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August 29 Monday Bicycle touring from Asheville Wisconsin to Ironwood Michigan to Wakefield Michigan There is only a short stretch of road, maybe a couple of blocks long, that is without a shoulder and then a nice three-foot-wide shoulder with smooth pavement begins. How we didn't see it last night is beyond me. My legs feel especially sluggish this morning and my bike appears to have put on weight during the night. We are going uphill and go from 600 feet at Lake Superior to 1100 feet at Ironwood in Michigan. The morning was especially cold for bicycle touring. I wore my long-fingered storm shelter gloves for the first time. The sun was peeking out as we hit a welcome centre. We got a map of Michigan from the not-too-welcoming attendant. The sun felt good on our backs as we ate and rested at a picnic table. I felt like having a siesta, but somehow coaxed myself into patching three bike tubes instead. They appeared to be holding air when I pumped them up to check. Clouds blew in and just as we got on our bicycles to leave, sprinkles began to fall. We found a grocery store with an overhang and pulled our bikes under there, were we stayed for an hour and a half waiting for the rain to blow over. While we were waiting, we bought groceries and wrote postcards. There seems to be lots of elderly and disabled people who buy their groceries in the afternoon. I saw a delivery truck for Tombstone Pizza. We decided their motto should be: "Pizza to die for." Ah, we are constantly amusing ourselves. We pedal out of town. When we spot a sign for a Superior Circle Tour, we hang a left. The road is smooth and the traffic is light. Almost too light. Sharon says it reminds her of cycling the backroads of Washington State. All it needs is a crystal clear brook running alongside and it would complete the illusion of cycling in Washington. There are not too many clean streams here. We are enjoying ourselves as we cruise along, mostly downhill. Feeling something is amiss, Sharon wants to stop and check the map, but I casually announce, "Who cares if we're cycling west?" It turns out that we are on a loop road -- back to where we started this morning. We have to backtrack about twenty kilometres, but I do capture two nice pictures of our inadvertent cycling detour. One is a heavily treed lane that is just beginning to turn colour, and the other is a reflection of dead trees in a small still waterway with reed grass growing alongside. We finally cycle back into Ironwood at 6:30 PM. This is wood as strong as iron? There is a lot of iron and copper around. The A&W has hamburgers: two for a buck. So we pull our bicycles in and eat four each. We pedal out of town -- on the correct road this time. We bicycle all the way to Wakefield without stopping and arrive just as it is starting to get dark. We follow a sign to the municipal campground and set up on a hillside overlooking a pleasant little lake. The only problem is: our spot is sandy and it begins to start raining, splattering sand up onto the tent walls. The showers cost ten cents. Nothing that a touring cyclist likes better than cheap showers. |
