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About Jim Klobuchar
Click here for the full day by day itinerary from Moscow to St. Petersburg, registration form, travel terms and cost schedule of the tour of Russia organized by Jim Klobuchar's Adventures and Group Travel Directors. A $400 deposit is due April 23.
Bike Trails, Sailboats, Pelicans
and the Infant Mississippi:
The 34th Annual Jaunt With Jim,
And You’re Invited
Dear
Friends,
Churchill's description of Russia as a riddle and a mystery wrapped in an enigma has never completely gone out of style. What he didn't foresee, but what increasing thousands of American travelers will attest, is this:
For all of its czarist mysteries of the past and the tumult of the Communist era, Russia today is a hard place to resist for a visitor from the west who wants to experience the places, faces and the atmospherics of a land that has been at the center of some of the world's transforming events of the last 100 years.
Join us Sept. 25 to Oct. 6 for a trip into the heart of Russia--Moscow, the inscrutable but often beautiful Volga, Red Square and the Kremlin, the quirky allure of St. Basil's cupolas, the homeland of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, ancient villages evoking the times of Peter the Great. And then St. Petersburg of the white nights, the Venice of the North, with its palaces and
magnificent art of the Hermitage.
Jim Klobuchar's Adventures has toured Russia several times, but not since it emerged from the ruinous years of the Cold War with a new, oil-propelled economic vigor. There's an element of this tour that is not usually part of the standard explorations by American visitors. The city of Tver lies on the Volga a hundred miles from Moscow en route to St. Petersburg. It opens the way to a light hearted
catamaran cruise down the Volga, which we'll take in the company of some of my Russian friends, connections that developed from a journalist exchange several years ago at the end of the Cold War. We can picnic in the forest along the river and very likely be asked to join in one of those ancient Russian choral ballads that almost never end. Nobody, of course, sings sad songs like the Russians and nobody plays balalaika like the Russians. We'll want to attend one of those concerts and also, with luck, a play by Chekhov.
Today's Russia is new economically; but the old is never far away. The country's political history has often suppressed what has been called "the soul of Russia." It's elusive but, it can be felt; and it's never very far from the Volga. Join us. You haven't had caviar until we taste it in St. Petersburg!
Churchill's description of Russia as a riddle and a mystery wrapped in an enigma has never completely gone out of style. What he didn't foresee, but what increasing thousands of American travelers will attest, is this:
For all of its czarist mysteries of the past and the tumult of the Communist era, Russia today is a hard place to resist for a visitor from the west who wants to experience the places, faces and the atmospherics of a land that has been at the center of some of the world's transforming events of the last 100 years.
Join us Sept. 25 to Oct. 6 for a trip into the heart of Russia--Moscow, the inscrutable but often beautiful Volga, Red Square and the Kremlin, the quirky allure of St. Basil's cupolas, the homeland of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, ancient villages evoking the times of Peter the Great. And then St. Petersburg of the white nights, the Venice of the North, with its palaces and
magnificent art of the Hermitage.
Jim Klobuchar's Adventures has toured Russia several times, but not since it emerged from the ruinous years of the Cold War with a new, oil-propelled economic vigor. There's an element of this tour that is not usually part of the standard explorations by American visitors. The city of Tver lies on the Volga a hundred miles from Moscow en route to St. Petersburg. It opens the way to a light hearted
catamaran cruise down the Volga, which we'll take in the company of some of my Russian friends, connections that developed from a journalist exchange several years ago at the end of the Cold War. We can picnic in the forest along the river and very likely be asked to join in one of those ancient Russian choral ballads that almost never end. Nobody, of course, sings sad songs like the Russians and nobody plays balalaika like the Russians. We'll want to attend one of those concerts and also, with luck, a play by Chekhov.
Today's Russia is new economically; but the old is never far away. The country's political history has often suppressed what has been called "the soul of Russia." It's elusive but, it can be felt; and it's never very far from the Volga. Join us. You haven't had caviar until we taste it in St. Petersburg!
Click here for the full day by day itinerary from Moscow to St. Petersburg, registration form, travel terms and cost schedule of the tour of Russia organized by Jim Klobuchar's Adventures and Group Travel Directors. A $400 deposit is due April 23.
Bike Trails, Sailboats, Pelicans
and the Infant Mississippi:
The 34th Annual Jaunt With Jim,
And You’re Invited
June 13-20, 2008
Bike
riders love breezes at their backs, sunshine on their cheeks and cool
water
under their handlebars. But at core they’re all recycled explorers. So in June
we’re re-opening the geographies and history books of our childhood and heading
north to a lake called Itasca, where the legendary Old Man River begins an epic
journey that has touched millions of lives and given rise to song, showboats and
a thousand sagas.
