Serious tailwinds again today. We started out on the thirty mile Pere Marquette trail. It began less than a block from the hotel. It is beautifully paved & has good signs, bathrooms every five miles, and even pressurized air hoses for filling tires. It runs mostly through deciduous woods although there are times you can hear traffic on a nearby highway and occasional towns where you can see houses & businesses. The woods sheltered us from the winds a little, but we still got plenty of help. One cyclist going the other way who passed us as we approached the end said, "You're gonna hate riding back!" with a very unhappy look on her face.
We came out in Midland, a fair sized town with a nice deli where we got sandwiches. As we were leaving we felt a few drops of rain so I stopped to encase everything in plastic bags. Naturally, that ensured that we would not feel another drop all day. It was actually almost chilly. I kept my windbreaker on all day. It's been well over a month since I have done that. At home I would have it on almost every day.
We found our way through town to Nebobish Road. I sort of like the name, and we really liked the road. It soon shook off what remained of the town and took us barrelling through about ten miles of open fields. No shelter from the wind there, and no need for it. We just let it push us along towards our goal, which I had just recalculated & determined was about 8 mikes farther than I had thought. Bruce was pleased. He was having a great day. I was a bit less pleased - doing ok, but happy to think tomorrow will be a rest day.
Bay City. My computer was flashing a warning that its hub battery was getting low, so Bruce helped change it. Unfortunately, the batteries in the little bag with the "unused" label must not have belonged there; they gave out before we arrived today, and the place I stopped to try to get new ones didn't have the right size. More on the to-do list for tomorrow. Bruce noted his time & mileage so I could add his for the rest of the day to what I had done up to then. We had a couple of map-folliwing issues in Bay City. Score: one for me, one for Bruce. It was lucky that we didn't miss them at the same time. Reversing directions would have been quite a penalty in today's wind.
A little later, we looked more closely at the map & realized there was a better route to Caro. It is just a bit off the Adventure Cycling route. We tried it, and it worked perfectly. Probably saved us two or three miles which would have been into the wind.
Our B&B is very nice. Everything about it looks precisely as it did online. Since that's what made us choose it, that is very good news. Our hostesses directed us to a great restaurant a couple of miles outside town (Aline, where will we be when you leave???), and we stopped for ice cream on our way back. Aline & I got out of the car to get ice cream while Bruce tilted his seat back to get a head start on a good night's sleep.
When we got across the street, the place looked closed, but Aline tried the outer door & it opened. A guy came right over to the inner door. "Ice cream? Come on in. Don't worry about all this. Lots of groups here tonight."
Yes, there were. As we entered, we passed a large round table with 9 guys playing poker around it. Our guy had stood up from his place at the game to help us; he called out his bets as he served the ice cream. A little farther into the shop were a couple of people carefully producing frosting-flowers for a wedding cake; just beyond them, two young girls were making their own attempts at flowers.
When my ice cream came, it had little candy eyes on top, staring at me. One of the little girls said, "They're edible."
Miles today: 88
Total miles so far: 3232
No comments:
Post a Comment