Osceola, Wisconsin – I just left Minnesota, but I’ll be going back in the morning. I have mixed feelings about this.

In some ways, Minnesota is the most bike-friendly place I’ve ever seen. The day before yesterday, I took a day off from the cross-country route to bike a section of the Mesabi Trail, a brand-new bike trail they’ve put together running through stretches of the Mesabi Range in the northern reaches of the state. The 40 miles I did on the Trail will certainly go down as one of the highlights of the trip: the path led past every sort of scenery you could imagine. There were lakes, long stretches of woods, parts through the fringes of big towns, parts through the centers of little ones, and everywhere hills and gravel tinted a fiery red by the iron in the soil. After so many miles of having to squeeze onto the shoulder, I got to be king of the road for a day, and I loved it.

Plus the trail – and this was my entire point in taking it – led right to Hibbing, Minnesota, the birthplace of America’s greatest musical poet, Bobby Zimmerman (lately known as Bob Dylan.) I showed up in Hibbing on a Saturday afternoon, all set to take the Dylan walking tour, only to discover there was a massive parade stretching down Main Street.
This was, a weird combination of thrilling and vexing: on the one hand, I wanted to do the walking tour; on the other hand, everybody loves a parade. I managed to do both, checking out Dylan’s childhood home, synagogue, high school, even the building in which he was Bar Mitzvah’ed, then watching most of the parade. The highlights were the three vintage Greyhound buses (Hibbing is also the home of Greyhound, though I didn't have time to hit the Greyhound Bus Museum) and the self-propelled Port-O-Let. Now that was impressive.

Hibbing is also known as The Town That Moved, because the original townsite was located right next to an enormous open-pit iron ore mine. (The mine, the world's biggest, is still there, and you can climb up a hill and stare at the massive red scar in the earth.) A few decades ago, the mine started to grow too close to the townsite, so they moved it maybe a mile away. But the townsite is still there. It's very bizarre: full streets laid out, running past grass-covered lots that mostly still have foundations and even steps on them. It's a ghost town in the most direct sense of the word, and it was a truly surreal experience to meander through it.

So anyway, back to my original point: Minnesota is blessed with remarkable bike trails, as well as a huge number of bikers to use them. But there’s a major downside: the roads. Some of them are just awful. For some reason, the joints in the pavement, those crosswise cracks that show up every 15 feet or so, are like mini-Grand Canyons up here. Sometimes it feels more like you’re riding on railroad ties than a road. Let me tell you, as much as I’ve enjoyed Minnesota, my butt will be very, very happy to see it in the rear-view mirror in a few days.

In the meantime, I am swinging through Wisconsin briefly; the route at this point heads pretty much due south, so it's right back into Minnesota in the morning. Tomorrow I get to experience my first jolt of truly urban biking when I head into Minneapolis to visit my friend Ruth for a couple of days. So far this trip has gone way faster than I had planned, but we're getting into the "stopping by to visit people I know" zone, so the pace is likely to slow up soon.