At Home in Ithaca

It's been 6 weeks since we arrived in Ithaca and wrote our last blog entry. We've been quite busy, but in a relaxed and paced sort of way, with two primary activities: time with our family and explorations on our tandem of the Finger Lakes area.

Our base has been a cozy mother-in-law type of apartment in the lower level of what is basically a one-family house. It's actually a tad more spacious than this little "efficiency unit" we rode by in Michigan, and has allowed us, as you can see, to make our tandem a more intimate part of the family than heretofore. Our place has a beautiful back yard that we look out to from the living/dining area, and deer go by our window about once a week, and wild turkeys drop in every now and then. We're exactly 2 miles from Lisa and Ray, Louise's daughter and son-in law, and our two dear grandchildren. It's just under 2 miles the other direction to the heart of the Cornell campus, close enough that we were easily able to walk home one evening after seeing a movie in the on-campus movie theater (Jefferson in Paris, shown in conjunction with a Lafayette exhibit in the Cornell library, which owns the largest collection of Lafayette memorabilia outside France).

Once a week we join Lisa and her almost-3-year-old daughter Hanachan at gymnastics, which is more structured play time given the young age of the kids than anything else, but they do get good socialization in concepts like taking your turn, and pick up some skills and confidence in moving their energetic little bodies. While Lisa gives Hanachan some much-desired maternal focus, we keep her 2 1/2-month-old brother Issei either asleep or distracted with walks in his stroller.

Hanachan is in daycare other than this one morning, but we do occasionally see her if we get together with the family in the evening or on the weekend. She's a very cute and incredibly bright little girl, and she's finally moved us from the "stranger" (or was it merely "strange"?) category to that of family members.

But mostly we're with Issei. Four or five days a week we bike over after a leisurely breakfast and split our time between watching Issei while Lisa gets on a teleconference or reviews a paper or attends an occasional meeting on campus, and socializing over lunch or a sewing project. The weather this Fall has been unusually dry and warm, and we've taken Issei on 2- to 5-mile walks in his stroller almost every day. He is a baby, however, and he occasionally melts down because we've mis-timed a return to mom (who's nursing him) or for reasons known only to 2-month-olds. It's fun watching him learn new things, but it's also nice to know we get to hand him back to his mom and dad for the bulk of the day and all of the night (hey, he's a baby -- of course he wakes up every few hours!).

It's also great to vicariously experience a little of the academic life through Lisa, who is currently on maternity leave from her position as Assistant Professor in the Human Resources Department in the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Ray, who is an Assistant Dean of Students in the College of Arts and Sciences. After so much time in academia ourselves at UW, it's a world we're very comfortable in, but being on a new campus is a little like visiting a foreign country where English is the common language -- you can understand them, but not always completely until you've been there longer than we will have been before we take off again.

What about that red tandem? Not to worry, it has been VERY busy. Five out of the past six weekends have involved 2- to 4-day trips, and another 3-dayer is set to happen starting tomorrow. The riding has been better than we expected in terms of bike-friendly roads with wide shoulders and beautiful scenery, but the Fall color has been very subdued (perhaps due to very low rainfall all Summer and warmer-than-usual weather this Fall) and the terrain has been somewhat hillier than we were used to or expecting. Here is one of the few really nice fall foliage shots we've gotten.

This whole area was significantly rearranged by the four continental glaciers that covered it between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. The most obvious and scenically stunning examples of this are the Finger Lakes themselves, about a dozen lakes that run in narrow north-south troughs looking indeed like skinny fingers from the air. But many other valleys were also gouged out by the glaciers in the high plateaus between the lakes, and erosion over the past 10,000 years has created other topographic detail. In short, few roads are level for long unless they can find one of the few wide river floodplains and stay there.

The flip side of this are the gorges, wonderlands of erosion through millenia of sedimentary rocks when streams take sudden plunges into valleys made deeper and steeper by glacial carving. Here are a few examples from Watkins Glen and Letchworth State Parks, which we visited by car last weekend while Jeff's daughter Becky and her fiance Sean were in town. The third example is Taughannock Falls, which we biked to from home. It's 215' high, the tallest free-fall of any waterfall this side of the Mississippi.

This area is also rich in human history, from the Iroquois to the early white settlers to the recently-arrived high techs. The Iroquois backed the wrong side in the Revolution, and were pretty much kicked out by the new nation and their land distributed in lieu of back pay to Revolutionary War soldiers in the northeastern part of this region, or settled by New Englanders moving west in the early 1800's. We routinely pass houses clearly built in the popular styles of long ago, original articles and not reproductions. One weekend we stayed at an inn in continuous service as such since 1807, and we've also spent nights at a B&B built as a home in 1825, a 1902 Georgian mansion on the banks of the Susquehanna, and a large place built in Elmira for women widowed by the Civil War. On our swing to the south we actually rode into Pennsylvania to the small town of Athens for lunch with Kevin and Joan Carey. Kevin is a high school friend of Jeff's, who has been a physician there for the past 29 years, quite a change of life-style considering that their high school was on the East Side of Manhatten, a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and surrounded by the 8 million inhabitants of Gotham.

