Today's forecast had rain, strong tail/cross winds and thunder in it again but it was almost sunny when we left Red Wing.  The radar (and pavement) showed rain in the hours before we woke up, though.  And I did get hit by a brief episode of rain on the approach to St. Paul.  Yesterday Minneapolis had some pretty good thunderstorms with high winds.  I have evidence, which I'll get to in a bit.

We headed back over to Wisconsin for the early part of the route.  This is said to be more scenic and a little quieter than the Minnesota side of the river.  I'd guess the winds were blowing behind or across us in the 20-30 mph range.  While they were cross winds, the best way to stay out of the ditches seemed to be leaning my bike into the wind, keeping my torso upright.  I'm sure it looked a bit strange.  Once I got used to that, the winds weren't so bad.

At Prescott, we re-entered Minnesota.  Staff recommended that we ride the sidewalk rather than on the steel grid bridge (from experience I can tell you that they are nasty).  They may not have realized that there was a solid strip on the side.


A last look at Wisconsin over the St. Croix River:

Barges lined both banks of the Mississippi to the south of St. Paul.


Looks like this one is carrying wood chips.


The St. Paul skyline:


A business jet lands at the St. Paul airport while a commercial airliner departs the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in the distance:


We routed up off the bike path on the north side of the river, through downtown St. Paul for a couple of blocks and then to the bike path on the south side via the Wabasha St. bridge.  Being on the top of the bluff plus the urban canyon effect made the winds really challenging.  I almost blew over a couple of times; rumor has it that one of our riders did topple.


We heard that some pretty good storms blew through here the last few days and there was plenty of evidence on the bike path--downed branches:


and even a (wasp?) nest:


See those little flowers next to the nest?  They were picked up by my tires.  Some were tossed off to stick to the rest of my bike; the rest accumulated around the top of my front fork and every so often I'd have to pull out a "nest" of them.  The bottom line was that my bike got its dirtiest on this last day.

The last couple of miles to our motel was directly into the headwinds.  I spent much of the afternoon cleaning, disassembling and packing my bike in its suitcase.  Final bike computer odo:


Then I picked up my rental car at the airport.  I had to see the Mall of America.  It is not a large as the Edmonton Mall but they have plans to expand to take that crown.  Ultimately, though, it is just a giant mall with a lot of stores, said to be quite crowded on the weekends.

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