Tag Archives: Bike Tours

RIP: My Sirrus Comp Touring Bike

RIP … my Sirus Comp Touring Bike… 17,073 miles toured in North America. Crumpled frame. Photo taken “Somewhere” in the “Middle of NoWhere” Montana!
 
New Specialized Sirus Comp arrives on Friday! Leave for Scotland shortly thereafter. Follow my bike diary on Crazy Guy on a Bike Portal.
My friend for seeing North America! 17,073 miles ridden on this bike.
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Seeing America by Bike … and Birds!

Sam Cook, the Duluth News Tribune outdoor writer, wrote in today’s Sunday paper a nice feature about all of Molly’s and my self-supported bike tours taken throughout North America.  Molly and I have now bike toured 6,366 miles in the past four years through the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, New England, the Canadian Maritimes, Texas, the Ozarks and of course … our own Lake Superior region!

Last Spring we biked through the Texas Hill Country, and then turned north through East Texas, the Ozark Mountains finishing along the Katy Trail in Missouri. This year we will move across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, and bike tour Scotland. Thus, I am pleased to announce the 2016 Scotland Tartan Tour. It will be fun to see the Scottish countryside at 12 mph! Expect to accompany me via this blog as I bike and bird through Scotland! (follow our trip via my daily trip diary)
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Read Molly’s Overview!

Meadow Madness! Dickcissels & Meadowlarks

Molly and I just finished up “a quikie” bike tour. Unlike our longer multiple month and hundreds of miles, if not thousands of miles trips … we only cycled 156 miles over three days. The bike tour may have been short, but the birding and scenery has been great. Just this morning at sunrise I captured a new lifer, a Dickcissel! Next to that bird on the wire was an Eastern Meadowlark. Although I love my home area along the North shore of Lake Superior, both of these birds never visit the Boreal forest.

Here are a few of my sunrise photographs, and a few pics from the last three days of cycling. We named this bicycle tour the Wisconsin River Ramble. After a short tour along the Mississippi River, we biked 61 miles up the Scenic River byway, and then back the next day. As much as we could, our route took some different roads each day. Much of this area was never scoured by glaciers during the last ice age. The end result is hills because the land was nor shaved flat by the grinding pressure of the ice.

The Dickcissel

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Eastern Meadowlark

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Day’s 2 and 3 of our ride

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A typical farm scene while cycling

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The Unique Cafe in Boscobel

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Some Blue Wildflowers Along the Highway

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Hill Dispair \ Fatigue (50+ miles into the day’s ride)

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Thanks Wisconsin!

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