Small Town Girl at Heart

Downtown Bowlus

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania where everyone knew they would probably leave for somewhere else.  All of my adult life has been spent in one city or another. But deep down in my heart I want to live in every small town we visit.  Our bike ride this weekend took us out to the northern extension of the Lake Wobegon trail http://lakewobegontrail.com/ from the Blanchard Dam blancharddam.html to just outside Albany.  Many of the towns in this area of the state were named for or by the railroad men.  Bowlus, our starting point, was named by railroad officers but no one remembers who Bowlus was.  It's a small town with the bike trail running across its main street.  A grain elevator stands next to the railroad/bike trail.  The town would have had freight and passengers coming through on a daily basis.  Now it's off the main highway but has created a comfortable stopping point for cyclists.  A major activity for the town in the 1920s was the building of the Blanchard dam across the Mississippi.  It's worth the effort to ride there.

Downtown Holdingford

Seven miles further down the trail is the town of Holdingford which was named in honor of its first permanent settler, Randolph Holding.  He settled in the area in 1868.  Yesterday we watched truckloads of hay drive through town.  Haying was going on in many of the fields we rode past.  As in Bowlus, a grain elevator sits empty next to what would have been the rails.  The trail cuts right across the main street in Holdingford but traffic doesn't stop for us like it would have for trains.

We had another day of spectacular skies and fields of wildflowers.  Joe-pye weed is in full bloom.  It has spectacular pink clusters of flowers and stands 2-10 feet in height.  This flower favors wet areas; we saw it blossoming among the cattails.  There were entire meadows of Joe-pye weed outside of Bowlus.  Last blog I wrote about the common mullein.  This is another giant flower that favors dry conditions and sun.  It blooms alongside of roads and bike trails. 

Chipmunks were overrunning the trail yesterday.  We spied a red tail hawk sweeping low over the trail probably hoping to snatch one up for lunch.  Will sees more animals than me and reports a frog and a small garter snake on the trail.  On the way  home driving down lonely route 32 we saw wild turkeys.