This is the 34th annual Jaunt With Jim, a bike ride of such stubborn longevity that
it has acquired its own cult of underground historians. One of them insists that we
once rode for ten hours and 97 miles from Monticello to Osakis into a 28 mile an
hour headwind in temperatures that reached 95 degrees.
The conductor of the ride has always regarded this as a tasteless slander and insisted that the distance was 94 and not 97 miles. But partly to commemorate that remarkable day we’re returning to Osakis this year by a different route and with the mileage, of course, radically reduced. In the early years we went 100 miles a day and carried all of our kit on our bikes, sometimes weighing up to 35 pounds and including—on the bike of one exercise maniac—a set of standard, weightroom dumbbells.
Somewhere in the intervening years sanity materialized, more or less in harmony with the advancing age of the riders. We now have throttled down to 65 to 75 miles a day and the bike loads usually are confined to digital gauges measuring pulse, mphs and global positions.
We are happy to acclaim this as progress, and even happier to invite you to join us
June 13 to 20 when we’re “Going to the Source” in our biking pilgrimage to the
beginnings of a great river and also to some of the loveliest scenes of woodland and
lake country in Minnesota. The actual start of the ride is June 14, a Saturday, but
because we pretty much rise with the sun, we’ll gather the night before, June 13,
at a campsite in Pelican Rapids, park our cars for the week, breakfast there and then head out into the morning. (Registration forms at the end of this newsletter).
The
itinerary: Pelican Rapids to Osakis the first night, June 14;
Brainerd June 15; Walker June 16 and
17; Bagley by way of Itasca State Park and the source of the
Mississippi June 18; Park Rapids June 19; and back to Pelican Rapids June 20.
The ride is produced annually for members of Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures, a loosely organized clan of adventurers, travelers, over the road nomads and a few happily unclassified mystics. Its advisories and postings are available at
http://www.jimklobuchar.com Our group usually numbers 120 to130. For many of these the ride has become a kind of reunion and celebration of their shared zeal for the open road. But it also encourages newcomers and welcomes them enthusiastically.
The cost of the trip is $160 per person, which covers the use of a shuttle truck that carries the riders’ duffel bags from site to site, the Penn Cycle repair and maintenance van that accompanies our ride and provides its services from dawn to nightfall, maintenance and custodial customs at schools whose facilities we use, local fees, the t-shirts that are part of the identity of our ride and miscellaneous services. A registration form is available in this newsletter. The great majority of our riders camp out at tent sites where we spend the night, although a few use motels. We take most of our meals as a group, which helps organizationally and is part of the community sense of the ride. We also stop en route in midmorning and midafternoon for rest and snacks, all of which means that we are not hammering the pavement hour after hour. This in turn creates a civilized tempo for the ride and a social atmosphere for our visits in the towns along the route. A good rule of thumb is to allow $20 or so for the breakfast-lunch-and dinner meals and a few quid for snacks in between.
Horror stories have been spread by the ride’s more imaginative rascals dealing with a 5:30 a.m. wakeup whistle by The Conductor, which allegedly violates well-established laws of nature. It’s true there is such a whistle, but it is a moderately-pitched whistle, a whistle blessed by the qualities of brevity and genuine affection. On the other hand, if you want to sleep all day, hire a taxi or charter a school bus.
A full daily route description will be distributed to riders before breakfast in Pelican Rapids the first day of the ride. Directions to the parking lot and pre-ride campsite will be made available by postal mail and through the internet well before June 13.
Also available in this newsletter is a separate registration form for those interested in a sailboat event on Leech Lake during our annual R and R day in Walker June 17. We’re going to be camping there, incidentally, in the attractive city park overlooking the lake. Regulars on the ride have enjoyed the yacht experience there a number of times, produced two years ago by Mitch Loomis of Walker, who will be the fleet commander again this year. It will be a twilight cruise in one of the most dramatic lake settings in Minnesota as part of a package plan that will include suppertime snacks and wine sips. Two years ago it also included a mock naval skirmish among the boats and, because that may happen again in these Minnesota waters, we’ll inevitably call the cruise “Nautical But Nice.” We’ll try to satisfy all who’d like to participate but there may be a limit to how many we can accommodate, so we’ll use the registration postmark to determine eligibility.
