I Kiss You on the Brain in the Shadow of a Train.

There's a tornado watch for our area, and I'm thinking it's a great time to escape. I haven't done a "great ride" post in a while, so here goes...

For John's birthday in 2012, we went to La Crosse to ride bikes. We had a friend tell us how fun the rails to trails were there and what a cute little town La Crosse, Wisconsin was. I did a little research and found out they had fun mountain bike trails there too. So, we loaded up the CX bikes and headed out.

The first day we went to the mountain bike trails. They had this cool set of berms to ride. We could have spent hours there.

 The Rails to Trails run at least 100 miles out and back, so we drove to Sparta and started there. We figured we'd go as far as we wanted and head back.

The weather was pretty chilly for September, but the views on the trail were amazing.

We were warned that we needed good lights to go through the sometimes 1/2 mile long tunnels, so we brought our 500 bazillion lumens lights and they worked just great.

This is what the inside of the tunnels looked like. We were happy for all the 500 bazillion lumens we had on us.

Once we rode about 25 miles in, we decided to stop and get something to eat and drink in that little town, whose name I don't remember now. There was a little bar/grill and we ordered beer and fish and chips. When we entered the bar, all the locals got quiet and turned around to check us out. We sat at the bar and the bartender took our order. Then he came back to us and said, "Um, some of our locals like to still smoke in the bar and they were wondering if that was going to be a problem for you." So, THAT'S why they were giving us suspicious looks and got all quiet when we walked in...We assured him it was fine with us and he promptly went back to where he had been standing, picked-up his lit cigarette from the ashtray where he had set it, and took a drag. Apparently, he was one of the "locals" who wanted to smoke inside...

We rode back to our car and ended up covering a little over 50 miles of beautiful, Wisconsin scenery. I'd love to do it again one of these days.