It was great to see Becky and Sean, and we're hoping to hear soon what day they settle on for their wedding. They're talking about mid-January, which would mean that in the first half-year of retirement we went from 1 of our 4 kids (2 each from our prior marriages) being married to all of them, as Matt and Akiko and Brian and Ardith tied the knot in August. Matt has already announced Akiko's pregnancy, so we are now looking forward to having 3 grandchildren by sometime next year! Looks like we'll be doing lots of travelling in retirement, with grandkids at opposite ends of the earth, 2 in Ithaca and 1 in Tokyo.

Newlyweds Brian and Ardie arrive next weekend for a quick visit, there's still a little bit of biking weather left before Winter arrives, and the two of us are currently planning a week-long trip by rental car in early November. We'll tell you about all of that in our next blog.

Love to all from Ithaca.

Landed in Ithaca

After almost 5 weeks on the go, covering 1303 miles, we've finally arrived in Ithaca, our home for the next 4 months.

Our final leg began in Stratford, on the Avon River of course, which naturally drains into the Thames River, which logically flows through London, which then proceeds to . . . Lake Erie! These Ontario cities and rivers were named by homesick Brits who settled this part of Canada in the mid-1800s. In the late 1800's a Stratford citizen rallied the citizenry to create a Shakespeare garden in a town park, i.e. a garden containing every plant and flower mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. With a name like Stratford and a Shakespeare Garden on the premises, another visionary citizen rallied the town to create a small Shakespeare play festival in 1953, and things have not been the same since.

The Stratford Festival is no longer limited to Will, and in fact we saw three plays here, two by others: an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. Our first play was A Comedy of Errors, which we saw Friday night on half-priced rush tickets when we decided that we still had a little energy left after arriving in town at 3:30 in the afternoon. The play is fairly outrageous to begin with, and Stratford pulled out all the stops to put it on as a broad farce, with excellent results. Now they did push the limits here and there, and we are fairly confident that Antipholus did not say "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto" to Dromio in Will Shakespeare's time, but hey, it fit the mood, so why not?

All three plays were terrific productions, each casting a strong mood, each very different. Mockingbird was remarkable for the performance of 11-year-old Abigail Winter-Culliford as Scout, a role that required her to be onstage for almost the entire performance, and to memorize more lines than most adult actors get. And she did not merely occupy the space onstage, she occupied the role. She's from Vancouver BC, and we hope we can see her again some day in that neck of the woods once we return to Seattle. The Oscar Wilde play was nonetheless our favorite, given the clever plot and even cleverer dialogue. We also stayed off the bike for 2 whole days, so we refreshed the body as well as the mind.

While in Stratford, the wind finally adjusted itself to assist us, and we left town with a tail wind for what turned out to be the longest day of the trip, 69 miles. Ian, our B&B host in Stratford is an avid cyclist himself, riding every day at the age of 74 despite heart surgery last year, and he found us a terrific route on low-traffic roads and even accompanied us for the first 3 miles out of town! The fact that it was Labour Day meant that the truck traffic was extremely light, and the largely shoulderless roads tolerable. A second days' journey from Stratford and we were in Niagara-On-The-Lake, a wonderful community 20 miles down the Niagara River from the Falls. N-O-T-L is a quaint, well-to-do community that hosted two major battles in the War of 1812.

In the Depression the Canadian government put men to work re-creating Fort George to look like it did in that era, and we had a great tour of the fort from a woman who exemplified the rarely-realized ideal of Canadian bilingualism as she explained everything in alternating segments of English and French and answered questions from the group in both languages, smoothly. Modern NOTL is more focussed, however, on the wine industry, and we passed half-a-dozen wineries going in and out of town, and passed within a few miles of another two dozen had we chosen to wander. We stayed at one of roughly three dozen B&Bs and walked past a number of high-end (and pricey) restaurants before stopping for a reasonably-priced nouveau Thai sort of place that served arguably the best meal of the trip.

The ride from Niagara-On-The-Lake to Niagara Falls was another highlight of the trip. A bike trail took us on smooth, car-free asphalt for the first 15 miles and put us on a reasonably low-traffic street the remaining five miles to the Falls. The route was never far from the Niagara River, and numerous times the scenery opened to spectacular vistas to our left of the Niagara River and Gorge, culminating of course with a view from the Canadian side of the American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls and Horseshoe Falls, dropping all that Great Lakes water we had ridden by for the prior three weeks over a 170' precipice. We returned on foot after dinner and were treated to the light show, as powerful beacons on the Canadian side light up the falls in varying colors. What a treat!

The next day was yet another one of those days that keeps us biking. Once more, a tail wind. Once more, great bike trails alternating with roads that had wide shoulders, low traffic or both. Once more, great scenery, but this time of idyllic river and canal rather than dramatic rock canyons and waterfalls. We amused the border crossing guards when their computer selected us by random drawing for a complete search -- they had never had a bicycle hit the border crossing jackpot before, and they settled for a few questions about bringing in agricultural products before sending us on our way (we answered that we had eaten any and all that had come our way). A few miles out of Niagara Falls NY and we hit the western end of the Erie Canal in Tonawanda, and were immediately rewarded with a bike trail along the canal.

The Erie Canal was completed in 1825 and was truly the first superhighway in America. It moved not only goods at a fraction of their prior freightage, but also people -- more people moved out West on the Erie Canal than moved into America through famed Ellis Island. It had major rebuilds in the 1850's to make way for yet larger boats, and in the early 1900's when it converted from mule-power to motor power for the vessels using it. Today it has a very small amount of commercial use, but is maintained (beautifully) by New York State as a tourist draw, both for boaters on the water and for hikers and cyclists using the old towpaths alongside it.

For most of three days, we followed the canal. The very western part of the canal today is a channelized section of Tonawanda Creek, and never had a towpath since the 1918 rebuild. Bike trails filled the gap, sometimes right on the Creek but sometimes in nearby woods. At Lockport we came to Locks 34 and 35, the final ones before Lake Erie. Originally two sets of five small locks raised boats to the west on one flight or lowered them eastbound on the other. They now provide a flow-through for water to keep the canal water level up below the locks. Today two locks do the job of moving boats 49 feet up the Niagara Escarpment (note the lowered boom on the sailboat in Lock 34, to let the boat get under the many low bridges). From Lockport the original towpath has been smoothed out for cyclists, and it stretches now almost 100 miles to and through Rochester to Newark NY, and further extensions are being worked on still.

While the packed limestone surface was a little slower than a highway, maybe 1-2 mph at any given power output, the old towpath put us right next to the canal and past various historic buildings and canal structures, such as the lift bridges that have stairways so that pedestrians can still cross the canal when the bridge is in the "up" position, or the viaduct that carries the canal past the town of Gasport, part of which is in the photo.

Our first night along the canal was spent in an 1831 brick home that is now the Canal Country Inn B&B, to the right of Jeff in the photo. We walked along the towpath a mile into town for dinner at a restaurant called the Old Basket Factory that was once, in fact, a basket factory serving local farmers shipping produce on the canal.

On Saturday September 8, we reached the final reserved lodgings, Van Cleef Homestead B&B, built in 1825 by the founder of Seneca Falls. One more day to go! Then we checked the weather forecast -- 90% chance of rain, 1-2" expected. Well, we had stayed overnight twice before in Seneca Falls and fallen in the love with this charming town, and the B&B had no one booked for our room for the next night, so we pulled out our novels and had a quiet day of reading, with one trip out using the B&B's guest umbrellas. Through 1-2" of rain, in fact.

Our delay paid off. Our new "final day" was splendid, in the low 70's with a tailwind and on roads with wide shoulders all the way to Ithaca. Not only that, but they rose hundreds of feet on a ridge above Lake Cayuga, giving us vistas far across the Finger Lakes. What a way to arrive!

There was only one cloud on our arrival, and it has taken a few days to pass -- our grandaughter Elise was still in the throes of a bad virus, and not a very happy camper. But little Issei, our 6-week-old grandson, has been all we could want in a grandchild, and we're getting quite used to him and he to us in the three days since we arrived. We're looking forward to spending lots of time with the grandchildren and their mom and dad, Lisa and Ray, in the coming 4 months.

We're delighted with the apartment we sublet, sight unseen, from John Blake, a Cornell Law student who is studying in London this fall. Actually Lisa, Louise's daughter, checked it out for us last spring, and we met John this summer when he came to work in Seattle, of all places, for the summer! It's a neat, clean, attractive place with a garden view we will have difficulty leaving in 4 months. We'll put up a photo or two in our next entry.

Thank you for following our travels on this blog. We will update it maybe once a month with some photos of our family here and of the Finger Lakes region we expect to visit by bike on weekends, until we get on the road again in January, in Florida, for a trip up the East Coast.

We'd love to know who's reading our blog, how you've enjoyed it, what suggestions you have, and any news of your own you'd care to share with us (which we will NOT put in the blog!) Please email us at redtandem@yahoo.com!

