July 9 Day 39 Rugby ND 57 miles
We usually have breakfast before riding, but today we rode fifteen miles to Granville for breakfast (well, yes, we did have a round of leftover donuts before riding, but that hardly counts). Granville celebrated its centennial a week ago. Among the festivities was the pitchfork fondue. You get a drum of oil boiling, you round up a stack of sirloin steaks, you mix up a bowl of mustard butter, you grab a pitchfork out of the barn and you're ready to go.
There's a 1903 bank building, an impressive stone edifice now fallen into substantial disrepair. A daughter of Granville now lives in Montclair. She has purchased the building to restore into a brewery/restaurant in the basement, professional office on the main floor, and an apartment on the second floor. The expected cost is $2 million. This in a town where there is a little-bitty grocery, a couple of bars, a cafe, a cheese factory, a bank, and a new community center. I hope it works out for her; some of the townspeople were pretty clear that they don't expect it to.
To return to the new community center, I should say that the Granville welcome sign adds the name "McGillicuddy City". There's some liquor company promoting a line of schnapps with a story line about a bar in a tiny town that is frozen in winter for about six months of the year. The liquor company offered $100,000 for a town that (a) is frozen six months per year, (b) would change its name to McGillicuddy City, (c) has a bar that would change its name to "The Shady Eye", and (d) has some sort of boarding house. The mother of the bank renovator got a B&B license to meet the last requirement. The Branding Iron Saloon agreed to the name change (though I notice that the sign still says "Branding Iron Saloon"). So now the city has a new community center.
Rugby has a pillar at the highway intersection declaring that the spot is the "Geographical Center of North America". How would anyone prove that wrong? If there is any significance to this at all, it is that we must be roughly halfway in our journey! We added up our miles - we're about 1900 miles along. Whoopee!