Day 42 to southern Minnesota
Sun 21 July 2024
Distance traveled: 450 miles
More riding through chilly fog, a visit to gggrandfather's burial site, and slabbing it south through Minnesota until enough was enough.
Got on the road a bit after daybreak, waiting for the deer to go away (mostly) and headed west towards Duluth. This part of the UP feels more rugged, with ridges and river valleys--not that I saw much, there was low fog in a lot of places, particularly in low spots where it got really thick. I could tell that I was going uphill and downhill, and I'm sure it was scenic and all, but hey, I was happy to be out early and not stuck in the fog behind a logging truck going 25mph up one of those hills.
I did see a bald eagle feeding off of... something... on the side of the road. Couldn't tell if it was roadkill or not until it flew off. That was unexpected.
A quick ride into Ashland, Wisconsin, an old port town on Lake Superior, and where my great-great grandfather Henry Bassett is buried. He was well travelled--born in Singleton, NSW, Australia in 1849, migrating to London when he was 20, then New York, then the Orillia Ontario area... and eventually ending up in Ashland, Wisconsin, where he died when he was 60.
We have family notes from my grandmother (he was her grandfather) saying he was born in Melbourne in 1848. Several years ago I walked into the Family History Centre at the State Library of New South Wales and proudly gave them that, and the librarian snickered and said "Of course he wasn't!" She told me it's highly unlikely, as Melbourne only had a couple thousand people in 1848, and then popped his name in a couple indexes, pulling up some microfilm and fiche, and found out his real birthplace up in the Hunter Valley a few hour's drive now north of Sydney. She explained he no doubt lied to hid his convict family ties--both his parents were convicts, and also his grandfather.
Anyways, his profession once he moved to North America was always "teamster" in city directories and the like so we do know that. And his convict parents we know a lot about, like when they absconded to what tasks they were assigned and even down to height and weight and tattoos, anything that the colonial administrators in Sydney would find useful in identification and doling out labor. That's a story for another post.
He died in 1909 in Ashland and is buried in the St Agnes cemetery, so I was just curious where he ended up. The cemetery was peaceful with huge oak trees, and while I found his section I didn't find any markers. My mom went to the same cemetery some years ago and spent an afternoon looking and said she couldn't find anything either. Ah well, that's where his journey more than halfway around the earth finally stopped.
Ashland to Duluth was a boring cop-infested section of road. The bridge to Duluth was closed for construction, so I took an alternate to I-35, and ran into more bridges half-closed for construction. It was Sunday afternoon, and everyone was hauling trailers and ATVs and kayaks and canoes back from the north country with their GMCs and Subarus, and it was very irritating but hey gotta just get through it and maybe through to the south side of the Twin Cities for a place to stay the night?
Traffic on both 35E and 35W was messed up (delay: 63 minutes on 35E and 41 minutes on 35W), but as I got closer and closer 35W got less and less and boom, I was punching through Minneapolis and really trusting the GPS to have me go this way and that through its mesh of highways.
Found a good place to stop for the night here in Faribault, and must study the maps more tonight for a better route to Denver than all Interstate: the printed AAA maps are much better than Google Maps in that regard. Those printed maps will show the divided four-lane highways vs the two-lanes vs the country roads, and that's very useful information that just isn't that apparent when using the online map sources.
