Highlands to Lowlands

Yesterday we made an epic trek across southwestern Wisconsin. We clocked in at 14 hill/valley traversals — and I’m not just talking about small or medium hills, but genuine granny-gear, can’t see the top of them, soul-crushing hills. The valleys are the ones that you get lost in, entering some sort of an uncharted land where no one has set foot before. We probably brought smallpox to the natives and came back with various invasive species of fauna and flora. Anyway, it was epic and we covered about 60 miles between New Glarus and Blackhawk Lake State Recreation area (with a solid headwind again, I might add).  We stopped off for a great little picnic lunch and grocery shopping trip in Dodgeville. We were determined to do the route without resorting to the bike trails, and we both agreed it was well worth the extra effort because it was more interesting and less painful and more hilly.

As for our camping experience — let’s just leave it at “if you don’t have anything nice to say…”

In the morning we headed up out of Blackhawk Lake with a 3 mile climb; always part of a balanced breakfast.  Then we did a few gut-check down-in-the-valley to top-of-the-world transitions on a road that was built with mules in mind, before we finally settled on a nice county road that was smart enough to stay in the highlands, appropriately near Highland, WI. We eventually took a beautiful miles-long descent into the valleys heading towards the Wisconsin River, and spent some quality time looking up at the hills we had been on top of minutes earlier.

We ran into a few minor issues with our routes because many of the side roads are still closed after the horrible flooding that we brought to the area as part of our annual SolstiFloat 2013, only six weeks earlier. Who knows what calamity will follow us this time. Evidence of the flooding was easy to spot with huge swaths of road and shoulder gone missing, particularly in lower sections of valleys. Anyway, due to the detour you can add a few miles to our original meager total of 32 to take us to 37 miles, but still 3 1/2 hours in the saddle due to some serious hill work.

Eventually we made it to part of the trip where we will ‘flip it’ and start heading home — this time it was the Knapp Creek homestead between Muscoda and Boscobel. Waiting for us was the better part of a house, under construction, and a great dinner and drinks, along with a bed and all sorts of great amenities.

Tomorrow we’ll be taking a day off the bikes and doing some work on the house-to-be. I think we’ll use Liz as a human ladder and maybe I’ll do a bit of rework of the blueprints. Monday we start heading home, with some planned time off on Wednesday to enjoy Madison and spend some time with the families.