Thursday, July 20, 2000

We rode from Big Rapids MI to Howard City MI, a distance of 29 miles. I am very tired after the ride from Germantown to Manitowoc and the ride from Ludington to Big Rapids. I really have not had a change to get rested because of the time change from the central to Eastern Time zones. My legs have not recovered from the effort required to bicycle those two days.

We tried to ride on a bicycle path built on an old railroad right-of-way but it was unpaved and covered with loose gravel. The only type of bicycle that can use this portion of the bicycle trail would be a mountain bicycle with big, soft, knobby tires. Our bicycle with road tires was just too difficult to ride on this bicycle path.

We did ride on roads that almost paralleled the bicycle path. The first half of the ride they were country roads and did not have much traffic. Then we traveled on what appeared to be the old highway 131, which is now a 4-lane interstate type highway about a mile further west. This road varied from very good to very bad. In places it was smooth, with nice 3-foot paved shoulders and in places it was nothing but patched potholes with no shoulder because the shoulder had become one big pothole. It also had triple the traffic of the earlier roads.

In addition to the paved shoulders, there was an additional 6 to 8 foot of unpaved shoulder. This additional unpaved shoulder was needed for the Amish horse and buggies. From the tracks on the unpaved shoulder, it appears that the horse walks on the unpaved shoulder next to the paved shoulder. One of the buggy wheels than rides on the paved shoulder and the other wheel rides on the outside edge of the unpaved shoulder. In one town we saw two women with a horse and carriage. The carriage was all black and very simple, much like a carriage that a fire-breathing minister might have used in the first part of the last century. The scenery continued to be of wooded areas around some farms and many houses.