One More Day

Today we were lucky. When we checked the weather before leaving the motel this morning in Bowling Green the radar showed a giant green blob of heavy rain marching north. We thought it would envelop us just as we were hitting the road, so we battened the hatches and set off with our raingear on. Half an hour later we stopped and took off our rain gear because it wasn’t raining and we were sweating to death. The storm never caught us and we rode the whole day with nothing more than a few sprinkles. We made our goal of Howell Michigan fairly easily, thanks mostly to a nice tail wind. We estimate that it was about 90 miles, which would make it easily our highest mileage day yet. Tomorrow we have to do roughly the same to get to our final destination, and we’re pretty sure we’ll manage it. It’s like a bike race now, in that once you can sense that finish line, you have super-strength. Plus we’ve been staying in motels so we have extra energy from not having to set up camp and make dinner and breakfast. Tonight is our fourth night in a motel out of thirteen nights so it seems like we stayed pretty close to our plan. We spent a bit of time searching for detail maps today to try and figure out a good safe route through Michigan. Not an easy task. There are lots of busy roads with no shoulder. And people here love their cars. I thought every one in Michigan was out of work these days. Where are all these cars going? We definitely had some stressful riding today, with cars constantly zinging past us uncomfortably close at hand. But we also had some really secluded roads and some horrendously bumpy roads. So overall it was a great day, as usual. We had one memorable conversation with an older farmer, somewhere in rural southern Michigan. One of my water bottles bounced out as we were riding by his house and I turned around in the road to grab it. As I did so, this guy yelled “where are you going, California?” So we rode over and told him what we were up to and he told us all about his farm (300 acres,) his barn renovations, his family, and the fact that he held off selling some corn and soybeans and the price fell and he lost thousands of dollars. He didn’t seem too broken up about that last bit either. It was a really fun interaction of the type that we seem to get almost every day. I think that is the thing that impresses me the most about touring, the fact that people are really interested and want to talk to you about it wherever you go. Tomorrow will probably be the end of the trip, but I’ll keep adding more posts. I have some equipment reviews that I’m working on and some other observations about the whole experience. I’m also going to caption and post all of the photos as soon as I can. Thanks for reading.