Westward Ho!

I’m not sure what the locals consider to be western Minnesota, but in my mind, it’s anything west of Minneapolis. Thus, today began my mind-numbing ride through western Minnesota. I only made it 54 miles today (which was all I had planned). That’s one of the shortest point-to-point rides so far. It felt like the longest. There is very little out here. Translation: when the wind blows, there’s very little to stop it. Furthermore, when it blows at you, it makes forward progress a challenge. To my golfing buddies, this is a 5-club wind. This is 3-wood from 130. To my work colleagues, there is no crane work getting done today, and definitely not putting up any siding or roofing. To those that don’t fall into either of the above categories, just make sure you turn around when you spit. If the weather forecast can be believed, it appears I have traded in the rain for the wind. The rain is far more unpleasant from a laundry perspective and probably increases the danger level slightly when riding but is not entirely unpleasant. You reach full saturation fairly quickly and after that, additional rain has no real impact. On the other hand, the wind is unrelenting. It’s a bit like banging your head into a wall for five hours, every now and then banging it extra hard. The best part of today’s ride (tongue firmly in cheek) was a particularly brutal stretch of about 6 miles on a gravel and dirt road. The thing that differentiated this particular stretch from other dirt roads I’ve been on was the fact that the surface was not compacted. It was like riding on a beach for an hour. It did lead to my own version of the old question about the tree falling in the forest. In this case, if a person curses at the top of his lungs into the wind and nobody hears him, including himself, did he make noise? I tested this on multiple occasions during the gravel/dirt stretch. I truly could not hear myself scream. The music in my AirPods may have had some contributing effect, but it’s hard to say because I could barely hear the music.

That brings me to the saddest part of my day. While enjoying my lunch at the Longhorn Burger House in Lester Prairie, MN, I switched my phones. We recently moved all of our phones off the company plan and onto our own family plan. This resulted in all of us getting new phones as part of the promotion. The sad part (aside from the days of her life dealing with the Verizon people that Kelly can never get back) is the fact that the one thing that didn’t seem to make the leap from the old phone, through cyberspace, to the new phone, was my playlist. Many other playlists survived the transition. Mine did not. I will be spending the rest of the evening figuring out how to resurrect it. I had made it to the “S”s but was stuck listening to an assortment of Zac Brown and Taylor Swift songs for the last two hours of the ride.

On the bright side, today was supposedly the worst of the wind. Things are looking up.

This is what I was looking at most of the day. This is what I’ll be looking at for the next week. Don’t expect many photos.

I doubt anyone will confuse this for Napa.

This looked intriguing. Too bad I won’t be hanging around New Germany, MN for another two months.

Forgot to post this one the other night from my dinner with Courtney and Will. Still trying to figure out what part of the pig is the wing.

Pre phone switch at lunch time

Post phone switch