A bike trip for the holiday

This past weekend we had the fun of going on a little biking trip on the Paul Bunyan Trail. A had wedding flowers to do on Saturday and we were having trouble finding campgrounds so we didn't leave until after church on Sunday. My sister Keren took us down South of Walker and dropped us off. At the drop off place their was a pond that the kids had fun exploring around.

I did find a campsite for Sunday night (For $50 a night!!!) so we were all packed up to go hiking. Jonathan is using a bigger bike this year so I had to make him new pannier bags (The brown ones in the photo below) and Aaron got his old ones. This is the first year that he has had a rack and pannier bags.

 We were running late getting started and so we didn't actually get on the trail until around 3:30 pm. We also hadn't researched the trail or the options of starting places very well so we ended up having 21 miles to go to reach the campground. 8 of those miles consisted of big hills as well. It was a very pretty, winding and hilly trail in that area. We enjoyed it but it did wear us out.

Jonathan was needing to rest after some big hills.

 There were a lot of flowers in that area too.

Aaron and Mara on a flatter stretch.

 That evening we didn't get to the campground until it was almost dark. Then it took the camp owner a while to show us our place. We were still needing to make our supper and set up tents and such and so we were pretty tired and hungry! Once we got food in us we felt much better and then we headed to bed. It was pretty cold that night (the forecast had been 36 degrees) but we brought warm stuff and we slept pretty well.

 The next morning I went to check out the bay we were camping on. It was on Leech lake but from their campground it just looks pretty weedy. It was pretty anyway.

Our campsite. We were in the area of a bunch of people that bring their RVs and stay all summer long. I think they found us rather interesting. They were very friendly and offered to loan roasting sticks and give us fire started and water and ice.

Getting packed up on Monday morning.

One of the things I had fun noticing were all the wild edibles along the way. It is always good to know what we could eat if we were needing to survive along the trail. :-)  Here is some of what we found:

Sumac. We collected some of this and are looking forward to making something similar to lemonade with this.

We we surprised to find a bunch of wild grapes. Mara picked quite a few and we plan on making jelly.

Wild plums. These aren't ripe yet but I am hoping maybe we can ride back to get some when they are.

Echinnacia. I collected some leaves to use for tea.

We also saw quite a bit of Wild Asparagus which off course is not in season right now but we are hoping to go find it next spring. We also saw other herbs and greens, wild chokecherries that could be picked right now, a few hazelnuts, and strawberry and raspberry plants. I am sure there was a lot we missed as well.

Here is Megan out of the trailer to stretch her legs on Monday. We rode 37 miles on Monday.

Once we got back to our town we had fun eating supper at a yummy Mexican restaurant. We had packed all our other food and we could have made it home to eat but we enjoyed filling up on food with out doing any more work that night.

 It was another fun bike trip and now we are thinking about our next one.