We’ve had overnight visitors at “the Parsonage at Spring Lake”! Joe and Autumn, friends from the crew at County Cycles in Roseville (check out their store website I’ve got linked on the blog), rode their bikes (the kind with pedals and no exhaust pipes) up from St Paul on Saturday and tented out in our yard. It sounded like a fun ride for them until they started following the directions they got to the Kozy Oaks campground which they’d gotten from MapQuest. Of course, the internet directions were pretty hard to decipher, and they were led on a wild chase on gravel/sand backroads until they were forced to admit that this was no fun. So, they turned around and headed to the Pizza Pub in N.B. for some food and beers before pulling the 4-mile stretch of hwy 95 out to the parsonage… in the darkness.
One thing this community of bikers has going for us though is that we’re all used to riding in traffic, in less-than-desireable highway conditions, all kinds of weather, and darkness. Neither Joe nor Autumn even own cars! So they’re pretty well equipped for whatever a ride like this one will have for them in terms of hazards and challenges. Both of these folks have made the insane “Duluth ride” (something I’ll probably write about in another post) to completion… I’m pretty sure Joe’s done it several times. 320 miles on a single-speed bike, overnight, 27 hours in the saddle; a straight shot to Duluth and back on the Sunrise Prairie Trail, old hwy 61 (hwy 30), and the mind-numbing round trip of Hinckley-Duluth-Hinckley on the great Willard Munger Trail (it’s an awesome trail through some beautiful natural scenery, but its 75 miles one way, and taking in 150 miles of it can be a bit much in one ride). So Joe and Autumn were all set for riding at night on 95. Joe was showing me his new lighting system (he’s getting ready for a 24-hour mountain bike race at Afton Alps that he’ll probably use this for) at the house, and its almost as bright as the security lighting on the parsonage garage!
They joined us at the 10am worship service on Sunday, and I couldn’t resist sharing an inside joke w/Joe that we used to go back and forth with at the bike shop. So I hope it wasn’t too much of an embarrassment when I piped up right in the beginning of the service and said “Hey Joe! ‘I have got some tasty snaaaacks!’” Fun stuff!
So, we got to share the parsonage space with friends, hung out a bit on Sunday, and now our biker buddies from the Cities have a little better idea about how to make it up to the house safely. All that remains is to get the bike shop set up in the garage, construct the fire ring/gathering space in the yard, set out a few choice tent sites a little further away from the highway noise, and we’ll probably have an extra six or eight folks sitting in worship with us on random Sundays. This is by far my favorite community of friends that I’ve gotten to know at work, and by far the best hourly-wage job I’ve ever had. Everything I ever valued in a work culture I had right there at County Cycles, and it was the best thing to be doing before coming to work at Spring Lake because it’s all fresh in my head to perpetuate in my work here.
Krista and I both appreciate the clear understanding among members at SLLC with regard to our privacy and personal space at the parsonage: that it’s our house, that we are the only ones with keys, etc. But at the same time one of the dynamics that Krista says she really misses from her life in Madagascar in the PeaceCorps is the idea of people just stopping in to chat. I grew up with the same dynamic in my family as well as the farming culture that surrounded my childhood. We’ve had so much fun with people stopping by when they see us out in the yard to welcome us, and random buckets of berries and vegetables “showing up” on the front steps, that we hope everyone will soon feel welcome to come and see us while “using their best judgment” when we’re wrapped up in other things. We’re so excited to have a place to live like this one, where our friends can come and spend a few hours with us with their kids, where we can have people over to tell stories and chew the fat around a big fire ring, or come and fix some bikes with me or see what Saoirse’s up to now!
