Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
views of the river, which in some places is so wide and slow-moving as to be called a
lake.
The next morning, sunny with a chill in the air, I crossed the bridge from Winona into
Trempealeau, Wisconsin, rode along the edge of a national wildlife refuge and through
Perrot State Park, a lovely spot along the river with an American frontier feel; you could
imagine a Conestoga wagon rattling up to a log cabin in its flower-dappled fields. From
there I picked up the first of the many Wisconsin trails I'd ride much of the way to Ch-
icago.
Last night I stopped in Sparta, a small city that calls itself “The Bicycling Capital
of America” on the strength of being one pole of the granddaddy of American bike
trails, a thirty-two-mile path established in an old railway bed in 1967 that goes through
woods and farmland southeast to the town of Elroy. Like a lot of mid-American places,
its size—the population is about ten thousand—Sparta appeared a bit down at the heels,
but on this day, with fall approaching in the angled light of late afternoon and early
evening, the wooded trail and its surrounding parkland were cheerfully pretty, a place
to make a touring bicyclist feel welcome. The bicycle, in fact, is the town symbol; it ap-
pears on signage everywhere, clearly an attempt to attract pedalers to Sparta's motels and
restaurants (though I wouldn't brag about the ones I sampled). And the local museum,
named for an astronaut who grew up nearby, is devoted to the history of transportation.
The Deke Slayton Memorial Space & Bicycle Museum, it's called.
The Elroy-Sparta State Trail is actually one of four interconnected trails that took me a
hundred miles, from Trempealeau to Reedsburg, which is within a day's ride of Madison.
Unlike the Heartland and Paul Bunyan trails in northern Minnesota, which I also used,
or for that matter the trails in Minneapolis, the Wisconsin trails are unpaved, mostly
packed-down dirt or crushed limestone. That affects the quality of the ride, of course,
though it isn't necessarily worse than traveling on pavement. I had glorious rides in Min-
nesota, but frankly the whole state road system, bike paths included, could use a new
application of asphalt. So many roads and shoulders are pocked, potholed, and cracked
at regular intervals from cold heaves that I felt that I had speed bumps every twenty
yards for five hundred miles.
It's true a bike doesn't roll quite as well on dirt, and the Wisconsin trails were a little
lumpy with fallen twigs and leaves; at the end of a fifty-mile trail ride I was more tired
than I would be otherwise. But the two-day ride on Wisconsin's trails was a treat. The
weather was cool and sunny, the air crisp and bright with the feel of autumn coming
on. Alas, the leaves hadn't begun to change, but the greenery was impressive. Woodsy
corridors went on for miles, broken up by swampy waterways flanked by immense wil-
lows, or by farmhouses, cornfields, barns, silos, and grazing cows that gave me postcard