From an Island of Calm to an Island of Culture

We've just now done a 10-day journey from Mackinac Island, a peaceful isle of horses and bicycles surrounded by Lake Huron, to Stratford Ontario, perhaps not the Olympus of theater in Canada but a mighty mount nonetheless, surrounded by seemingly endless miles of farmland. In our next entry we'll say a bit about Stratford and the Shakespeare (actually Shakespeare Plus these days) Festival. This is about getting here.

As promised last time, we've now got a map of our route from Milwaukee WI to Ithaca NY. And as you can see from the map, we spent the entire time to Mackinac Island following the shore of Lake Michigan. In planning the trip, we wondered why there were many, many more B&Bs, inns and motels along the shore of Lake Michigan than along the shore of Lake Huron, which this leg has mostly taken. The answer is simple -- it's fairly boring on this side of the lower peninsula.

Lake Huron is in many ways like Lake Michigan -- identical elevation above sea level, same temperature, even a tad bigger -- but location is everthing, as they say. The Lake Huron shore of Michigan's lower peninsula is on the leeward side of lake weather, and thus lacks the sand dunes and hills that make the western shore dramatic. It also is largely a straight or gently curving shore, unlike the Lake Michigan side with numerous bays and peninsulas that make for interesting boating and that provide picturesque sites for summer homes. This lighthouse at Presque Isle was one of the few scenic spots, and it gives us a chance to show you all what our fully-loaded bike looks like with the new Ortlieb panniers that were a retirement present to Jeff from his office.

It also has far fewer towns. Leaving the ferry from Mackinac Island to Mackinaw City, we went 60 miles our first day, passing through only one town. Only occasionally did the road get close enough to Lake Huron to see the lake. The up side was that the road was incredibly flat and blessed with a wide shoulder and little traffic. Rogers City, that first destination, has the world's largest open-pit limestone quarry. Not exactly a big tourist draw, but there was an overlook on our route so we stopped to take this photo. That's an enormous truck in the upper right hand corner of the photo, a few miles from our vantage point. The most interesting thing about the quarry is where the limestone goes. The quarry is owned by U.S. Steel because they use most of its output in making steel. No, steel is not made from limestone, but a few hundred pounds of it are added to every ton of molten steel to remove impurities from the iron ore. A brochure we found in Rogers City informed us of many other things this limestone goes into, from fertilizer to the toothpaste you may have used today.

A few days later, we were in a community a bit above the "thumb" of Michigan when we saw an item in a local paper describing the demographics of the county we were in. The median household income, the article said, was about $25,000. This stunned us. That's not much above the poverty level, we thought, and another newspaper article a few days later confirmed this (poverty level for a family of 4 is now defined as $20,400, and the median household income for the nation is over $48,000). But the roads here were in excellent condition, something we bicyclists pay an inordinate amount of attention to, well paved and well-swept. The houses were not large or fancy in this area, but not ramshackle either. The next day, while still in that county, we decided to skip the cafes and have our first picnic lunch, using the compact butane stove and titanium pot we'd been carrying for the first time. We went to a quite large supermarket and started looking for something healthy to cook. We thought we'd cut up a sausage and add it to soup, but there was nothing that was less than 80% fat -- literally! We looked for ground beef, and the leanest to be found was 19% fat, not the 7% that every grocery in Seattle routinely carries. We asked a grocery employee, and she said that low-fat doesn't sell there, cheap sells there. Their customers, she said, don't care what's in the food as long as it's inexpensive. We ended up buying cooked chicken in the deli section and a can of soup so we could say we used the stove, but the main thing we got out of lunch was an interesting lesson in how economics shape entire communities.

Bay City is at the inside of the thumb, and a blog we read last year from some Canadian bicyclists who circumnavigated Lake Huron described coming into Bay City as something of a nightmare of truck traffic, strip malls and disappearing road shoulders. Jeff studied the maps extra hard, and thought he had a good alternative, and it was one of those special days that you remember for a long time. Granted, a rare tail wind helped, but the road he had selected was flat and nearly traffic-free, through pleasant farm country until we got close to Bay City. From that point, there appeared on the map to be a way along the shore of Lake Huron, but the resolution of the map wasn't good enough to see if the road was continuous or a series of dead-end roads. As it turned out, there were two dead-ends, but in each case friendly neighbors told us how to find footpaths around a garage of a certain color or shape, where we could jump to the next road and continue on. The second "secret passage" brought us into a wildlife preserve and onto a beautiful rail trail that brought us right into Bay City.

Bay City is an unlikely place to go sightseeing, but they've done a remarkable job of beautifying the shore of the Saginaw River, and the next day we had a delightful ride along a biking/walking path that follows and at one point seen in the photo takes you right over the river on a wooden testle. Along the way was the site of a long-gone shipyard that chose to close rather than switch from building wooden ships to metal. Some of the wood vessels they had built rested at their docks after the boats had joined the shipyard in retirement, then fire swept through and burned the shipyard to the ground and the boats to the water line. To this day the ghostly remainder of the boats' skeletons can be seen. A nearby sign gave the name and date for each skeleton, from the 1880's to about 1905 for the most recent of the ghosts.

