ROAM rest day 13-8-'11 Minneapolis

A rest day on ROAM is not your ordinary resting day where you get up late, have a nice breakfast and maybe go out for a walk later.
Todays' rest day was like this: we got up around 7 in the morning, had scraps for breakfast or a bar from our sponsor Cliff, filled water bottles from a hand operated pump on a well and got in our bikes to ride 90km to our next camping place in St. Croix. A so-called rolling stop through the twin cities on each side of the Mississippi river Minneapolis and St. Paul. The ride through town was along a nature rich trail. As it went up and down right and left, bendy and with unforeseeable encounters with oncoming strollers, joggers and cyclists, it proofed difficult to navigate for us who had never crossed these towns. It's simply not the same as when you ask our captain the route for the next day and he says: "just go east on route 12" and look out for velomobiles at the lunch stop.
Anyway, I was amongst the latest riders to leave the campground and since I was determined to upload at least 3 clips from my about 100gB of raw ROAM movie material to my YouTube account, I left the group I was in at the first coffee shop that I saw. There were just a couple of ROAMers leaving the Caribou and they could assure me they had good coffee and fast and free Wifi. Benji had come with me. He was not in a hurry, but waiting 2 hours for me to upload the clips was a bit more than he had expected. As he had no GPS, he had to stay with me or risk getting lost.
Afterwards we went to the Freeway cycling shop and restaurant where we were supposed to meet. The others had already left! Only John and David came in later, but they went on by car.
Expecting 65 km instead of 65 miles, we were a bit disappointed when we discovered that we had to cover more ground. To cheer us up, I thought I'd buy Benji and myself an Icecream at what seemed to be an Icecream van. So we came around this vehicle that turned out to be a vintage bus and found ourselves all of a sudden in the middle of a wedding party. This was of course the perfect opportunity for an improvised photo-shoot. We got a gorgeous bridesmaid and both the lovely bride and groom to sit in our Mango and Quest.
I had a smile on my face for the last kilometers to the St. Croix campground
:-))
See you on the road.