There are some sure-fire ways to know you’re really in Minnesota, and today offered up several of them. Before I get to those, however, we need to say good-bye to the South Pier Inn and Canal Park in Duluth. The South Pier Inn is a really unique place right below the Lift Bridge, where you can see freighter and other traffic pass by just a few feet away. Duluth is considered to be biggest and busiest port on the Great Lakes, and is also the farthest inland freshwater port in the U.S. The South Pier Inn is a great place to stay if you want to experience this first-hand.

This morning, I had a nice chance to reconnect with Branden, the hotel manager, who I had last seen when we were there for Grandma’s Marathon in June. Branden also has an interest in biking and occasionally does longer rides. Here he is in the hotel lobby.

This is a photo of Trudi and me just before we checked out, standing on the deck outside our room with the Aerial Lift Bridge in the background.

The first mile or two of today’s ride was on trails that run north along Lake Superior, and it was there that I bumped into Jeanine and Kyle, a retired couple from Denver, CO who are on an eight- or nine-day bike trip from where they parked their car in Fergus Falls, MN (about 200 miles from Duluth). They recently moved to Denver from North Carolina and rode their bikes from N.C. to Denver just for fun in connection with that move. Here is a photo I took of them along the trail.

Jeanine and Kyle had lined up accommodations for tonight using the Warm Showers hospitality exchange service that is popular with some cyclists and warned me of severe thunderstorm warnings for later that afternoon that could include hail. This was of concern, since I had 50 miles to go to get to Floodwood, MN. As you can see from the blue skies in this photo, the weather was perfect this morning, and already in the 80s by the time I started. As I’ll explain further below, however, one way you know you are in Minnesota is that the weather can change dramatically in a relatively short period of time.

Another way I knew I was in Minnesota was this sign honoring the folk singer Bob Dylan, who was born in Duluth and grew up in Hibbing, MN.

The next reminder I got of where I was occurred only a couple of miles into the ride, as I headed up some very steep streets to the Skyline Parkway, which follows the ancient shoreline of Glacial Lake Duluth and offers dramatic views looking out over Duluth, Superior, the St. Louis River, and Lake Superior. That’s great when you are up there, but getting there on a bike is a challenge. Those streets had a grade rivaling some of the steepest climbs I’ve experienced on this trip, and it took me over an hour to get to the top, after which I still had about 45 miles of biking ahead of me, which I was hoping to accomplish before I got caught in a big storm.

As it turned out, the storm began around 4 p.m. and continued for a couple of hours. It also got quite a bit colder. There was no hail, but there was lightning, and a couple of times when it seemed frighteningly close, I laid the bike down near a ditch and crouched there until it seemed I was out of danger. The storm was even more challenging because a 13-mile stretch of Hwy 8, which we had thought was paved, turned out to be dirt/gravel, which got very mushy in the heavy rain. It was a long, tiring ride in a heavily wooded area where there was very little development of any kind, and few homes.

Interestingly, later on a guy in front of me in line for a sandwich at a Subway Shop in Floodwood said he had seen me passing his house in the storm. I commented on how remote that long stretch of gravel road was and asked if they had any bears in the area. He said oh yeah, his two dogs ran a bear up a tree in front of his house just a couple weeks ago. I’m glad I didn’t know about that beforehand.

Here is a photo of the Cloquet River I took just before the storm started.

And here is a photo I took of the Saint Louis River just as I was finally getting into Floodwood (pop. 515) around 7 p.m. The rain had let up a little by then, but another thunderstorm kicked in shortly after I checked into the Stardust Motel there.

Just when I realized Hwy 8 was becoming a gravel road and conferring with my Chief Navigator on my options (none other than to forge ahead as it turned out), this horse trotted over to see what was going on. It only took him a minute or two to realize there was nothing of interest and start eating grass.

There were only a couple of dinner options for me in Floodwood, and I picked the Mainline Station, which was a few blocks away from my motel. The two specials on the menu this evening were “Tacos and Tots” and “Tater Tot Hot Dish.” For those of you not from Minnesota, “hot dish” is a casserole that includes some kind of canned vegetables and soup, plus a protein like hamburger. It is a term that was invented in the state and according to an online reference to a CBS news story, “has become a symbol of Minnesotan identity.”

I definitely knew I had to be in Minnesota when I saw these two specials, and after fighting 13 miles of mushy gravel on a road bike in a lightning storm, felt I deserved a classic Minnesota comfort food like the Tater Tot Hot Dish.

Here’s what the hot dish looked like before I had my first bite.

Ah…and here’s what it looked like after my last.

There is potentially more rain on the horizon for tomorrow (Wed., 9/6), but I don’t have quite as far to go to get to my next destination, Hill City, MN (pop. 619), and I’m pretty sure there are no gravel roads on that route. And now that I’ve had my hot dish, I feel I can deal with just about anything I might have to encounter here.