We had wondered what Frankenmuth would be like. It is widely known as a quaint town with German roots, and from the web seemed to be a place a lot of tourists went to. With the help of another cyclist from Bay City, we found an idyllic route down roads where we saw no cars in either direction for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and checked it out. It was fairly underwhelming. It's authentically German, all right, named by German missionaries from Franconia ("Frankenmuth" means "courage of the Franconians") who intended to turn the local Chippewa into good Lutherans. The tourist guides are discretely quiet about the level of success they did or didn't have. In the early 1900's a restaurant founded in the 1880's began to get a name for itself by serving all-you-can-eat chicken dinners, and folks from nearby cities like Flint (20 miles away) and even Detroit (85 miles out) who were getting more prosperous building these new-fangled devices for Henry Ford would drive to Frankenmuth and enjoy a good meal. In the 1950's the restaurant decided to play up the German theme and added some Bavarian (not Franconian, interestingly enough) decor, and a few other places followed suite. Now the tourist buses bring in hordes, and the main focus of the trip appears to be lunch and/or dinner in town. Frankly (pardon the pun), there's not much else to see except for the usual assortment of kitschy gift shops and sweet shops, in this case with various German or ersatz-German themes. Ironically, there was only one restaurant that served sauerbraten, which Jeff insisted on since he knew this was his only chance to find this on a menu on this trip. Louise was very pleased with her German smoked pork, and both agreed that the sauerkraut and blaukraut (sweet and sour red cabbage, also known as rotkohl) were outstanding.

Two days of riding still more quiet roads through the Michigan farmland brought us a hundred and five miles to the St. Clair River, which drains Lake Huron into Lake St. Clair, sometimes called the "sixth Great Lake," which then drains to Lake Erie. On our side, Michigan; on the other, Ontario Canada. The St. Clair looked like a lake, calm water just rustled on top by wind and chop, until you stopped to watch the ferry go back and forth from Marine City MI to Sombra ON, pointed 30 or 40 degrees upstream in order to proceed straight across against the current carrying the waters of three Great Lakes on their way to the remaining two. Great ships passed by silently all day and all night, perhaps some to or from the limestone quarry in Rogers City, or the great iron ore fields above Duluth, or the grain elevators of Chicago.

Our destination was the Heather House B&B in Marine City, and it was one of our best stopovers. As the photo shows, it is a gorgeous Victorian home, with a large front porch and a separate second-story porch for each of the five guest rooms. There was a round library/sitting room in that turret, a half-story above the second floor, where we unwound from the riding and checked out some of their books. Louise liked the first two chapters of Nicholas Evans' "The Loop" that she read there so much that she wrote down the title and, amazingly enough, found it in a second-hand bookshop that same evening on the way to dinner.

But good B&Bs are more than just beautiful houses. Our host was Barb, who is running the place now that her parents have retired from founding and operating it for 18 years. Sometimes it's the hosts, sometimes the other guests, sometimes both that make for a great experience. Barb more than made up for the absence of other guests with her warm welcome, her much-appreciated offer to use the washer/dryer, and a great breakfast the next day. The main course was a wonderful quiche lorraine, but we took this shot before it arrived to show off the beautiful period silverware, china and linens she put out for us. She's finishing up coursework to become an elementary school teacher and the B&B is on the market. We certainly hope she finds special people to continue on with this special place.

Alas, that breakfast, the ferry boat crossing and the pleasant welcome by Canadian Customs were the last good moments of that day. We had spent the evening before watching not only the boats in the St. Clair but also a terrific light and sound display as thunderstorms moved through Marine City just after we returned from dinner. While they brought the temperature down from the mid-80's to the low-70's, they also brought a north wind, at the very moment when our southward-trending route turned to a zig-zag course alternating between straight north and straight east. And no light breeze was this -- it was a steady 15 to 20 mph blow, with occasional higher gusts, and we struggled. Not only when going north, as you can well imagine, but also going east, as Jeff would have to clench the handlebars to keep the bike straight against the cross wind. The physical and mental strain was the greatest we'd had to this point.

Adding to the misery was the fact that Ontario saves money on its roads by not bothering with paved shoulders. As long as no one was coming the other way, vehicles passing us were very good about giving us a wide berth, cars and trucks both. And cars coming up behind us were very nice about slowing to let oncoming traffic clear before passing. These were not overly busy roads. But every now and then we could see a truck coming up behind us, cars or trucks approaching, do the math, and see that everyone was going to be right where we were in 15 or 20 seconds. As carefully as we could, we'd hit the brakes down to 8 mph or so and coast off into the soft shoulder, hoping we'd stay upright while coming to a complete stop out of the way. We always did, but it was not a pleasant exercise, and it was one we went through well over a dozen times that day.

