catching up!

well it's been a few days, let's test the good ole memory. first of all bob dylan' s song "blind willie mctell" is so good it has been slowly killing me. as my friend maya once said, i have been strummed into righteousness.
so on the 4th we left madison at dinner time after meeting alan and erin's landlady, who climbs mountains all over the world and hires guides and all that crazy business. i dunno if i already mentioned but alan and erin are embarking in may on a 2-year bike trip from the arctic circle to the tip of south america... bluh!
so we biked only a few miles before we were already in rural land outside madison. as it got dark we came into a town called Black Earth where the fields were full of fireflies. it looked unreal as it got dark, they all just seemed to be floating around serenely and there were hundreds of them, it was actually a little bit cooler than the fireworks hahaha. we saw some fireworks starting up ahead of us as we biked so we sped up toward them. we got to a public school where we could see them pretty well even though we were a couple miles away, so we watched them there. they made me unexpectedly homesick, but some ridiculous mad libs involving hippopotamous schlongs cheered me up. we camped in the schoolyard since we knew no one was around; the population of the town was like 100.
the next morning began with me picking some wild berries and then getting chased away by a very intimidating bird. i believe we were going to viroqua on this day hahaha i mite miss a day in this entry. it was still flat at this point and sunny and perfect, as it had been for many days. we passed Dylan and Clementine, two people doing a 6-month bike tour of the US who came from Switzerland! we had learned about their tour from talking to someone on warmshowers, so phil saw them and yelled their names but they had no idea who we were so they were super surprised hahaha. we talked with them for about an hour tho it only felt like 15 minutes, that's what always happens when you take biking breaks it seems. phil hopes to visit them in lasahn (no clue how to spell that), switzerland within a couple of years and it wouldn't surprise me if he did.
viroqua is a very randomly located progressive town with a really big co-op considering it's relatively small size. phil was having some trouble breathing here so he went to the doctor, they said he had acid reflux, which he doesn't, he actually had a virus (his grandma is a doctor and she was able to actually figure it out). so a couple of hours in the emergency room with blood tests and a numbing drink just led to phil picking up a prescription he didn't need, yea doctors. we camped in back of a church and phil talked to a lot of people at the food co-op while i did some bike trail research. if we took roads for about 30 miles to la crosse, a small city on the mississippi, then we could hop on the Great River Trail (i think that's what it's called haha) for about 25 miles north en route to the twin cities. so that is exactly what we did. the trail was gorgeous, there were lots of birds and swampland and a national wildlife refuge and a state park, and very nearly the whole trail was lined with wild raspberries and blackberries! phil got his 4th flat, while i've still only had one.
when we got tired we just picked a random patch of grass rite off the trail to pitch our tent. the mosquitoes attacked us with a vengeance so the tent pretty much felt like heaven. phil seemed pretty much better at this point which was excellent.
next marnin' i washed off in the silty Black River while phil was still getting up. it had been about 5 or 6 days since we showered so the grime had accumulated pretty well. i've been getting these solid black lines of dirt along my neck that look pretty hot. sometimes i clean them off, sometimes i don't.
we made it halfway from where we started to the twin cities, to a town of 121 people called Maiden Rock. we had spent almost the whole day just following the mississippi and in maiden rock we pitched our tent about 100 yards from it, and about 20 yards from a train. we seem to end up next to water and trains pretty frequently. again phil was able to sleep thru the ground-shaking trains, while i was awake most of the nite feeling really itchy, which i assumed was from being so dirty. in the morning i went in the mississippi to try to remedy this, but the itchiness didn't go away. by the end of the day phil and i both realized we had somewhere somehow mingled with some poisonous leaves that were the actual source of the itchiness, so now we spend a lot of our free time scratching. alas.
so we made it into st. paul and thru to minneapolis last nite and will be here today and tomorrow. we are staying with a couple and their 4-year-old daughter. they are super nice to us and have about a dozen instruments, plus the twin cities seem really cool, so we're pretty excited. rite now phil is on a bike route with some people who deliver fair trade organic coffee by bike. he found out they were leaving about 15 minutes in advance, so he just jumped on his bike and went, seems to be typical phil-style.
from here it's about 550 miles to rapid city in a straight line west! we'll see how long it takes us to get there! ps phil and i had a race for a couple miles yesterday and i won. though i will give credit where credit is due and say that my bike and stuff = 40 pounds and his = like 100.
when we got off the trail we met some hills, but none so bad as in western pa.