddle of beer and raised a toast to end the night with Flavski, to her father Mickey C, whose birthday it happened to be.

Pancake breakfast at the Viking Cafe.