Black River Falls, Wisconsin

 Maybe thanks to the good word the pastor in Neillsville put in for me, I had the blessedly good fortune of coming upon a motel in the small town of Mondovi seventeen miles before the much larger town of Durand, that had been my initial destination for finding a motel for my weekly shower and some NFL.  I had been riding into a headwind all day making it a bit iffy for me to arrive in Durand before dark.  I was also not certain that I would find a motel there, so I was quite relieved at the site of the Sunrise Inn as I headed into the setting sun.

I didn’t arrive in time for the Bears/Packers game, but I did get to see a prolonged interview with Aaron Rodgers on the Packers’ post-game show.  He was refreshingly frank and articulate, an elder statesman.  I didn’t learn the Packers prevailed over the Bears until I turned on the TV in my room. A while after the game ended at three I started asking people I saw along the road it’s outcome, but no one knew, not even the woman who checked me in at the motel. I thought Packer football was a religion in Wisconsin.  It was shocking to find so many football atheists.  And the preacher was among them.  I asked him if the game was a noon or a three o’clock start. He said he wasn’t a sports fan and didn’t know.

I was at least able to watch the end of the Patriots/Cowboys game, a thriller that went into overtime.  The Cowboys scored a touchdown on a long pass to take the win and keep their record of being the only team this year to beat the spread in each of their six games, as they had only been a three-point favorite.  The Cowboys’ offense was in high gear racking up 567 yards, the most that any Belichik defense had ever given up, even going back to his days as a defensive coordinator.

And there was that telling number 567 once again.  It had turned up twice during the day as I went through a series of Geraint Thomas/Luke Rowe podcasts (Watts Occurring), a couple of Welshmen who are long-time stalwarts of Team Sky, now Ineos Grenadier.  They contributed to seven Tour de France wins for the team, Thomas winning one of them.  Their podcasts offer much insight into the mindset of elite cyclists and life in the peloton.

Their Irish agent Andrew McQuaid was a guest on one show.  He said the top junior riders have 5, 6, 7 World Tour teams chasing after them, a recent development hyping the intensity of the sport.  He as an agent now has to try to sign them up too.  On another show ranking the top ten sprinters of the past two decades Thomas and Lowe initially included the young pint-sized Aussie Caleb Ewan, but then remembered they’d forgotten the retired Tom Boonen, so knocked him out, apologizing to Ewan, who is a buddy of theirs, saying, “Give us 5, 6, 7 years and you’ll be there.”  

When Ewan was a guest they introduced him saying they couldn’t get Cavendish or a couple of other sprinters, so they had to settle for him.  Ewan well knew their sense of humor so didn’t hang up.  Nor did he snarl when their first question was, “How tall are you anyway?”  He went along with it saying, “Wikipedia says I’m 1.65 meters, but I’m actually 1.67.”  Lowe and Thomas give each other the piss all the time as well.  Thomas will occasionally preface some remark with “When I won the Tour de France,” to which Lowe always replies with an incredulous “You won the Tour de France?” 

They are always entertaining and informative.  They’ve got a catalogue of 54 podcasts over the past two years.  They conclude each show asking their guest what three people, living or dead, they’d like to have for dinner.  No one yet has picked any of my choices.  Andrew Carnegie would  have to be one of them and Henri Desgrange, founder of the Tour de France.  That third spot is a tough choice between John Muir, Paul de Vivie, Dervla Murphy and Ian Hibbel.

Having stayed in Mondovi and not pushing on to Durand Sunday gave me the opportunity to gain entry to the Carnegie Library in Durand Monday morning.  It now houses three tenants—a law firm, the District Attorney and a title service.  The interior reflected the Cottage architecture, making it a most comfortable and amiable setting, like plopping down in someone’s living room. The “Public Library” on the facade was interlaced with a network of vines covering the front of the building. 

From Durand I followed the Chippewa River south for fifteen miles until it merged with the Mississippi, then biked along it for fifteen miles to Alma then Cochrane before turning east to the next Carnegie in Arcadia.  I had two climbs of five hundred feet, each covering a couple of miles, the longest and most strenuous of the trip, as I left the Mississippi basin for farm land, camping alongside a cornfield five miles before Arcadia.

The front door of the Arcadia Carnegie was open to a construction site.  The library had recently been replaced and was now being converted into an accountant’s office.  Wikipedia needs to be updated once again.  The building hadn’t been altered in its hundred years retaining all its charm and dignity.

Then it was forty miles east through more farmland to Black River Falls and it’s Carnegie, now the local Historical Society Museum.  It was only open Fridays  and Saturdays from ten until two. It too had not had an addition and stood preeminently along the town’s Main Street.  

I’ve been seeing Amish here and there the past few days, usually zipping by in their one horse carriages. Today I passed a barefoot man with the distinctive hat and beard walking along the road, maybe to a nearby farm.  

Only three Carnegies to go and I’ll have completed the state.  They are clustered together, so I could finish them off tomorrow and will then have the dilemma of biking home or taking the train, either from Wisconsin Dells or Milwaukee.  Amtrak isn’t making it easy with it hard to get information on whether stops have baggage service or provide bike boxes.  If the wind persists from the south, I will make every effort to take the train, but if it switches from the north,  that would make for a fun final two hundred miles with a possible century to top off these travels.