Written by Dave

Day 49-50 – July 16-17

We’ve had a nice break here in Minneapolis. Two days off the bikes has done wonders for all the little niggles we’ve picked up riding nearly every day. We had to hose the bikes down when we arrived so there was little cleaning needed other than oiling the chains. That makes the break even more relaxing.

We did some supply shopping here and got out in the neighbourhoods a few times. It’s a big, multi-racial city so you see all kinds of people and hear all sorts of languages. We are in the Uptown neighbour where there are many people of many different racial backgrounds. Just around the corner there is a large Somali immigrant population – I’m not sure if I’ve actually ever heard Somali being spoken before yesterday. We weren’t brave enough to try a Somali restaurant but would for sure if we had a few more days. I have to say that while some politicians demonise people from Somalia, I feel safer around their head scarfs and kufis than I do “Americans” with their pants hanging half off their bums, we saw a few of them in Uptown as well.

I’ve previously done some shopping at an online bike shop called Perennial Cycles. I shopped there for small bits I needed to wire our SON dyno hubs up for lights and batteries, plus a few other hard to find small parts. I’d never really given a second thought about where Perennial Cycles was located because I was focused mostly on finding unique parts that they happened to carried and I just filled out the order form. To my surprise when Chris started looking for bike shops, he mentioned that the closet one was none other than Perennial – only .7 miles away. How could I not swing by their shop?  We visited them this morning, found a few small parts and generally geeked out talking about bicycle lighting systems (or at least I did, not sure that Nancy was quite as interested as I was).

WARNING: what follows is a little political. It’s my blog today and I’m trying to capture the impact of travelling to a place I’ve read about but not previously visited. I could just post flower photos for Pete but that wouldn’t be meaningful for me when years from now I re-read about how I felt visiting Minneapolis.

As I mentioned the other day, our AirBnB is a neighbourhood hit hard by the 2020 race riots. In fact, today we learned that George Floyd was murdered only 2.5 miles from our AirBnB. It has been four years since Floyd’s murder and the area is still recovering. In the greater Minneapolis/St Paul area approximately 1,300 properties were damaged, nearly 100 of which were completely destroyed or severely impacted. Estimates of property damage in the region were upwards of $500 million, making the unrest in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area the second most destructive in United States history, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Local officials estimated that rebuilding in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region could take up to 10 years.

I would never defend the rioters but these things can happen when people feel that they have been left behind and are getting treated unfairly (or murdered). The conservative in me would likely say “imagine if the $500 million dollars could have been spent on something, anything, even social programs, rather than picking up after hoodlums.” The liberal in me knows that $500 million extra dollars would probably be just be given away via tax cuts for the rich and/or big corporations – so there’s limited value talking about better ways to spend money on social programs.

Unlike many other severely impacted regions, rebuilding here is being funded locally. For the record, in July 2020, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) requested FEMA funds to help mitigate just the fire damage. In order for the request to be approved, then President Trump would have needed declare a “major disaster” for the state of Minnesota. The request was denied. Trump later said at a campaign rally in Mankato, Minnesota, that he denied the aid request as “punishment” to local officials. That decision contrasted with the disaster declaration and federal aid package of $638 million President George H.W. Bush approved following the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. Ah, remember good old days of compassionate conservatism, before vengeance and getting even became core Republican values. Just saying…

On a positive note, it feels that ultimately the Uptown area will recover. In the area around Lake Street, there are a large number of new modern looking, stylish apartment buildings. People living in them will want to eat out, go to movies, shop and have happy normal lives. They will spend money in local businesses and recovery will continue. It may take 10 years, but 4 years in, Uptown has many green shoots of hope. I look forward to coming back here one day and check on the progress.

END OF POLITICAL SPEECH

Tomorrow we head northeast across the rest of Minneapolis and then across St Paul. Looks like it will mostly be on trails or streets with bike lanes. We’ll have one more night in Minnesota before entering Wisconsin on Friday. Talking with multiple Minneapolitans* over the last few days, the rainfall this year (and subsequent mozzie population) has been a boomer. The Minneapolitans have warned us that the mozzies in Wisconsin are even bigger. I’m not sure if this is a “next town over hyperbole” or if in fact, we are headed toward mozzieageddon. Time will tell.

And even more exciting than all that (perhaps?), tomorrow Chris will join the team as a co-navigator. Today when we were at Perennial Cycles Nancy and I found a stem mount for Chris’s phone. The mount allows him to have his phone at the ready, right on his handlebars. It might take Chris some time to work out using maps real-time while riding and he’ll still have the weak “Ansari navigational genes” but for sure, having him review his phone at the tricky points will be a big help. Maybe one day, Nancy will let Chris and I do all the navigation – how exciting.

*Minneapolitans sounds weird but that’s what they call themselves. Say that 3 times fast 🙂