Somehow or other, we convinced ourselves to bike 40 miles like this, until we reached a point on the route where any vehicle going by was very likely going to go the remaining 15 miles to our destination down that same road. It wasn't just the wind, the truck traffic on this road was distinctly heavier and we really did want to live to bike another day. We pulled over and watched for pickup trucks, sticking out our thumbs every time one approached. Two stopped but had their flatbeds filled, which we couldn't see as they approached. We thanked them profusely and said we'd wait, sooner or later we'd get help. And, sure enough, we did, in the form of Murray.

Murray was headed to a point just past the motel where we had a reservation, and said he could take us the whole way if we didn't mind stopping for 15 minutes at his house en route. No problem at all! He drove a few miles and pulled off the road and back a few hundred yards to what appeared to be a beautifully maintained 19th century brick Italianate Gothic home, where Murray introduced us to his wife Denise. Denise gave us a tour of their home, which is in fact only 10 years old, but done entirely in late 19th century style, down to the intricate oak woodwork, 19th-century floral wallpaper designs in several rooms, Victorian furniture, and interesting ceilings, some textured in wet plaster with intricate swirling designs, the kitchen ceiling wallpapered with a textured white paper that looked exactly like an old pressed-tin covering.

Our ride and visit with Murray and Denise helped calm both mind and body, but we both had a restless sleep, filled with tension from the day before. The next day we had ten more miles to go on that busy road before we could get onto quieter country roads. The cafe attached to the motel did not open until 8. We decided we could not wait until then, as the traffic and the wind (predicted to be out of the north though a little softer at 10-12 mph) would have picked up too much. We got up before the sun did, had a Zone Bar and a few almonds for "breakfast," and were on the road just after sunrise at 7 am. By the time we'd done the 10 miles with only 3 trucks having gone by, none requiring us to go off the road and stop, we knew we could survive the day. Our spirits brightened, our muscles relaxed, and we pedalled on. It was our longest day at 66 miles, and there was another stretch of 10 miles on a semi-busy shoulderless road with occasional trucks, but the wind was not as troublesome, there were occasional narrow shoulders, and we knew that there was an end to this little period in purgatory, with Stratford as the payoff at the end of the day.

Well, we're now in pleasant Stratford, but our stay here and the three plays we stopped to see here at the Festival will have to await our next blog. May the wind be at your back, as the weatherman says it will be for us the day we leave.

A Car-Free Island in Time

We had a windy time of it getting here, but we're now at Mackinac Island, a few miles east of the Mackinac Bridge, longest in the Western Hemisphere. We had a 62-mile ride going NNE along the Lk. Michigan shore, facing a 15-25 mph NW wind. Fortunately a lot of the small roads we took had trees and/or bluffs to the west of the road, giving us some shelter, but it was a HARD day. The wind provided some dramatic waves in Charlevoix, our destination, as the photo shows. The town looks like it was the model for Lionel's little plastic town parts, quaint houses, Victorian store fronts and all. A local architect built a number of stone houses that folks come to see (from the outside -- they're all private homes), and we had a nice walk past quite a few of them. The one pictured here is probably the cutest one we saw, and is known locally as "The Mushroom House" for its shape.

Our next day was short and easy and almost all on a bike trail through Petoskey, which has an even larger, quainter business district, one that has survived the building of a Walmart on the outskirts of town. Third and last day northward to Mackinac was on a road called the "Tunnel of Trees," and that it was. It was a fairly narrow road for a state highway, with trees growing right up to the shoulderless asphalt, but the traffic was almost non-existent except for motorcycle clubs out for their Sunday rides, and bicyclists. Lunch was at Legs Inn, founded a century ago by a Polish immigrant who liked the area and the people of the Ottowa tribe nearby. We had a great Polish lunch with sausage on rye bread, stuffed cabbage, pierogies and dumplings. Polish students work in the summer, augmenting the locals who keep it running through the winter. We could see four lighthouses from our table on the veranda, one reportedly in bad shape as it was used for target practice by Army bombers training for combat in WW II.

Mackinac Island has been a dream destination for us for decades. NO CARS!!! Just bikers, hikers, and LOTS of horses -- about 600 in summer. At night from our B&B we hear hoof beats instead of car engines. It's not any quieter, but it's a lot more conducive to sleep. You also don't get diesel smoke in your face during the day as vehicles pass you, but you do get some pretty strong "biofuel" aromas from the horses, particularly in the downtown area where they stand, waiting for customers to haul.

