Tour de Trempealeau 2010
This is the 2nd annual Tour. Trempealeau County is a road rider’s paradise. Fabulous scenery, high quality pavement (mostly), and traffic volumes so low as to make one laugh. Our intrepid riders camped in Perrot State Park, one of the more interesting state parks. The Trempealeau Hotel is nearby and features fine dining, a nice bar, and great views from its deck. Honorable mention goes to Sullivans, the other Trempealeau restaurant. We ate there one night – everyone ordered the pan fried Walleye, and it was the best Walleye ever.
In attendance this year: Tim, Eileen, Guy, Ann, and Sam.
Click on thumbnails below to see more Photos.
Scenes from camp
There’s a nice canoe loop right out of Perrot. It takes about an hour to get around it. Water levels were high, there was some current in here to fight.
We drove to Ettrick to begin our first day’s ride. In the morning we rode “Loop #6”, a 29.5 mile loop that took us through Blair and Hegg. Note: County Road’s “S” and “C” on the second half had a lot of gravel and tar. It was a somewhat dirty section, and smelled bad too! This was the only bad pavement we saw.
The second day’s ride began in Independence. We rode Loop #7. Right when we parked our cars, two locals went by us with a boat on top of their car, no straps or anything holding it down, just the two of them holding it out the window with their hands. They were armed with a bow-and-arrow type fishing rig, for carp. Their paddle of choice was a shovel. (Nice.) Loop #7, called “Ride with the Eagles, is one of the best in the county and features “the longest continuous ridge top” of any of the county rides.
The last day’s riding began in Dodge – Loop #15. The section along River Road that parallels the Trempealeau River is particularly sweet. Check out the bluffs along this road! The Wilsons headed on home after the morning ride. Tim, Eileen, and Sam drove up to Arcadia and pedaled loop #7, again
The Hankard family came for one night of camping. They snagged a sweet walk-in site. We sat around their camp fire that evening and got pretty much savaged by skeeters and biting flies. Their whole crew kayaked the local canoe trail, and they also rode bikes. Later, Mike did the canoe trail again with Tim and Eileen.
Most of us walked up to the top for the view:
