July 7 Church Relief

The church that opened up restrooms and water for us.   If look close banners at front of church say "live simply that others may simply live"

A guy came by our campsite last night on his electric bicycle and stopped to chat. He and his wife are traveling around and taking rides on various rail trails and invited us over to see their camper van. They got a large cargo van, had windows put in, then designed and built the whole interior themselves: mosquito netting for the doors & windows, refrigerator, sink, gas stove, small toilet and many clever things to make good use of their space. It is designed such that they can put both her electric trike and his e-bike in the aisle while driving so they do not have to be carried on the outside of the vehicle. This was a lot of fun to see but did lead us to get to bed a little later than desired. Sometime during the night we heard a noise—something was getting in our panniers/food. We discovered that it was a raccoon and had unzipped the panniers and removed some gorp. It worked the pannier zipper properly but tore open the bag rather than opening the zip loc. We chased it away and it dropped the gorp, then we brought the panniers into the tent. But alas at some point later on, it was scratching on the tent and we chased it away again. This made for a poor night’s sleep. Between the raccoon and possible thunderstorms the next night, we left about 6:30 am as our goal was to get to New Ulm and stay in a motel with no mosquitoes or raccoons. Travelled through amazingly productive farmland but the farms were bigger and homes farther away from one another. Stopped at a church out in the countryside with a churchyard cemetery to eat lunch, and someone came out of the church and said we were welcome to use the restrooms as well as fill water bottles. It was a beautiful country church and we liked the banners they had in front that talked about living a simple life so that others can simply live. From a handout inside the door, we found out they are struggling with what to do with an empty parsonage which is right across the road, with no buildings/homes around for at least a mile or so.  

We eventually dropped down into the Minnesota River valley. Now we had trees next to us on the bluff as the road ran along next to it, and some farming on the bottomland, but also trees and some water-covered areas as we wound along the river for a number of miles. Then we crossed the river to go to New Ulm. Due to road construction, the road we were going to take up the bluff was closed, so we had to go along the bottom for a ways and then backtrack to a Walmart where we wanted to stop. The day had been hot, cloudy and humid, but we were surprised by hearing what sounded like hard rain on the roof. It had stopped by the time we checked out. Outside we wondered at first if it really had rained as the pavement was dry but then our bikes were wet. We headed off to the motel a ways away on the other side of town, but we got caught in a deluge partway there. We are spending the evening trying to get dried out.  

   Reposted 

Lake Koronis Regional Park to New Ulm MN