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Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Tail wind and warm.
- Start: Gwinn, MI
- ATW: Rumuly, Eben Junction, Chatham, Forest Lake, Munising, Wetmore, Shingleton, Seney, Germfask
- End: McMillan, MI
- Day Miles: 96 Ride Time: 7hr 30min Total Trip Miles:
We left sometime after 9am from Gwinn area and headed for Munising along Rt 94. A few miles from Chatham as we were racing down a hill Dave yelled out something to the effect of "AHHHahhAHH! OH no!" According to Dave we amazingly rode unscathed through a "pile" of nails. We doubled back to pick them up so as to prevent some other cyclist from having trouble and found, not a pile, but what was the result of a box of nails falling off of a vehicle going at a high speed. Strewn 50 feet down the east bound lane and berm was a pound of nails.
We collected them all, prying some from the soft tar patches in the road then tried to figure out what to do with a pound of nails. Toss them at the base of a tree? They were still good. Leave them by someones mailbox? Most of the houses we passed were abandoned. We'd just hang on to them and see if we could give them away.
We had scheduled a warmshowers stop in McMillan for Thursday. We were just under 100 miles away and through it'd take us a couple days to get there, but like all things scheduled on this trip something gets changed. We made it half way in a few hours and decided to ride on chewing off some of tomorrow's trip. In Shingleton we were 43 miles from our destination. We'd been pulling down 18 miles per hour over actually flat lad and with a tail wind. Could we make it all the way to the next house tonight?
Dave made a call and getting the green light we set off down the "Seney Stretch," 25 miles of perfectly straight and almost completely flat terrain. As we all know by now, nowhere a loaded tandem recumbent rides is completely flat. A .01% incline is felt of course it could have been fatigue from booking it for several hours but we still think there was an incline.
In the middle of the stretch we hailed a touring cyclist passing the opposite way. He pulled around and we talked on the side of the road to Justin a young Canadian heading across the continent in search of work on the west side of Canada. He had been cussing the wind we'd been cheering. We commiserated having dealt with our fair share of head winds on our trip. 15 minutes later we wished him luck and kicked back up into high gear making it to our host's home in under three hours of riding (just over three with stops).
We crashed a cook-out down by the shore of Big Manistique Lake that our hosts lived on. They had family and friends there but we were welcomed in just the same no matter how smelly we were. Later that night we heard again about the famous Paul and Jeff team. A week back they'd stopped in for a night and we heard more about their trip. Tired and a little sore we showered then headed for sleep at a late hour. What would tomorrow bring?
