Grand Forks, ND

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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We'd been riding bikes through Minnesota for 12 days now, and pretty soon we'd be leaving it all behind. The people here had been beyond friendly, offering their food, their homes, their hot tubs, their beer, and their companionship.

Still, there was a sense that we'd been in Minnesota too long; we'd had enough of the mosquitoes and the accents didn't sound so weird anymore. In fact, I'd started to pick one up myself.

We continued from Erskine along Highway 2, unperturbed by the anti-Christ, and rolling into an increasing wind. Paul was recovering slowly, but recovering. We moved modestly into Crookston, Minnesota and stopped for a coffee break at a small bookstore. We were out of there almost as quickly as we had arrived. We made a pit stop at a gas station and we fell further and further into the de-civilized world.

Then, like a Jack-in-box, the town of Grand Forks appeared. The metropolitan area is shared between Minnesota and North Dakota; their border celebrated unceremoniously by a bridge over the Red River. We rolled through the beautiful city and into North Dakota where we did the thing we did best. We found a coffee shop.

Quickly, one of the baristas offered up her own apartment for our showers. The place was huge and fully furnished and was reminiscent of a loft you might find in the suburbs of New York. I was left with one impression - baristas in Grand Forks, ND make an absolute truckload of money.

Of course, it's possible that baristas were paid so well because the place was absolutely haunted by a small girl who spoke at roughly 430 words a minute. She played chess with Paul and gave him other orders too. Finally she explained the inner workings of the coffee shop, told us where she lived, and exegeted the annals of Roman history. It was an exhausting process that I observed from a safe and hilarious distance.

Later, we found a bike shop on the other side of town, ate dinner at a Perkins,* and did the thing we do where we try to talk someone in to inviting us to their home for the night. It never happened.

* Perkins? Perkins? Seriously? A Perkins?

Paul was still on the upswing and so we decided another good night might be for him what he needed. Another night in a crappy hotel was absolutely called for and that meant there was a zero percent chance we'd be on the road before 11:30 the next morning. Also, I would be eating a dozen bagels for breakfast.