The route of the ride will be diversified, the northwoods scenes hard to resist and the rural countryside inviting. Many on the ride will be introduced to the new Wobegon bike trail running from Fergus Falls to St. Cloud and be reunited with the Paul Bunyan trail from Brainerd to Walker. We’ll also ride some of the back roads where traffic is spare and we’ll try to hold the mixed traffic to the minimum.
If you have questions please contact us on the internet at jim@jimklobuchar.com or call 763-258-1371. Fill the form below and mail to Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures, P.O. Box 47063, Minneapolis 55447. Make payable to Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures. The check for the yacht ride should be written separately and made payable to the fund named in the registration form.
Please add enroll me (us) in the “Going to the Source” bike ride June 13-20. I (we) understand Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures cannot be held responsible for illness or injury during the ride. Enclosed is the registration fee of $160 per person.
Name(s)___________________________________________________________
Address___________________________________________________________
City___________________________________State________Zip_____________
Phone numbers______________________________________________________
Email Address (es)____________________________________________________
Yes, I (we) want to take part in the sailboat cruise on Leech Lake as part of the “Going to the Source” bike ride June 17. Enclosed are checks for $30 per person, made out to Walker Area Community Center.
Name(s)_____________________________________________________________
Address_____________________________________________________________
City__________________________________State________Zip________________
See you in the flock at Pelican Rapids. And, incidentally, club members will be delighted to learn that the annual, if modest, fee for membership has been discontinued, and you can consider yourself a valued trail companion now and forever, with our thanks.
under their handlebars. But at core they’re all recycled explorers. So in June
we’re re-opening the geographies and history books of our childhood and heading
north to a lake called Itasca, where the legendary Old Man River begins an epic
journey that has touched millions of lives and given rise to song, showboats and
a thousand sagas.
This is the 34th annual Jaunt With Jim, a bike ride of such stubborn longevity that
it has acquired its own cult of underground historians. One of them insists that we
once rode for ten hours and 97 miles from Monticello to Osakis into a 28 mile an
hour headwind in temperatures that reached 95 degrees.
The conductor of the ride has always regarded this as a tasteless slander and insisted that the distance was 94 and not 97 miles. But partly to commemorate that remarkable day we’re returning to Osakis this year by a different route and with the mileage, of course, radically reduced. In the early years we went 100 miles a day and carried all of our kit on our bikes, sometimes weighing up to 35 pounds and including—on the bike of one exercise maniac—a set of standard, weightroom dumbbells.
Somewhere in the intervening years sanity materialized, more or less in harmony with the advancing age of the riders. We now have throttled down to 65 to 75 miles a day and the bike loads usually are confined to digital gauges measuring pulse, mphs and global positions.
We are happy to acclaim this as progress, and even happier to invite you to join us
June 13 to 20 when we’re “Going to the Source” in our biking pilgrimage to the
beginnings of a great river and also to some of the loveliest scenes of woodland and
lake country in Minnesota. The actual start of the ride is June 14, a Saturday, but
because we pretty much rise with the sun, we’ll gather the night before, June 13,
at a campsite in Pelican Rapids, park our cars for the week, breakfast there and then head out into the morning. (Registration forms at the end of this newsletter).
The
itinerary: Pelican Rapids to Osakis the first night, June 14;
Brainerd June 15; Walker June 16 and
17; Bagley by way of Itasca State Park and the source of the Mississippi June 18; Park Rapids June 19; and back to Pelican Rapids June 20.
The ride is produced annually for members of Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures, a loosely organized clan of adventurers, travelers, over the road nomads and a few happily unclassified mystics. Its advisories and postings are available at
http://www.jimklobuchar.com Our group usually numbers 120 to130. For many of these the ride has become a kind of reunion and celebration of their shared zeal for the open road. But it also encourages newcomers and welcomes them enthusiastically.
The cost of the trip is $160 per person, which covers the use of a shuttle truck that carries the riders’ duffel bags from site to site, the Penn Cycle repair and maintenance van that accompanies our ride and provides its services from dawn to nightfall, maintenance and custodial customs at schools whose facilities we use, local fees, the t-shirts that are part of the identity of our ride and miscellaneous services. A registration form is available in this newsletter. The great majority of our riders camp out at tent sites where we spend the night, although a few use motels. We take most of our meals as a group, which helps organizationally and is part of the community sense of the ride. We also stop en route in midmorning and midafternoon for rest and snacks, all of which means that we are not hammering the pavement hour after hour. This in turn creates a civilized tempo for the ride and a social atmosphere for our visits in the towns along the route. A good rule of thumb is to allow $20 or so for the breakfast-lunch-and dinner meals and a few quid for snacks in between.
