Gravity

Last weekend was Kindred's community days/cowboy fest/whatever they're calling it now, and that meant two things: parade and pancakes. We went down on Saturday morning with our neighbors down the street (Chase is the same age as Alison and Alexa is the same age as Eli) for the pancake feed and then stayed for the parade.

The kids started a game of "ring around the rosie" in the middle of the street before the parade started. I think with a little more time we could have made it an official event. There were quite a few other kids that came and joined in the fun. Not sure that asphalt is really the best surface for "we all fall down", but it didn't seem to faze the kids.



Four kids all diving for candy at the same time - what a haul! We might need to disperse some of the loot at Halloween just to get rid of it!



Alison has been working on her numbers quite a bit lately, and she put that together with her love of sidewalk chalk this week. If you can't make it out in the picture, she made "4+4=8" and "3+3=6" with stencils. She even knew to put the symbols in - a small correction to get them in the right order, but still!



Yesterday was my day to cash in a Father's Day gift. The gift was one free day to ride the Heartland Trail, and after trying to schedule it all summer, yesterday was finally the day. Joel and I started out from Akeley, MN at about 8:45, headed east to Walker, then north to Cass Lake. On the way back from Cass Lake, we stopped to stage a couple of photos, like this one.



Look at that! Such grace! Such poise! I make it look easy! And then I turned around, and promptly got my front tire stuck in the bridge I had already crossed. The tire dropped down in a crack and wedged in place, depositing me on the bridge deck in a rapid manner. Luckily, I was going pretty slow, and the timbers have more give than pavement, so I was able to escape with no injury. I managed to badly bend the front wheel and was a little worried about what to do. We were 10 miles from Cass Lake and about the same from Walker. I was able to bend the wheel back into alignment (kind of) the same way it got out of alignment - jammed it in the bridge and bent it the other way. I had to disconnect the front brake so the wheel would turn, but with a little tuning I was able to get going again, albeit a little slower.

We stopped in Walker for lunch, then made the last 9 mile leg to Akeley. Grand total: 67.3 miles. My butt hurts. Lucky for me, I trashed the front wheel on my bike so I can't ride until the new wheel arrives in the mail!