Day 3 - Chisholm to Biwabik. Pronounced Bye-wab-ick by the locals. Because they all immigrated from Wabik and one day hope to emigrate to Triwabik [I will admit, I already made a similar joke on Twitter]. I thought the most difficult part of the ride was the second thirty miles. As we hit the midway point you could chose to cut it short or do the designated thirty mile loop. When we got to the loop it had just started misting. The next seventeen miles or so got progressively wetter and progressively more wind in your face. A tough ride. I was glad it warmed up later so my shoes would dry out hanging on a fence.
At a midway stop at the Lutheran church one of the volunteers was wearing a submarine service jacket her grandfather had given her. She wasn't sure what boat he'd served on or if he'd been to my dad's reunion in Wisconsin the week earlier.
A stop at Grant Position and Mine to send to a coworker. You can see my bike in this photo obviously. I didn't think a packed pack would slow me down, but with a few bottles of water in there I could definitely feel it whenever there was a steep hill. That insulated pack is heavy. I should perhaps find a non-insulated one that weighs a third.
We got to pedal across it not long afterwards.
It is quite the drop.
When we rolled into town it started to get sunnier. We grabbed a quick lunch at Carlson's Pasty and Sausage Kitchen. They were out of pasties, but had shredded porchetta sandwiches. Delicious. Amazing. Strong recommendation and I hear the pasties are even better. We topped it off with a beer at Luke's Bar and talked to Luke for a while. On a return visit we met a lot of locals.
Festivities were in the town park, although they ran out of the BBQ chicken within like 18 minutes. This is me and Honk the Moose. A local celebrity.
I felt clever for realizing that if there was going to be a band, then the gazebo had to be powered. I managed to read in the shade and charge up my phone, and then served as roadie in charge of plugging in the single cord later when the band showed up.
This old guy, who reminded me of Grandpa Harry, could really shred that thing. Some wild solos. There was a guy at Luke's who'd started drinking with us at 1 p.m. and showed up for the music at 6 p.m. and he may not have ever quit drinking. He engaged in energetic dancing that included sky fist thrusting, fist pumping, Thor/MCU fist to the ground and a knee posing, and all sorts of other heavily fist heavy dance moves. We sort of expected to see him laying there in the park the next morning.
By the way, side observation, the police in Biwabik need more A/C in their bathroom and thicker toilet paper. These should be priorities over the armed-forces style armored police assault vehicle we saw in a parking lot on the way to Biwabik.
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