...Who knew??

...That spokes were so important! I can honestly say, I did not. I just thought, for all intents and purposes, spokes were there merely to make a wheel, I don't know, look like a wheel. Wow, was I off base on that one! Long story short, for a while now, David and I have been trying to figure out how to get across the river over to the "other side" for the longest time. The one bridge we knew about (pedestrian, bike etc.) has been closed for a while now and the only other bridges we knew of were for motorized traffic only.

We KNEW there had to be a way across and after much research a glimmer of hope did shine through. Hope came in the form of the OLD "Bloomington Ferry Bridge". So we decided to give it a whirl and left from our house in Burnsville and headed in that general direction.

About 10 miles in to our ride, I heard a loud pop coming from the rear of my bike but nothing that jarred me or made me suspect I had run over anything so I slowed down (mind you, didn't stop) and tried to asses the situation. Everything seemed ok so I kept riding and David, being quite a bit ahead of me, had no clue anything had happened at all. One and a half miles later, after slowing down for a stop sign, my bike definitely was not functioning properly at all. I called ahead to David, who came to a stop right away while I coasted the rest of the way to meet him.

We checked my bike and saw what "seemed" to be the rear brakes completely hugging the back wheel. Thinking they had seized up we tried to loosen them, just disengaging them proved to be harder than we had expected. No matter what we tried we could not get things to line up properly. At first we thought the wheel was not sitting true to where it should so we kept trying to readjust it but at this point it wouldn't even spin.

At this point our main thought was how do we get home. Do we disengage the rear brakes and drive home? This seemed like a good idea until I thought of all the hills we had gone over to get to this point and trying to go back down some of them without a rear brake just didn't seem like the smartest thing to do. So we did what we could to get the wheel to just spin and walked the bikes to the back of an old building to lock them up and try to get a cab to come pick us up.

We called a friend to get a cab company phone number but the only pen we had on us decided to take the day off and did not work so with stick in hand David scratched the number in to the dirt. We called the cab.

45 minutes later and $30.00 poorer we were home and picking up the car to head back out and fetch our bikes. We took my bike to the shop, told them the story and they took a look at it. VOILA! I broke a spoke and just riding on the wheel with the broken spoke for 1 1/2 miles bent the rim of the wheel throwing the whole thing off balance. Who knew spokes were so important???

As always...Click to super size...no extra calories included!

Didn't see many cars while we waited...but we did see some horses!



This was the final resting place...because it was Sunday, it was closed, of course





Etch-a-Sketch...the original version...
(cab number)


(my feelings on the whole situation)


(Waiting for the cab...)


(...Still waiting for the cab)


All in all it was an adventure to be sure. And in the end...we never made it all the way to the bridge but we came within a mile...we will be back! We WILL make it across the river!

Until then...

Peace out!