Tooling around Turnbull

Click for more pics of the Turnbull adventure
Liza, Maddie, and I drove out to Turnbull today and rode the "Auto View Loop." The auto view loop is a 5.5 mile loop around a small piece of Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge.

It's mostly flat; traffic is one-way only and very sparse. A perfect ride for a little girl on a single-speed that weighs half as much as she does.

The highlight of the trip was riding up on a bull moose. Yesterday, up at Grandpa John's on the Kettle River, we happened upon a skunk in the same way. We're tooling down the road, chatting and enjoying the scenery when an animal just appears and takes us all by surprise.

We handled them both in the same way: "Maddie stop." (skid). Wait. Look. Take a pic, then slowly back out. Except we didn't have a camera with the skunk incident. Dang.

Maddie kept a mental list of all the animals we saw today at Turnbull: turkeys, chipmunk, osprey, flicker, moose, dragonfly, grasshopper, wild duck. I expect Maddie will produce a number of drawings and stories that capture these creatures. I blog. Maddie is more old school: documentation and sketches are her methods of journaling.

Maddie had to remind me to slow down and enjoy the ride. It's difficult to gear down and take 2+ hours for a 5.5 mile ride, but it's an important thing to do. Especially today: when we have rare day when we didn't have anything pressing on our time.

For some reason it's sort of hard to accept, but Maddie (as all kids -- I expect) has lessons to teach us if we're willing to hear her. Once I stubbornly accepted Maddie's overall pace: ride a mile; hang out; look at stuff; walk a while; play; then ride again -- I enjoyed it and had a really nice time. Liza, of course, is totally and completely able to just chill and go with it.

The last 1/4 mile was tough. It's deeper gravel and a hill. Thank god for big bike racks. I hauled Maddie's bike, while Maddie rode side saddle with Liza.