Day 40: Peace, love, and soft-serve

Our alarm clock is often the birds. You can’t even see them in the hedges or trees. Usually one starts and then they all join in. It takes me a lot longer to start singing in the morning. The only restaurant that showed open, wasn’t actually open. A nearby dog walker said “they don’t open until 10am these days; they probably just forgot to change their hours on google. Bummer – we get so dependent on google sometimes. Not a big deal – we just pedaled to the next town of David City and found a BBQ place that also serves breakfast.

When I spotted a gas station about 2 miles ahead in Bellwood, I said to Steve “I’m stopping there for soft-serve ice cream”. Steve in disbelief said “how do you know they have it?”. “I can feel it!”, I said. I was right. Molly served a nice tall cone and we chatted for 10 minutes. She was the second mom for a lot of kids that came in while we soaked up some air conditioning. She showed us her photo collection and told us the high school basketball team won state champs back in 1934. Thanks for the great conversation Molly; we know you’ll follow and comment on our blog soon.

Columbus was our destination and Steve picked a free campground on the north edge of town. It had all the amenities we really need – a table, water, bathroom and even a place to swim/cool-off.

Tomorrow we’ll ride north and get to the beginning of the much anticipated “Cowboy Trail” which is the longest at 190 miles.

I can’t seem to get a good photo of the full moon with my phone but it was bright.

An astute reader, Ed, mentioned that Valparaiso is a city in Chile and the word is Spanish. I’m guessing the Czech settlers just liked the sound of it.

Summary: we rode 50 miles from near Brainard to free campground on Lake Babcock in Columbus on Oak Creek Trail, T road, 32 road, MN road, 41 road, highway 81, and other roads.

https://strava.app.link/PZNNVPF0Drb