We woke up to the sound of rain on the tent this morning but it had stopped and the sun was trying to appear by the time we rolled south out of town. We were riding the first part of Matthew Kadey’s Minnesota section of his Great Northern Bikepacking Route and it took us out of town on some quiet side streets. The gravel began on the edge of town and proceeding west to 600th Ave we turned south riding to Carp State Forest. The gravel was mostly category 2 and 3 but with a moderate headwind it made us work. Over the next few kms the breeze slowly turned to the west making the going a bit easier and once we swung east we actually had a tailwind. Most of the surfaces on the State Forest roads were decent with some sandy stretches that would surprise us in the middle of a corner or curve. We got our first taste of hungry deer flies today and they can be a nuisance. A little bit of an entomological observation here. It seems that the maximum airspeed of a hungry deer fly is about 17kms/hr so if you can stay above that they remain massed in a cloud behind you. If you drop below that then they begin to land on your helmet and crawl in through the vents and bite your head and land on your back and bite through your jersey. So, the trick is to look for a smooth line and pedal hard! We could see a storm off to the south of us as we approached Baudette MN but it slid by to the SE, someone got soaked out there. A few short stretches of pavement brought us into Baudette and across the bridge to Rainy River ON where we breezed through Canadian Customs this time. I think they are taking pity on us. We are sitting in our camp chairs in the Rainy River campground looking at the cabins about 250m across the river in the US. Tomorrow off to Ft Frances and then back into Minnesota.