Oakdale, WI

 After a nice ride on Sunday on the Minnehaha Creek Trail in Minneapolis, we traveled Monday over to Oakdale, WI for a couple of weeks.  We're at the KOA.  This is usually a nice one or two night stop over for us as Tomah has a nice Walmart and cheese store.  We're here this time to bicycle ride some of the Wisconsin Rail Trails and ride along the Mississippi River.  Campgrounds around Lacrosse weren't really set up for longer stays, so I chose Oakdale as a spot with the idea we'd commute back to the Lacrosse area to ride the Mississippi River trails.

Turns out that Oakdale is a pretty good base to commute to the local state and country rail trails.  We're still learning where the trail heads are located, best places to park, etc.  Since we plan to be in Wisconsin for about six weeks, we bought annual state trail permits.  We're doing daily permits for the county trails.  Yep, there's fees for riding the rail trails.

Even though we're having to keep an eye out for thunderstorms, we've ridden the Omaha County Trail from Camp Douglas to Elroy and back - roughly a 25 mile round trip.  It's an older trail, paved probably in the 90s and takes you through one tunnel (top picture).

Elroy has a really nice trail center (second picture from the top) and is a trail head for the Omaha County Trail, the "400" Trail and one end of the Elroy-Sparta State Trail.

After a couple of days & nights of heavy rain & thunderstorms, we decided to walk a section of the Elroy-Sparta Trail at Kendall, WI up to one of the tunnels and return, today.  After that we'd eat lunch at the Dorset Valley School Restaurant.  Our walk was cut short as there were trees down on the trail - huge tree tops that we couldn't easily find a way through or around.  Otherwise, the trail was in relatively good condition (see picture at above) with a few muddy/flooded spots.  Lunch (cheeseburgers), raspberry pie and strawberry shortcake were pretty good at the restaurant, too.

We still got a week and a half to go here.  Still have a couple of days of dodging thunderstorms per the weather reporters.  And a lot of rail trail available to ride.

Well, that gets you up-to-date with us.  Thanks for checking on us.  Until next week, David