Wednesday, July 19, 2000

Today we rode our bicycle from Ludington MI to Big Rapids MI, a distance of 67 miles. For some reason this felt like one of our harder days. We went cross-country because the Adventure Cycling bicycle maps would have taken us north when we wanted to go south. Everything was fine until we came upon a sign that said road closed. Our paved road was being rebuilt and over 4 miles of the road was completely torn up. We went south on a road that was supposed to be paved but instead were “improved” dirt or gravel. The first couple of miles consisted of gravel that was usually too thick and loose. The rest of the road consisted of dirt with a little gravel at times. The main problem was on hills where the cars had made a washboard of the road and on some curves the road was very soft sand. The road was so bad that I had to become the captain and the only power for the bicycle because Mary Kay cannot pedal in the stokers’ position. The good news is that for most of the time that I was captain we were going somewhat down hill. In all I think we were on this dirt road for 4 to 6 miles. After we got off the “improved” dirt road, we stopped at a grocery store to buy some food. A woman approached us and said that she had passed us 3 times. She was lost and trying to find her way out of the dirt roads. She said when she finally got to the paved road; she passed us again so we could not have been too lost.

The scenery was very different today from that seen across Wisconsin and Minnesota. We traveled through some national forests and saw deer a couple of times. They fled before we could get any pictures. We also traveled through an area of Amish farmers and saw two men raking hay using modern hay rakes powered by horses. We saw a number of wild flowers along side the road.