Montevideo to Hutchinson

For anyone who was concerned about it, the bike that was featured yesterday dangling from a basketball net was retrieved and its owner, a young man from Vermont happily did the whole ride today.

Today, (July 20), we rode through incredible quantities of corn, soy beans, and sugar beets. We had lunch at Olivia, Minnesota, which bills itself as “the corn capital.” Just to prove it, they have this kiosk featuring a giant ear of corn.

Just before Olivia, in Danube, Minnesota, a local man who stopped to ask me what in the world caused all the cyclist to come streaming through his town told me that the huge, open trucks full of corn that regularly passed us were sweet corn bound for the nearby Green Giant factory.

As I continued on through Olivia, I snapped this shot of the courthouse there.

Soon, we were back riding through the Minnesota countryside. One thing I had been noticing all day long was that almost every farm home is surrounded by a forest of several acres with the silos, barns, and other outbuildings on the southeast side of the forest, or sometimes completely surrouded by forest. A local man who stopped along the road as I was photographing one of these arrangements explained that the trees shield the buildings from the snow in the winter and the weather normally comes out of the northwest. Here’s a photo of a typical farm forest.

And here is a different home featuring a beautiful flower garden out front.

Tomorrow, we ride to our final destination in Minnesota, Northfield.