— It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are …  

— Ernest Hemingway



I’ve always been a big believer in the notion that knowing your way around the area signifies your investment and interest in that area.

I have now lived in Mankato for three years. Before that, I spent the majority of my life living in the St. Cloud area. By that logic, one would assume that I know the roads, restaurants and points of interest in St. Cloud infinitely better than those in Mankato.

However, that assumption would be wrong.

I got lost trying to find a restaurant in St. Cloud recently when I was up visiting my parents. It wasn’t even because the restaurant was new; it was simply in a part of town I was unfamiliar with.

That sort of thing wouldn’t happen to me in Mankato. I know almost every road in town and can aptly navigate the country roads surrounding the town as well.

There are a variety of reasons for this. St. Cloud is a bigger city, I utilize maps now more frequently than I used to and most of my driving years in St. Cloud were spent near the college campus.

But the biggest reason for my familiarity with Mankato isn’t due to any of those things. It’s due to cycling.

As regular readers of my blog probably know, I enjoy traveling on my bike. I see it as being not only a tool for exercise, but a tool for exploration as well.

I’ve made a regular habit out of taking bike trips to places in the Mankato area. One of the goals I had this past summer was to bike out all four loops listed on the Greater Mankato Visitors Bureau’s bike trails map. The Visitors Bureau’s reason for doing this was simple: To showcase the area.

Over Labor Day weekend, I took the concept a step further by combining all four loops into one 87-mile bike ride that took me through Lake Crystal, Nicollet, St. Peter, Kasota, Madison Lake, Eagle Lake and St. Clair. Over the course of the ride, I saw a waterfall and a dam, stopped off for beef sticks at Schmidt’s Meat Market, ate lunch at the River Rock Coffee in St. Peter, cooled off in Madison Lake, and enjoyed happy hour at the Uptown Tavern in St. Clair.

Call it my “Quad-Loop Extravaganza.”

Most people would guess that my main reason for doing that ride was for the exercise. After all, cycling is a great workout and 87 miles of it is enough to make anyone’s legs feel ravaged.

Exercise was certainly a motivation for doing it, but it wasn’t my only reason. If I just wanted a good workout, I wouldn’t have made that many stops and I definitely wouldn’t have stopped off for happy hour.

No, this was more about getting to know the area better. Thanks to that ride, I now know the twists, turns and hills of a few more back roads in the area. I also know a little more about the surrounding small towns that I normally would’ve just passed through had I been driving my car.

Did I even know River Rock Coffee existed before spotting it on my bike? Nope. Would I have ever found the Uptown Tavern had I not been biking through St. Clair? Heck, I’d never even been to St. Clair before finding out that it was on one of the bike loops.

As a matter of fact, some of the more memorable things I’ve seen in Mankato are places I initially “discovered” while I was out biking. I found the Rapidan Dam one day because I got bored with just biking on the Red Jacket Trail and decided to keep going once the trail ended. Likewise for the grain elevator mural paintings in Good Thunder and the Amboy Cottage Café.

Many people live their entire lives in one place without discovering things like that. They either get wrapped up in their daily routine or they become convinced that the area they live in is “boring.”

There might be more exciting areas in the world than Mankato, but I’ll say this about south-central Minnesota on a bike: It sure ain’t boring.



Alex Voigt is a Free Press copy editor. He can be reached at 344-6389 or avoigt@mankatofreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @AGVoigt.