Sunday, June 19th
One thing I have become very good at is being able to anticipate the layout and range of products of any gas station given it’s relative location and size. Before I enter the store, or decide to stop, I can make a reasonable guess whether it will serve just one type of coffee or several, fresh doughnuts or pre-packaged, hot dogs with or without a full salad and sauce bar for topping them, or even how many flavours of Arizona ice tea will be in the fridge.
I’ve had to fine tune my skills from state to state as each seems to have one chain which dominates. In Illinois and Iowa it was Casey’s General Store. The buildings always had red signs with the name written in a big yellow cowboy style font. But now, passing back and forth between Wisconsin and Minnesota, BP seems to prevail.
This is a relevant observation a) because I seem to spend a lot of time in/standing outside gas stations and b) my current preoccupation, given the increase in temperature, is iced coffee. In Japan I looked forward to their 7/11 machine-prepared cappuccinos. Even in the first couple of weeks in the states I only drank hot coffee, but now, apart from maybe the first stop in the morning, it’s just too hot for anything but things which are cold.
Most stations usually stock the Starbucks range of bottled frappuccinos. These are overly milky and sugary coffee drinks which have the consistency of cow saliva. However, there is one in this range, an unsweetened black coffee, which i’ve been drinking a lot of, though it’s the hardest to find. So what I’m searching for are the gas stations which have an ice coffee machine. It’s not amazing coffee, but you can fill a 20oz plastic cup full of it for $1.99.
Today I was very grateful to find such a gas station. About 18 miles outside of Minneapolis, in North St Paul.
I’d set off at about 11 after breakfast of scrambled eggs, and two coffees. Emily also gave me chocolate cake and two bananas to take with me. I’d abandoned the idea of an early start, it was much easier to make these happen when I was camping, less comfortable, and more in tune with sunrise and sunset.
Getting out of Minneapolis was easy. A combination of cycle lanes and paths quickly took me on to the Gateway State Trail, another converted rail track which led from St. Paul all the way to the town of Stillwater, around 18 miles. But despite the mostly flat, quiet trail it was hard to cycle, the heat sweated any willpower out of me and I couldn’t shake off the idea that I still had to cycle around 2,500 miles instead of just focusing on getting somewhere today.
I sat with the iced coffee under a tree at the side of the trail, almost in the shadow of a large snowman sculpture which apparently was the mascot of the city, North St. Paul, and remained up all year round.
I was told this by a 17 year old kid who had a puncture. I helped him out with patches and a pump though the tyre went down as soon as he had fully inflated it again. He told me he played ‘many brass instruments’, and collected Nerf guns. An odd little guy.
I gathered a little momentum after the long break, and the trail became ever so slightly downhill which helped. I reach Stillwater by 2 or so. It was an affluent little riverside town with cafes and restaurants close to the water and a woman singing middle of the road jazzy music outside one of the bars. I took a brief pause but soon crossed the old trestle bridge over the river and took a sharp uphill out into the countryside again.
I sweated out the next four hours in 33 degree heat on a series of winding and silent country roads. I had a tailwind at least, but it wasn’t enough to fill the void between what my brain wanted me to do and what my legs couldn’t.
I had a state park I was aiming for but again had to adjust my expectations. I looked at other camping options in the next 20 miles. A lot of RV park campsites which I was keen to avoid since they never seem like tent or wallet friendly places.
Fortunately I found a host on Warm Showers who could take me at the last minute. His name was Tom and he lived in a geodesic dome house he’d built himself. It was close to the town of Osceola, but on the Minnesota side of the St Croix river.
I paused a couple of towns up at East Farmington and bought an energy drink and ate some Skittles at the BP there before continuing down to Osceola where I stopped at Cascade Falls, a small waterfall down in a canyon accessed by series of wooden stairs.
I hiked back up the stairs and crossed the St Croix river on Osceola road, back into Minnesota where i’d started in the morning.
The dome was easy enough to find, a few miles uphill from the river. The driveway was dark as I approached and the shape of the distinctive house began to emerge from the trees surrounding it. The main house dome was 40ft and connected to another 30ft dome, the garage, with a rectangular section where the front door was.
Tom had built the house 20 years ago and it had taken a year or so to complete. Inside various triangular windows gave a view of the green forest he was surrounded by. It reminded me a lot of the house in Ex Machina. My room was in the basement.
The geometric makeup of the house created interesting angles and spaces. It was decorated sparsely with white walls and a lot of wood and it felt futuristic, and both a little unsettling but calming at the same time.
A storm was due to hit later. I hadn’t camped in over a week now, and it had definitely changed the tone of the trip of late. It wasn’t better or worse, just different. I enjoyed the feeling of roughing it slightly, but at the same time there was something amazing about not knowing where you are going to sleep and thanks to an app and an email finding yourself writing these words inside a giant dome someone built in the woods.
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