Lake Woebegon Trail : 3, Emergency Room : 0

Writing Well is the Best Revenge

No Emergency Room Visits!

That pretty much sums up the success of our trip to Minnesota. I checked, and it was about 500 miles one-way, but it is a very beautiful stretch of interstate, filled with trees and a few curves, so it was not boring. Didn’t care for the traffic through the Twin Cities (why do people speed up for a tunnel, jockey for position, then pass anyway in the tunnel, all quarter mile of it, which you aren’t supposed to do?) but survived it twice.

Got a hotel room the first night in Saulk Centre so the next morning we went to tour Sinclair Lewis’ boyhood home ($5@, but what else was there to do in town?). Things were going fine until an elderly woman in a gigantic older red Cadillac came thisclose to my Vette at the only stoplight on Main Street. Still not fully over that scare.

It was a nice tour, and then we headed over to the ‘Interpretive Center’ (because that was free, so why not?) and saw more Lewis memorabilia. Lewis was an unusually sensitive child from a tiny Midwestern town that was always teased for being bookish. He could wait to get out of Saulk and promptly put all the town’s hypocrites into a roman a clef he dubbed “Main Street” and won the Nobel Prize for Literature! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!! I CAN SO RELATE!!

Of course the citizens of Sauk Centre were outraged and gave Sinclair’s dad a hard time about the whole thing. Sinclair was an alcoholic who couldn’t maintain personal relationships and died alone and forgotten in Rome. But he got his little small-minded town back! Bwha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Sorry. Just had to get that out of my system. Anyhoo….

Later that day we took a room in Albany, MN. Skated past beautiful ponds and lakes over to Avon (about 14 miles round trip) and back. Noticed many of the business had signs saying something along the lines of ‘No guns allowed’ or ‘this is a gun-free zone’, etc. Makes me wonder what exactly happened before we arrived. I mean, does a Kraft Foods plant have many holdups? Actually, the only person I can imagine uttering the words, “Hand over the Velveeta and no one gets hurt”, is Mr. Right-After-I’m-Done-Blocking-My-Areteries-With-This-Preternatural-Yellow-Chemical-Brick himself.

Relaxed at the hotel (as there’s nothing, I mean nothing to do in Albany-perhaps we should have brought a gun) and went to sleep early. The next morning we skated to Freeport, MN, where they are making a big parking lot and shelter area for the trail. Right now it’s just a muddy pit, but some day it will be nice. Mr. Right After I Get Another Sports Injury was in a lot of pain since his skates are a dozen years old and have never been maintained. He was a trooper and made it back to the hotel (10 miles or so round-trip) but that was it for our skating tour. I really recommend it to anyone who likes to skate or bike.