We started our annual bike trip by getting lost. While finding the house we rented through AirB&B, we had transposed the numbers into the GPS…whoops. Eventually, we found the house.
Once settled in, we ate lunch and then took off for a bike ride. It was a beautiful day. We rode on the South Riverside Trail. It went along the Cedar River into Cedar Falls where there happened to be an ice cream shop. Perfect. We enjoyed some tasty ice cream and met a local man who had also biked to the shop for ice cream. We visited together while we ate.
We said good-bye without getting his name, and started back the way we came…but somehow missed a turn and we lost our way back to the rented house. With some backtracking we finally found a different trail back.
The next morning it was rainy so we went to the John Deere Tractor Museum and then went into a couple shops on main street in Cedar Falls, where the guys ran into the same man again. They stopped and chatted. Once again, we did not get his name, so as a group we decided to call him Waldo.
That afternoon the weather cleared; it was sunny and nice outside. We hopped on our bikes and rode out in a different direction, towards Waterloo. According to the map, there was a designated trail around the town…but we didn’t find it. It started out well marked, but soon we couldn’t find the trail. We ended up using our GPS system to get back to the house. It took about 1 1/2 hours to go four miles.
Once back to the house, we decided to ride the same trail as the day before. We followed it and found ourselves back at the ice cream shop. Hooray!
And…there was Waldo! It was quite comical. We visited and ate our ice cream with him (but still didn’t get his name). He retired from John Deere Engineering.
Fortunately, we paid attention to our turns this time, so finding our way back to the house was no problem. We did not get lost.
The house we rented was lovely… lots of windows and a large deck overlooking the Cedar River. It was nice sitting there, watching the river flow, after being lost three times…and finding Waldo three times.
