We've managed to get into Cambridge - Minnesota. It is only about 4 miles off the route and it has a campsite... It has been a day of two halves - the morning was hilly and cloudy, the afternoon was fairly flat and the sun was starting to peek through. Stillwater is proud of its Lift Bridge - it lifts its main span 48 feet above its normal level. Built between 1929 and 1931 it's now a pedestrian and cycle bridge. We left the Asteria Motel at about 9.40am, worked our way across town - some very pretty flower borders - over the Lift Bridge and back into Wisconsin. We headed steadily north through quiet hilly country.
We reached Osceola, missed the town centre, went across the St Croix river again and pushed on to Shafer, a pretty very small town with a bike shop and a flower garden for, amongst others, the Monarch butterfly. I had heard, on radio 4, about the attempts to help the Monarch strengthen its migration between Canada and Mexico (where it sensibly goes to avoid a Canadian winter). 3000 miles of hazards face the Monarch - pesticides, loss of habitat, predators. So habitat is being created.... The flowers were mostly two of my favourites - agastache and bergamot. The bergamot had the most bees - its flowers were at their fullness of bloom. The bike shop in Shafer sold us Berry flavoured electrolyte tablets - excellent for giving a useful flavour to some of the large amounts of water we drink. It's a lovely shop - bike shops have such wonderful things that I feel I ought to need... clever technology, new waterproofs (mine have a touch of the mange), sleek clothing.... We powered on to Sunrise, Harris, and Stark where we were detoured wearisomely - onto the 36. The person in charge ofbthe campsite here in Cambridge asked some absurd questions . Having told me I needed to enunciate more clearly (I am a foreigner I said...) I said I was resident in Wales to which he said 'is that a country?' - 'for much longer than the US has been one' I ventured, he said 'you must be rich' (to cycle across the USA), I said 'no, just retired' (this is indeed true - it is the time far more than the money that is the barrier to doing a transam - the daily costs are low of course (bikes travel very cheaply, you can camp cheaply or free, and live on uncooked food like bread, bananas and salad stuff - which are a great diet for doing a transam - and the food costs don't count since you would eat at home). Anyway we set up camp for $25 and then visited Walmart to get our dinner. It had no beer so we went to the liquor store for toasted Icelandic Porter - brewed in Connecticut. Pleasant but rather heavy carbonation. Tomorrow is probably the half way point of the journey.... we're at about 2100 miles of biking today.... Our legs are a mass of muscles. Arms less impressive....