You’re welcome

We cycled across Michigan, so now you don’t have to. Corn and soybean fields, check.  One bit of excitement is that now the corn we’ve been watching grow for the last 56 days is forming ears.

A local told me there’s a glacially formed ridge across Michigan providing hills, but we must have been dozing when that went by. Michigan was flat. One thing we couldn’t ignore was the cold, wet summer Michigan has been having. At Otter Lake, a nice afternoon turned into a tempest at dinner time, making us dive into the tent and hold onto the poles to keep them from breaking in the intense wind and downpour. When the rain eased we came out to start dinner, but another storm moved in and make us dive into the tent again. This time the ground couldn’t absorb any more, and the campsite flooded. We found out that our beautifully lightweight and roomy Big Agnes tent is fantastic now that we’ve had so much experience setting it up just the right way, but that it doesn’t float.

I don’t advise starting a cycling day when it’s going to rain all the time.

Reserving a motel room for the end of the day does a lot for one’s spirits.

One day we cycled along, lost in our thoughts, when the soybean and cornfields gave way Frankenmuth, an imitation Bavaria. It’s very popular. I was a good sport and ate a bratwurst.

There was some good polka dancing going on (which I’ll post if I ever get enough wifi connection).

A sweet girl tending the carriage horses noted that the sweat stain on my shirt was shaped like a heart, appropriate for Frankenmuth.

We tried to get a glimpse of Lake Huron in Bay City, but the shorefront was blocked by houses, and we were unwilling to bike the extra two miles one way to the state park on the lake. I did get a good look at the invasive purple loosestrife in full glory on someone’s front lawn, and, as a result, rampant in all the ditches and fields from then on.

I’m sorry to harp on environmental problems, but spending the day looking at the landscape go by at slow speed makes the conditions impossible to ignore. Across the country, field fertilizer is leaching into waterways large and small and clogging them with algae. Here’s the Saginaw River at Bay City.

Michigan finds ways to party, including this festival in the town of Yale.

We’ve become intimately acquainted with convenience stores. I cluelessly asked why there is so much bagged tobacco sold there and learned that people  roll their own cigarettes to escape the high cigarette tax.

By this time we have figured out what works food-wise. When we camp, the best meal we have figured out how to make in our little pots on our tiny stove is browned hamburger with spaghetti sauce. Chips and Coors Light for appetizers. Breakfast is instant oatmeal, bananas, and yoghurt. Vegetables, absent altogether.  Every time I ask for a restaurant recommendation and then say I’d like a meal with some vegetables, people get a pained look and think hard which establishment might offer a salad. I’ve found that sticking to the same food pattern makes me feel better. On the day we gulped a half gallon jug of juice at lunch, I felt uncomfortable all afternoon. I’ve been trying to find ways around all the added sugar in the prepared foods we have to rely on.  You might think that biking all day we can eat whatever we want, but it just doesn’t work out that way, unfortunately.

At breakfast in Marine City, Michigan, we watched freighters bring coal to the enormous power plant just upriver on the St. Clair River, which flows from Lake Huron to Lake Erie.

We took a little car ferry across and arrived in Sombra, Ontario. The riverfront was lovely, and, true to Canadian form, we saw a canoe in the first five minutes.

We were thrilled to arrived at the north shore of Lake Erie. It looked like ocean except that you could just make out the smoke from a coal fired power plant on the horizon.

I was all ready to jump in for a swim, but the guy cutting the lawn said he had never been in the lake. Wondering why, I saw a sign warning of high bacteria load. Tonight we are further away from Detroit and Windsor, in Port Burwell. People are swimming, so the lake water must be OK here.

We’ve seen more diverse agriculture here in Canada, including this vegetable greenhouse that went on for almost a mile.

There are wind turbines on some of the lakefront, and where they haven’t landed yet, the people try every argument to keep them out.

Tonight we must decide whether we will do the route we originally planned on the north side of Lake Ontario and down through southern Quebec toward Maine, or whether we’ll bike home through upstate New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire. There are no mapped cycle routes in the southern Quebec part, which in some ways argues against that.  (The Bicycle Coalition of Maine is establishing a bike route in Downeast Maine, a good idea, because a researched route is compelling for us cyclists.) The US option would take us over the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, and the White Mountains: a lot of hills we have already done on other trips. It’s tempting to take the known route through the US, and we are eager to get home.  But here’s the thing. Today we met a charming father and daughter from Camden, Maine, biking east to west on Adventure Cycling routes. The father hinted that following Adventure Cycling routes takes out some of the adventure. We also met a shop owner who says she gets cross country cyclists all the time.  I prefer not to do what everyone else is doing. I’m a bit sick of cycling, and my interest will hold better if we have to forge a route that’s not prescribed. I thought we’d have to flip a coin to decide, but I’m thinking we’ll go Canada in honor of her 150th birthday.