Day 3: Saturday, July 27, 2013
Location: Connecting Route between Lake Eleven Segment and the first Connecting route in Chippewa County, Taylor County, WI
Here’s where a decision was made. 1200 miles is a long way. I mean – it’s all about the journey, right? We decided first, that it was our journey – not anyone else’s. So – out come the bicycles. We figured driving the connecting routes by car was a true cheat; but to us, doing the connecting routes on bicycle was fair game. Second, we were taking two cars. It wasn’t ideal, because we’d have to juggle our cars around, because we could only carry bikes in the van, but it was better than bicycling both ways, and we had targeted a 14.9 mile segment of road for the day. Ambitious, perhaps, but we were gung-ho. We drove both vehicles to the intersection of Hwy 64 and CTH F, and headed south about a mile. We dropped off one vehicle, and then drove back north to the trailhead for the Lake Eleven Segment. We got out the bicycles, geared up, and rode down to the first car. I think it took about 12 minutes. So – we locked up the bikes, drove back to the first vehicle, picked it up, drove back down and picked up the second car, drove BOTH vehicles another 2 miles or so down the road, then came back for the bikes. We geared up again, rode the two miles to the waiting vehicle, and repeated this tangled exercise from one end of CTH F to the other, right through the town of Lublin, which was coincidentally celebrating Lublin Days. Oh, the pure, simple joy of it. Actually, we stretched out our rides a little bit each time; maybe three miles per segment at the most, and at some point we drove to the far end and rode back to the middle, because it was downwind. It was our first time on bikes in a long time, and we were getting our peddling legs back in shape, so to speak.
The weather was excellent, we always had food and water nearby, and the ride couldn’t have been nicer. Except for our butts. If I ever meet the evil son-of-a-sea-merchant who developed the tiny, little leather-crowned crotch-busters they distribute with ten-speeds and laughingly refer to as ‘seats’, I will find new and unique ways of inserting one on their person exactly where mine ended up most of the day. Theresa’s was a little larger but no better. There definitely had to be changes.
Back to the weather. Actually, we drove through rain most of the way there. We were a little concerned, but we had the whole day, and the forecast was rain in the morning, cloudy in the afternoon, which is exactly what we got. We saw that it was raining all around us, but our trip was almost entirely dry. So – we finished our bike ride, 14.9 miles, and had time to spare.
Location: Pine Line Segment plus connecting route leading west to East Lake Segment, Taylor County, WI
The next logical thing to do was hike a short 1.0 mile segment named Pine Line Segment. Built and maintained by Boy Scout Troop 53, it promised to be a fine little walk. Better yet, this was to be our first official completed non-connecting route segment of the trail. First, we drove to STH 13 Wayside on the east end and dropped a vehicle, then drove back to the west end and found a place to park in a field about 1/10 of a mile up the road. We walked back the 0.1 miles to the sign, and started our hike. It started out a little rugged, along the edge of what was clearly someone’s pastureland between two barbed wire fences, a little overgrown, and clearly not well-traveled, but easily enough marked, now that we knew we were looking for yellow blazes. It ducked down across a small marshy area and quickly entered the woods. The trail was OK – not great, but clearly a trail. In the few miles I’ve hiked since that time I have seen much better and much worse. Exactly one mile later we came out on STH 13, and walked the 0.6 mile connecting route back up to our car. We walked far enough to touch the next sign (by now a familiar ritual) and got back in our car to retrieve the other vehicle. Still a lot of back-and-forth driving. We definitely needed to improve our techniques. This was the end of our journeying on Saturday, and we drove home tired but happy in our two vehicles. We were making real progress, and actually having fun on the trail. Running total: 19.2 miles of trail covered; 5.2 miles ‘extra’ hiking. End of Day 3.
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