(The streets of St. Peter, torn asunder, give us free range to bike where we wish, unstopping and unscathed)
Maia and I began the day by departing from the Super 8 Motel where we spent the night with my parents, who had generously stopped by to resupply the bike team and take away our smelly old clothes. The daughter of the parents who own the motel is going to be putting on a 350 Day of Action event at her high school! Also, thank you so much for cooking us the wonderful rice and lentil curry dinner.
We travelled through New Ulm and down the road to St. Peter, passing farm fields and prairie before gliding back down into the Minnesota River Valley. Just out of New Ulm, we saw a sign that declared "vegetables for sale." Curious, we decided to check it out, and met a family who sells the fruits of their labor (or vegetables) to people in town. They told us that they can't afford a car to go to the farmer's market though, but that people know to just stop by the farm to pick up their produce.
We arrived early, so we explored the town and biked up the very steep hill that Gustavus University is on just to see if we could (not recommended). We talked with students who were walking around campus about what we're doing and then hightailed it to a meeting with the manager of the local St. Peter Food co-op.
Travelling down Main Street, we witnessed how it had been completely torn up to redo the road. Many people at local businesses said that this has hurt them at a time when the economy is already down.
At the Co-op, Jennifer and a reporter from the Mankato Free Press met with us. We talked about the 350 bike trek and learned about the many things that the co-op is doing to promote buying local. For example, there is a FAMOUS local cheese that got in article in the paper that has been selling like crazy. I ran into a man the following day on the Sakatah Singing Hills trail who said that he was dissapointed that the cheese was gone; I guess everyone had wanted some!
We talked and talked and talked until the sun had gone done, which is good because of the wonderful conversation, but bad because the sun had gone down. Why? Because that meant I would have to bike to Mankato along Highway 169 in the dark; little did I know that I was about to meet Scylla and Charybdis.
My parents drove Maia home so that she could get to work and I began the trek around the road construction to get to 169. Ah, I was out of the city and biking when the speed limit went up and I suddenly realized that there were cars whipping past me at sixty miles an hour on the left. I stayed to the right of the narrow shoulder as I biked uphill, the whole ride was uphill. Suddenly I saw a shape in the road ahead of me and swerved around it: a dead cat. My stomach wrenched as I saw yet another dead cat not that much later.
It was starting to get creepy as I was biking in the pitch dark with only a flimsy flashlight attached to the front of my cycle to guide me. Then, there was a large snake that slithered off of the road in front of me. I swerved to the left just as a large passed by me not two feet away. I was starting to panic now and stayed as far to the right as I could when I started hearing a strange grunting whining noise and shape that was following me on the right. Oh no, I thought, I knew that I had heard that there were mountain lions around here; what if one was stalking me? I didn't know what it was, but I knew that there was something there. So I stayed in the middle of the shoulder, balanced between the murderously fast traffic on the left and the unknown noises from the creature stalking me on the right. With a burst of adrenaline, I biked the rest of the way to Mankato, where I collapsed on my friend Alex's pull out couch. Thank you Alex and Karl for letting me crash so that I didn't have to set up camp in the forest, alone at night!!!
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