A comfortable night on Stephanies' futon set us up well for today. We had an indulgent lie in until 0630 and a relaxed morning as Stephanie cooked us a breakfast of porridge and scrambled eggs.
The roads were busy in the morning and a few roadwork sections forced us to find detours. As we found on the training rides, progress becomes a little stop-start in metropolitan areas. We found our road, route 75, and caught the Mississippi River Trail. Still no sight of the Mississippi though.
The road was another very straight course following roughly the route of the interstate, and occasionally we would weave alongside and see the heavy metropolitan traffic roaring through. This interstate was a world apart from the quiet dual carriageway that we rode through North Dakota on, and we were glad to be on the side road.
Occasionally the Mississippi Rover Trail would branch off down a short section of bike trail, but mostly we were on quiet roads all day. We made Otsego for lunch, where we stopped at Denny's, a commercial chain of diners.
After leaving Otsego we had a particularly hilly section to traverse before we hit the outer suburbs of Minneapolis. The temperature climbed to 40C and the humidity compounded this such that whenever we stopped we would be immediately drenched in sweat. Tempers frayed at times with this, but it was nothing an ice cream at the next service station couldn't fix.
We caught our first sighting of the Mississippi along here, and as we moved into the metropolitan area we rode alongside its banks into the centre of the city. On our way in we were struck by the size of Minneapolis. It was a good 20 miles from the outskirts to the centre. When we came alongside the interstate around 15 miles out we caught sight of a cluster of skyscrapers in the heart of the city, the first we have seen since Seattle.
Minneapolis is the most bike friendly city I have been in. Large cycle lanes with buffer zones and even a few solid barriers make navigating the city easy and safe. There is even the "Greenway" we are told which runs underneath the city and is totally free of traffic. The city seems a diverse, liberal and multicultural city. A very pleasant place to be, and we decided that tomorrow it would be nice to spend a morning exploring.
I managed to contact a host in the city, Natalie, who offered is a place in her shared cooperative house. Natalie works in education, teaching about cooperatives and also some outdoor education. She is actually going to start leading tours with ACA, the makers of the route maps we have been using.
On arrival we were greeted by her housemate Andrew who, seeing our weathered and sweat drenched selves, asked "would you guys like to go to the lake?" This was music to our ears! An afternoon swim in the lake with the sun setting over the far side was fantastic, and we felt human again. We also met Beth, who was another host I had messaged but could not accommodate us. We swam then went for ice cream.
A 24 hour cycle race had started by the time we returned, doing laps of the block we are staying on. Our hosts sat outside with banjos and fresh lemonade!
We have been told that the East African food here, Ethiopian and Somali in particular, is excellent, with the largest population outside of Africa. We went to investigate and found an inauspicious looking establishment where one local approached us warning that it was Somali food. I asked whether that meant we should not go in, but he said no, but he thought we might not like it... .
It was excellent. Goat meat with excellently flavoured rice and salad and fresh juice. The rice reminded me of an establishment back in Qatar that served rice and chicken which was very good. It was good food and lots of it. We were the only non-Somali people in there. We then moved on for a quick craft beer where the tiredness caught up with us.
We returned to the house, which was easy to find as we just had to follow the cyclists until we heard banjos. After a short conversation with the hosts and their friends we retreated to the living room for the night.
PS. I forgot to mention a very interesting woman we had a chat with on our way through a small town yesterday whose husband had been in the 8th Air Force and flew 36 missions in a B-17 as a radio operator over France!
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