The island has a state highway all along the shore, exactly 8 miles long and totally level. For 6 of those miles it looks exactly like a bike trail with a yellow stripe down the middle. It's a little wider, not by much, near town, but there it shares use with horse-drawn wagons, horse-drawn delivery trucks, horse-drawn garbage haulers (they put your trash container on a flat-bed wagon and empty it elsewhere, then return the empty), and LOTS of walkers and cyclists. As you cross the street, you also have to watch for more than the traffic because the roadway has, uh, 'texture.'

The town clusters around ferry docks for three boat lines that charge identical fares and have virtually identical schedules, all running boats every 30 minutes from 7 am 'til early evening. One street is fudge shop, restaurant, fudge shop, gift shop, fudge shop, old wood hotel, restaurant, fudge shop, book store, fudge shop . . . for about four blocks. Did we mention the Island is famous for fudge? We got a free sample in one from a student from Poland, who was very surprised to hear about Legs Inn, and positively salivating when we described our lunch there. Besides Poles, we've encountered quite a number of Jamaicans working summer jobs here and elsewhere in this part of Michigan, and were told there are also quite a few Filipinos and Chileans in the summer work force. Wonder how the Michigan congressional delegation voted on immigration reform this past year . . . This community would come to a grinding halt without 'guest workers,' it's pretty clear.

The island has a LOT of hotels and B&Bs, none more famous than the Grand Hotel, which was used with other island landmarks in the film "Somewhere In Time." There are many reminders on the island about the movie. The hotel is enormous, as the "world's largest summer hotel" darned well ought to be, and a walk down the "world's largest front porch" takes a while, as you can see!

We've also enjoyed hiking around the island looking at the many stunning summer "cottages" built by wealthy Midwesterners in the 19th century, competing in size and architectural quaintness and almost all set off by colorful gardens. There is also a genuine fort on the island that was successfully attacked once with no loss of life. The commander learned of the declaration of the War of 1812 from his British opponent with a much larger force, and chose not to commit himself and his fort to martydom. Smart move, as the diplomats awarded Michigan, and thus the fort, back to the Americans 2 years later.

The weather has been dry except for light rain one morning a week ago. The wind has been strong while we've been on the island, and from the direction we're headed tomorrow. It's supposed to get lighter in speed, but not change direction. Could be another tough 65-miler when we leave. Temperature has been Fall-like, given the wind plus high temperatures only around 70. It could be worse. It gets cold enough here that in some winters (2 out of the past 4, from someone who's spent 4 winters here) Lake Huron freezes from St. Ignace, five miles away, all the way out to Mackinac Island, and locals mark an "ice bridge" with discarded Christmas trees that people drive across by snowmobile. In the "old days," in fact, it was how the island was resupplied in winter.

For those of you trying to keep track of our route, we'll see if we can put up a map next time be blog on. Having come up the west side of Michigan's lower peninsula and jumped to this island between the upper and lower peninsulas, we're now about to ride down the east side of the state, along Lake Huron. In one week we'll enter Ontario from Marine City MI, along the St. Clair River that separates Michigan from Ontario, US from Canada. We expect to see a lot more lakeshore, the world's largest open-pit limestone mine, and a town with a German heritage that appears to be something like Leavenworth WA, except that it really IS German. But also, now, perhaps a bit hokey. We'll let you all know.

We've gotten a few Comments via this blog site from folks we've met along the way and told about our blog. Keep the comments coming! We enjoy hearing that folks are reading about our trip.

Cheers, Louise and Jeff

Le Grand Tour Begins

After a 3-week trip to Japan for Matt's wedding, we're now on the road on our tandem, bound for Ithaca NY.

We had a surprisingly unfrantic 26 hours in Seattle, given all that had to be done and was done. But Steve and Janet Sisson helped us recover from jet lag with a good sleep at their place, and we got our wedding post online and handled all the other Seattle-centric tasks that had to be done with no sense of hurry. Janet gave us a lift to Amtrak via the FedEx store, where our suitcases and backpacks from the Japan trip got sent on to Ithaca, and off we were.

Although the tandem has couplings and can be fit into two suitcases, we used the standard Amtrak method of taking two single-bike cardboard boxes telescoped together to pack our bike, with only a few parts removed to make it fit. Fortunately, we had all those removed parts where we could find them when we hit Milwaukee, so 45 minutes after we stepped off the train, we were biking the half-mile from the station to the lake shore, where we had the first of many lighthouse sightings of this trip. Having spent much of our lives on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, we never realized how many lighthouses are inland on the Great Lakes. One week into the trip and we've seen almost a dozen.

The first three days were north along the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan. We had a 25-miler through the north half of Milwaukee and into the suburbs right after getting the bike reassembled, but it was an easy urban 25 since the nice folks in city govt. had sent us a Milwaukee bike map that showed us bike trails (about half the distance) and quiet streets (almost all the rest) to Cedarburg. As we came into town a lycra-clad fellow on a ride squeezed between work and dinner showed us to the door of the Washington House Inn, a charming 120-year-old hostelry in a beautifully cared-for town that grew up around mills on the Cedar River in the 1850s. Walking through town that evening was like being transported to another, more gracious age.

