Day #46: La Crosse to Winona, Minnesota (36 miles)

La Crosse started as a trading post located on flat land in between the many cliffs, known as bluffs, that line the Mississippi on both banks. I got a relatively late start, because I only had 36 miles to ride and I knew I should easily be done before lunch...

Yesterday, I'd climbed a very steep hill and it made me muse about the physics of motion, so... physics sidebar: ...as kids we learn we can make things move by pushing or pulling or throwing or kicking them, and we learn we can stop a moving object by catching it or letting it bump into us, like catching a hard throw or blocking a soccer kick. We also see that if we roll a ball on grass it will eventually slow down. And if we throw a ball in the air, it will eventually reach the top of its arc and fall back down. We can see that a pebble or a stone falls quickly, but a leaf flutters slowly.

It took people a long time to figure out how objects move. Aristotle believed that earth, air, fire, water each had their preferred level and tried to get back to that level, depending on how much earth and air were mixed in an object. It's a sort of "fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly" theory. Aristotle, along with most people, also believed that heavier objects fall faster. According to Aristotle objects fell at a speed determined by their weight. This didn't factor in objects speeding up as they fall.

On a bike rolling downhill, at first we might be just inching along, exhausted from riding up the hill, but little by little the bike picks up speed and then starts to roll faster and faster until we're flying at the bottom of the hill. It took until 1604 for Galileo to understand this acceleration by studying balls rolling down inclined planes, although as usual Leonardo da Vinci got close to figuring it out in his experiments a hundred years earlier. Isaac Newton, who was born the same year that Galileo died, figured out most of the rest about gravity and motion. As Newton said, "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

Of course, it took 200 years after Galileo for the first bikes to be invented. Imagine how much Da Vinci, Galileo and Newton would have figured out if they had a modern bike, and how much they would have loved riding across America :-)

A stop for second breakfast in Trempealeau at the Station Cafe, where I talked with the owner, Shirley. She's a force of nature and has no end of interesting ideas to invest in her community in addition to making a mean bagel with lox :-)

A bunch of action shots with commentary...

Snapshot: 36 miles, starting at 7:30am and ending at 12:30pm, with 3.25 hours of actual riding: