Spring Fling 2026 — Day 4: Lancaster to Blue River

The day started like many others lately with the continental breakfast at the hotel. Pretty standard fare — I had a waffle, except I stood there listening to the machine incessantly beep at me for a solid minute before someone had to come over and explain that “you need to flip it.” I’m assuming there’s a whole TikTok about it that I missed. No instructions anywhere on the thing. Clearly the world has moved on without me!

We rolled out and stopped at “The Coffee Tree” in downtown Lancaster before heading north. Harald flagged it because they had a reputation for vegan-friendly food, so he grabbed some burrito action for the road. Seemed like a solid move on his part but I was not in the mood.

Pretty much immediately after leaving town we were onto quiet roads. It was a chilly Sunday morning — Mother’s Day, actually — and there just weren’t many people out. The ones who were out were friendly. The wind was still coming from the northwest and still had some bite to it; I kept my long-finger gloves on the entire day despite signs along the route claiming it was 75° F. I don’t know where they were measuring, but it wasn’t in our same universe. That said, it was substantially more manageable than the day before, so we’ll take it.

The day was about 45 miles with roughly 2,200 ft of climbing — so, the usual Driftless formula: up, down, up, down, repeat. The long descents were a little less rewarding than usual with a headwind knocking us back all the way down, but nobody was complaining too loudly.

Around 25 or 30 miles in, the roads started feeling very familiar to me. We were southeast of Boscobel, an area I’ve ridden through a bunch of times coming from the other direction. Bit of a strange feeling, like running into your coworker at the grocery store.

We stopped for lunch at a park in Boscobel and worked through more of our remaining food. From there we hopped onto what was an old highway or frontage road running east alongside the busier state highway, and caught a ripping tailwind for the last 6 miles or so into Blue River. That stretch basically paid us back for the headwind descents.

Blue River is where we crossed the Wisconsin River, then we wound north and looped back west to George’s place. We rolled in around 1:30 or 2:00.

George was in Wauwatosa visiting his mother for Mother’s Day, so we had the place to ourselves for awhile — plus Ollie the golden retriever, who was very happy to see us. We unpacked, ate whatever we could find, showers, and more or less immediately sank into the silence of Knapp Creek.

There’s an oriole coming and going from the feeder out back. It’s very quiet here. That’s about all we needed.