Day 2 was rainy for the first half of the ride, but the Interurban Bike Trail more than compensated by providing a pleasant route through two more towns and a lot of countryside. It mostly followed an old interurban (long-distance trolley) line, and wherever the right of way could not be used, it took us with clear markings to wide, low-trafficked streets 'til we were back on the original route. Our third and final day in Wisconsin was on a road recommended on the state bicycle map, and it did not disappoint -- it was mostly level with only gentle rollers from time to time, with a decent shoulder for the 4 or 5 times an hour a car passed us. On top of this, it came out to the lake shore mid-way to Manitowoc, our destination, and gave us good views up and down the Lake Michigan shore. As we left Wisconsin on the S.S. Badger for a 4-hour ferry ride across the lake, we decided that eastern Wisconsin was both as beautiful and bike-friendly as western Wisconsin was when we toured a few hundred miles of it 5 years ago.

The ferry goes from Manitowoc WI to Ludington MI, and 1 1/2 hours from the former, all you can see from the boat is a sharp line between water and sky for 360 degrees around the boat, except for what looks like a soft pencil line above the horizon in a small area to the west. 15 minutes later and that is gone as well. In short, Lake Michigan is so wide that the curvature of the earth keeps you from seeing either shore when you are in the center, at least at the minimal height above the water, maybe 25', of our top deck. BTW, the Badger had a sign we decided to adopt, at least for our blog. Thought they might object if we took it down from the wall next to the cabins on the boat, but it expresses our thoughts poignantly.

The Michigan side of the lake, which we have now ridden for several days northward, is quite a bit different than the Wisconsin side, which is most farmland and gentle topography. Here, prevailing westerly winds have created sand dunes and a more irregular coastline, and a lot of the land is covered in forest, predominantly birch, ash, beech and scrub pine. The forest understory is usually low to the ground, so you can see quite a ways in to these forests, though no wildlife has yet come into view. Many of the roads we've found have been narrow and low-trafficked, and riding down them is sometimes like taking a hike in the woods, on wheels.

One day we stopped at a crossroads to check our map and a woman cycling by stopped to be sure we knew which way to go, then took off. By the time we got going, she was a few blocks' distance in front of us. With great effort, we caught up with her a few miles later, only to fall behind when she cranked it up over 20 mph. We saw her later in the next town, and she admitted to being named Cathy and being 57 years old. She was training for a century (100-miles in 1 day) ride, and it's clear she's going to do just fine.

We've stayed at three very nice B&Bs in Michigan so far, but one deserves special mention, Bear Lake Manor in the very small town of Bear Lake. It was built a little over a century ago for a physician and it is a beautiful building with a large, friendly living room just off the entry and a porch that wraps around two sides of the building, where we had breakfast. The night before, we walked down to Bear Lake itself, and watched the sun set on this 3-mile-wide circular lake, apparently a "kettle lake" formed by the receding glaciers. The hosts were gracious, the dinner in town was delicious, the evening relaxing, the setting beautiful. What more can you ask for?

The last four nights have been spent overnight in two locations, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and Traverse City. A friend Louise made 15 years ago, June Thaden, lives in the latter and came to the former to treat us to some great hikes in the National Lakeshore. We spent Monday exploring the sand dunes, some as much as 460 feet (46 stories, for you city-dwellers!) above Lake Michigan. With the assistance of June's car, we accessed some great trails and had fun catching up with each others' doings. June was president for 3 years in the mid-90's of the League of American Bicyclists, the largest bicycle organization in the U.S., and is a wealth of knowledge about biking, bike touring and bicycle advocacy. She's not a one-sport person, either, and is leaving Saturday for two weeks of backpacking the Appalachian Trail in central Maine. She is one active 75-year-old! As you can see, she's also a tree-hugger. Hopefully we'll stay at least partly as active as June.

June also put us up at her home in Traverse City, the heart of the cherry region. This area grows one-third of the world's cherries! We went to a store that sells only items with cherries or made with cherry wood. Cherry salsa? Got it. Cherry mustard? Got it. On our "rest day" here in Traverse City we took a 40-mile ride up the Mission peninsula, 35 miles of it along the shore of Lake Michigan and 5 miles down the center of the peninsula where cherry orchards stretched along all the roads and off into the distance.

Tomorrow we're off on a 3-day jaunt up to Mackinac (pronounced mack - in - awe) Island, where the state highway circling the island has an enviable record. It's never had an automobile accident. Because automobiles have been banned from the island since state highways were "invented." We're spending three nights there to force ourselves to have a true rest day or two, and hopefully we'll find computer access to tell you more about Mackinaw Island and the route there through the famous "Tunnel of Trees."