Michigan Bicycle Trip

These are the photos from my Michigan Bicycle tour. The original plan was for Tyler and I to start and end in Toledo making a counter clockwise tour around the Lower Peninsula, but that plan ended up being modified pretty heavily. We started out around noon on Saturday the 10th, and after a little mechanical difficulty, we met up with Nate at the Michigan border late that afternoon. He rode with us the rest of the day, and we camped out in a back yard just outside of Hillsdale.

The next day we got up early and started riding again. We intended to make it to have dinner at Nate's parents' house and then make the short ride into grand Rapids. A few miles before we made it to the cottage, we had to take a dirt road for a while and Tyler bent the rim on his road bike. At the time this seemed like a pretty significant setback especially considering the price of the replacements. Luckily Nate had a friend who was able to get it back to (almost) true for free. We spent Sunday night at the RadPad.

Mondays morning we took off again, and fought some big hills north of GR. Tyler was feeling tired, and I offered to take the lead. By lunch time we had made it to Big Rapids, but we were about an hour behind where we had hoped to be, and weren't feeling too fresh. After lunch we decided that the original planned route was a little ambitious and went to Farris State University to see a map and plan out the alternate route. Tyler decided that between a slightly bent rim, and some seriously tired legs he would prefer to just end the trip early. I wasn't ready to be done just yet, so I thought about some alternate routes, and other plans, and ended up calling Sarah. She decided she would come up to and meet me at the RadPad, and we would do a three-day along part of the west coast. So Tyler arranged a ride back home, and I bummed with him back to Grand Rapids to stay for another night.

Tuesday morning, Sarah and I took off for Holland. It was a longish ride, and Sarah was hurting because her back tire was severely low on air. Unfortunately it wasn't until we got all the way into downtown Holland that we found a bike shop to fill it up for us. But it was a good thing we did. She felt a lot better after the tire was full, and there were a few times when I had trouble keeping up. After arranging to stay with Kurt and Karla Mast in Zeeland that night, we headed on to Holland state park. The beach was sunny and beautiful and the water was refreshing. And the best part was Pier Diving! They allow you to jump, dive, flip, and belly flop off the pier into the lake. It was awesome. After we swam for a while we got ice cream and headed back to the Masts' house. We didn't realize beforehand, but riding back was almost a third of the way back to Grand Rapids.

We had planned to head up to Muskegon the next day, but we didn't have a place to stay up there, so we decided to spend the night Grand Haven at a campground with Sarah's friend Brittany. The ride was shorter than we had been planning, so we had lots of time to hang out, lay on the beach, wash our clothes in the lake, get wicked sun burnt, and explore downtown. Riding into downtown was a great part of this trip too. We saw another state park and did more pier diving. We also went to a place called Pronto Pup's that sells something like a homemade corndog (although the owner will be quick to tell you that a pronto pup is not a corndog). This turned out to be even better than we had expected because we mentioned that it was our first time so he gave us each a free pronto pup! We said thanks and told him we wanted to each buy one also, but he told us to take the two and come back for more if we liked them. Of course we liked them so we came back to buy more, and he gave us two more free ones!! It was great. Of course we had to take the money we saved on pronto pups and put it toward ice cream at the pier peddler. That night we played some cards, and slept in the trailer with Brittany's family.

The final ride was back into Grand Rapids via M-45 (Lake Michigan Drive). The road was mostly pretty nice, but the last bit was pretty busy and lacked a nice bike lane so it was a little rough riding. But we didn't care because we were almost home and had just come off of two consecutive days of pier diving. How can you be in a bad mood after that right? That night at the RadPad I helped Nate disassemble his Honda CM400 to sell the parts on ebay. We also completely disassembled the engine.

After all that, I put my bike in the back of Sarah's car and we drove back to Huron so I could get ready to head out to CTY the next day. It ended up being a great trip.