It was slated to be a gorgeous day weather-wise, in the 70s with a light wind and sunny. So, I contacted Brad last night to see if he was available for a ride, and thankfully he was since Kevin was camping in Spring Green and none of my gal-pals could ride until Sunday. Turned out Mark M. was also available. I didn’t post to the FB group because whenever I have lately, nobody shows any interest.
We met at my place around 11 with plans to head to Eureka with a stop at the Eureka Landing for lunch along the Fox Fiver. While we were there, Mark received a text for a potential hot date. So, he headed back home from there and we headed west along the north side of the Fox River around and into Berlin. Then taking DD to D across Hwy 73 and some back roads; eventually winding back to Eagle Road.
While we were on DD I came up on a bunch of peddle bikers and apparently my bike isn’t very loud as they could not hear me approaching and they were riding side-by-side. So, I slowed down extremely behind them with not knowing what they were going to do, figured they didn’t hear me and coming up on a curve. Of course they decided to turn left onto an approaching road and as they started to do so, is when they finally realized I was behind them. After that I kept hitting a bunch of bugs, and couldn’t really avoid most of them. There were hundreds of dragon flies in a tall grassy area of the marsh and I stopped to point them out to Brad. I did my best to avoid them, but it was pretty difficult.
At one point when we were heading east on Eagle Road we came up on this place Kevin and I have been by around half a dozen times with a really large fence, but we’ve never seen anything in there. I always assumed it was for elk, but low and behold when I came around the first curve approaching it, there was a giraffe. Yes, a giraffe! So I pulled over and Brad asked what is this for, and I said “don’t you see it?” He then finally noticed it. Apparently it is Shamba Safari near Neshkoro. I never noticed the building inside there before either, so I will have to look into if it is new.
From there we ended up back onto D into the north side of Princeton, where we took Cty P east and some back roads to Hwy 23 into Ripon where I had planned for us to stop for ice-cream at the Sweet'er N’ Saulty’er.
It was such a beautiful day, almost exactly the same as the day we skydived which brought back such fond memories for me, and if I didn’t have plans for the evening, I would have kept on riding. I killed the tracking app before Princeton, but I’m certain it was around 110 miles for the day as my tracking app said 65 miles when I stopped the tracking it to preserve my iPhone battery.
