Aitkin, MN

Last summer, I rode a bicycle from Chicago, IL to Devil's Lake, ND. Since I've never written about the adventure, and since it was a long December as far as temperatures went, I thought January might be a good time to talk about summer 2008. January is Bike Month at the Drawing Board.

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This day was going to be different. For nine days now, we'd known every morning roughly where we'd end up in the evening. When we fell asleep behind the steakhouse, we set no alarm, we had no agenda. We had a tent and we had some bikes. We were at the whimsy of the wind.

It was the first night we'd slept on the ground, and I was taken aback by just how chilly August could be. Early morning temperatures were in the low 50's; so we made the executive decision to wait out the bite in the first coffee shop we saw. This would become a theme.

I can't remember too much about the place. It appeared to be an old, converted diner. I drank coffee and ate some sort of pastry and spent some time with my nose buried in a newspaper. I wrote a letter to the girl I was going to marry. I moved with no sense of rush since there was nothing to rush me.

We rode out and headed north along state highway 169. The road was wide and clean and virtually devoid of traffic. It was the kind of road that went nowhere and wasn't even the fastest way to get there. We held the shoulder at a quick but calm pace.

We coasted through the town of Milaca, and chose not to stop for the town play, a musical about how Paul Bunyan met Babe the Blue Ox.* I only wish I was making this stuff up. The whole state seemed to be obsessed with Paul Bunyan.

* Paul Bunyan: Holy crap! You're a big ox!

  Babe the Ox: Holy crap! You're a big guy!

  Paul Bunyan: Holy crap! You can talk!

So we paced through Milaca, regrettably without a second thought. In Indiana, no matter where you are, you can count on being within 20 miles of a town. That means that if you decide not to stop for lunch in one town, you'll almost certainly have another opportunity in an hour or so.

That's how we arrived in a town called Onamia about an hour after we'd decided we were famished. It's tough to say what makes a town a town; in this case, it was a food court on the side of the road. Also, they sold sweatshirts that featured a phoenetic pronunciation of the town's name. You know, in case you want a souvenir from a town that's greatest feature is that it's difficult to pronounce.

* oh-name-ee-uh

Just after lunch, we discovered Mille Lacs Lake. Of the state's ten-thousand lakes, it's the second largest one that's held entirely within Minnesota. On the map, it was the size of my thumb and from one shore, I couldn't see to the other.

It's the home to several posh fishing communities, extravagant summer homes, and a particularly poor-looking Indian Reservation. The road runs along the curvature of the river and so every hundred feet provided a vista of wealth or destitution, seemingly at random intervals.

It's tough to say what we were looking for as we wandered through Minnesota. A campground? A cool restaurant? A coffeeshop? At some point, we were going to see something that made us want to stop for the night, and if we didn't, nightfall would.

That's when we saw a sign that said in big letters:

FREE SPAGHETTI DINNER TONIGHT

That was pretty much it. I nearly wrecked myself following the arrow that pointed to the east. We found a Lutheran church and we had a lot of questions. Is it really free? Is it really dinner? Is it really spaghetti? Is it really tonight? Can we take showers?

All of our questions were answered affirmatively, so we locked up our bikes, showered in a renovated part of the building and toured the town for an hour while we waited for dinnertime. We found a natural foods' store and a bootery* and an internet cafe and everything a person might want from a town that was a 12 hour stayover.

* They love putting the suffix -ery on the ends of words of there. More to come.

We ate spaghetti and then got some more and then even offered to clean up the church. This piqued the interest of a man named Bryan Johnson who asked us about our quest, our homes, and whether or not we'd seen much of the Olympics. Would we like to go to his house tonight to watch the Olympics and sleep in beds in guest room in the basement?

Um, yes.

So we went back to his house and watched the Olympics and ate brownies and slept in beds and we learned that the chance that you might be abducted by a serial killer is sometimes worth the risk. Besides, he seemed like a really nice guy, and he was.

Somewhere, half a world away, the U.S. was sticking it to the French in a swimming pool, and it's amazing the power that has to unite people. I slept like a rock instead of on top of one.