UpperMiss

Day 9

Sunday, 6 June 2010
Prairie du Chien, WI to Dyersville, IA
80.8 miles, 6h33m, 12.3 mph
Elapsed Time: 9h32m, Max speed: 37.0mph
Total Climbing: 3083ft, Max elevation: 1231ft
Total mileage: 660.6

A beautiful day for riding in northeastern Iowa--provided you weren't heading in to the wind. Luckily, we usually had the wind at our backs. Otherwise we'd still be out there. It was a long hard day.

We rolled out of the motel parking lot in Prarie du Chien and right onto the Mississippi River bridge. That's the last we'll see of Wisconsin on this trip.

Not a visually stimulating bridge.

Once in Iowa, we turned north along the river to visit Effigy Mounds National Monument--our fourth National Park on this trip. The Monument preserves grass-covered mounds built by ancient...well, mound builders. Only the lamest of mounds are visible from the visitor center, and you have to hike up a pretty big hill to get to anything significant, and we were wearing cycling shoes, so we went anyway. There was some wheezing but no falling, and our Shimano MB86 cycling shoes served well on the 2-mile hike. (Yes, we both have the same shoes).

Mr. Balint in front of a mound. Note how he blends in, and how those shoes grip the path.

This was the reason for the whole trip.

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The view from Eagle Point, on the mounds trail. Looking down the Mississippi.

We left the Monument and rode back south along the river, and then inland up a long, steep climb. We were escorted by chattering red-winged blackbirds, who all wanted to make sure we kept moving along.

I pointed the camera at the sky and caught this guy.

The next few miles were into a stiff wind, until we reached the town of Monona. After a stop at the local store, we turned and headed south with the wind more or less at our back. This is wide-open country, lots of farms, lots of big sweeping hills, long descents, slow, grinding climbs. A couple of the climbs were very long. Near Colesburg we reached the highest elevation on the whole trip so far.

We stopped for lunch in Elkader, and we figured out that pull tab thing. They are like scratch-off lottery tickets, except you pull off a tab instead. Mr. Balint lost a dollar. I won my dollar back, then gave it back to the state of Iowa. We stopped in Colesburg at a local ice cream stand and had root beer floats. Yum.

It looked like this today.

Looks like it rained north of us, but we had only a few stray drops hit us.

Mr. Balint seemed to be in a hurry at times.

The very small town of Petersburg has a very large church. We could see it for miles.

We reached Dyersville at about 5:30. We had planned to ride out to the Field of Dreams (about 3 miles outside of town) but we were tired and we weren't looking forward to riding back to town into the very brisk headwind, so we went straight to the motel. There we learned that the Field is open only until 6pm.

The plan for tomorrow is to visit the Field of Dreams when it opens at 9am, then ride to Coggon, IA to investigate some of my family history, then on to Cedar Rapids, from whence Mr. Balint will return home. I will continue on my own on Tuesday.

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