Day 1: When a bike trip becomes an adventure

My 1981 Trek bicycle on the shore of Lake Superior at the start of a six-day, mid-July bike trip down into Wisconsin and up along the Mississippi River.

Route: Duluth, Minnesota, to Grantsburg, Wisconsin
Miles: 109 miles

Spend enough time with your bicycle and you come to know every sound it makes. And every sound it shouldn’t make.

The sharp “ping!” I heard on Day 1, mile 70, of what was planned to be a multi-day bike trip through Minnesota and Wisconsin was the latter. And when that noise was followed by the sound of clanging steel, I stopped.

The sound had been my rear wheel and, specifically, a spoke breaking. Even worse, it was a spoke on the drive-train side of the wheel, meaning it wasn’t something that could be repaired with the tools I had with me.

A moment before, I had been letting a strong, cool tailwind from the north carry me down the smooth, quiet Willard Munger State Trail. I was euphoric at the start of what I hoped would be my longest bike tour ever. I had left my house in Duluth, Minnesota, at 6:30 that morning and was well on pace to ride 109 miles to my goal of Grantsburg, Wisconsin.

But at about mile 60, a tree had fallen across the trail. Impatient, rather than try to take all my gear off the bike or walk the bike around the tree, I figured I could just lift it over. What I think happened was a branch got caught up in the spokes and when I began moving forward again, well, “ping!”

“The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong, that’s when adventure starts.”

Yvon Chouinard, founder Patagonia

I recalled this often-used quote by Yvon Chouinard from the adventure documentary “180 Degrees South.” If he’s right, then my trip had become an adventure, and my vision of what the day would entail had been disrupted. For a brief moment, I saw my trip coming to an end just hours after it had begun.

In planning this trip, I had told myself and others that it was going to be a “trip to nowhere.” I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have much money, and I didn’t have a route. What I had was five or six days, my bicycle and the gear I’d need to go where I wanted to go. And I didn’t want to go anywhere. I just wanted to ride my bike.

But, to be honest, that story wasn’t completely true. I’m not a freewheeling, live-in-the-moment kind of guy. I am an anxious planner who worries a lot. So, my freewheeling bike trip had a route. Here it is.

The Trek, left, at the northern terminus of the Willard Munger Trail. Right, my proposed bike route at the start of my journey, which would have done a kind of figure 8 down through Minnesota, along the Mississippi and then back up through Wisconsin and to Duluth. I didn’t end up going that way.

And my carefree day had a destination: Grantsburg.

I sat on a bench at the side of the bike path and tried to think about my options. A few things occurred to me. The first was that things really weren’t that bad. The wheel still rolled. I hadn’t wrecked. If I could get to a bike shop, it was something that was easy to repair. (I also learned a few weeks later about a sweet new item to add to my repair bag — a fiber spoke that would have dropped right in and let me keep on riding if I’d had it with me.)

I removed the dangling spoke. I released the brake caliper and managed to get the wheel working well enough that it would roll without rubbing against the frame. I used my phone to Google “nearest bike shop.” The results weren’t promising.

I narrowed my choices down to two options: 1) turn around and ride 30 miles back the way I had come to a bike shop just off the Munger Trail; 2) continue on to Grantsburg and then, the next day, ride 27 miles to a shop in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.

I talked to the guy at the bike shop just 30 miles away. He was there and he could help me.

But I hate going backwards.

And there was a place in Grantsburg that made its own root beer.

Day 2: ‘Ride as far as you can, John’