Horror stories have been spread by the ride’s more imaginative rascals dealing with a 5:30 a.m. wakeup whistle by The Conductor, which allegedly violates well-established laws of nature. It’s true there is such a whistle, but it is a moderately-pitched whistle, a whistle blessed by the qualities of brevity and genuine affection. On the other hand, if you want to sleep all day, hire a taxi or charter a school bus.
A full daily route description will be distributed to riders before breakfast in Pelican Rapids the first day of the ride. Directions to the parking lot and pre-ride campsite will be made available by postal mail and through the internet well before June 13.
Also available in this newsletter is a separate registration form for those interested in a sailboat event on Leech Lake during our annual R and R day in Walker June 17. We’re going to be camping there, incidentally, in the attractive city park overlooking the lake. Regulars on the ride have enjoyed the yacht experience there a number of times, produced two years ago by Mitch Loomis of Walker, who will be the fleet commander again this year. It will be a twilight cruise in one of the most dramatic lake settings in Minnesota as part of a package plan that will include suppertime snacks and wine sips. Two years ago it also included a mock naval skirmish among the boats and, because that may happen again in these Minnesota waters, we’ll inevitably call the cruise “Nautical But Nice.” We’ll try to satisfy all who’d like to participate but there may be a limit to how many we can accommodate, so we’ll use the registration postmark to determine eligibility.
The route of the ride will be diversified, the northwoods scenes hard to resist and the rural countryside inviting. Many on the ride will be introduced to the new Wobegon bike trail running from Fergus Falls to St. Cloud and be reunited with the Paul Bunyan trail from Brainerd to Walker. We’ll also ride some of the back roads where traffic is spare and we’ll try to hold the mixed traffic to the minimum.
If you have questions please contact us on the internet at jim@jimklobuchar.com or call 763-258-1371. Fill the form below and mail to Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures, P.O. Box 47063, Minneapolis 55447. Make payable to Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures. The check for the yacht ride should be written separately and made payable to the fund named in the registration form.
Please add enroll me (us) in the “Going to the Source” bike ride June 13-20. I (we) understand Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures cannot be held responsible for illness or injury during the ride. Enclosed is the registration fee of $160 per person.
Name(s)___________________________________________________________
Address___________________________________________________________
City___________________________________State________Zip_____________
Phone numbers______________________________________________________
Email Address (es)____________________________________________________
Yes, I (we) want to take part in the sailboat cruise on Leech Lake as part of the “Going to the Source” bike ride June 17. Enclosed are checks for $30 per person, made out to Walker Area Community Center.
Name(s)_____________________________________________________________
Address_____________________________________________________________
City__________________________________State________Zip________________
See you in the flock at Pelican Rapids. And, incidentally, club members will be delighted to learn that the annual, if modest, fee for membership has been discontinued, and you can consider yourself a valued trail companion now and forever, with our thanks.
The
Conductor of
Jim Klobuchar's Adventures
jim@jimklobuchar.comJim Klobuchar's Adventures
| Jim Klobuchar’s Adventures Around
Our
two week camera safari in Tanzania and Uganda in January, including
climbs on Kilimanjaro by several in our group, was one of the most
successful in recent years. There will be another--soon, as there will
to Russia, Egypt and Nepal. Ahead of those, however, comes
Springtime in Italy, April 23-May 6 of this year, offered here several
months ago. Click
here for details of tour of Italy.the World
|
Click here to read about Jim's latest book, "Pieces of My Heart," which gathers some of his favorite experiences in wild nature and looks at them as gifts that illuminate the later years of life.
Click here to read about "The Miracles of Barefoot Capitalism," By Jim Klobuchar and Susan Cornell Wilkes
Click here to read about
“Sixty Minutes With God.”
Click here to read about "Wallking Briskly Toward the Sunset," By Jim Klobuchar
Experienced travelers call Jim Klobuchar's Adventures "simply the best," a travel club of discovery. His tours are drawn both for action seekers and more leisurely travelers. They're imaginatively planned to provide plenty of free and personal time, and always at moderate prices.
Scores of people repeat his trips because Jim's experience in the faraway places invariably gives the adventure an extra dimension of a mountain retreat in the cypress forests of Tuscany, longtime friendships with the Sherpas in the Himalaya, and much more.