Day 25- July 16

Day 25: July 16th 34,772 miles on my odometer

We awaken to the sound of rain outside the hotel. In an attempt to save time, I left my luggage strapped to the bike. Fortunately, even with a hole in the bottom of one saddlebag and with no raincovers at all, my Chase Harper gear is keeping all the water out. Ceci’s River Road saddlebags are still letting the water in, but we’re not keeping anything in there that can’t get wet.
We eat the continental breakfast at the hotel and hit the road. Pretty early by our usual standards. The roads continue to be rough until we get out of Minnesota. Things get a little better when we get to Wisconsin.
We stop for a while at a really good visitor center in Ashland. You can just barely see Lake Superior from here. We spend about an hour looking through the exhibits and gift shop. We then head off to get closer to the lake, and waste another hour in futile efforts. Finally we find a small city park with a beach. We stop for a bit but find no beach glass. I do take about a teaspoon of beach as a souvenir. My mother has a collection of sands from beaches I’ve been to all over the country.
We are now on Hwy 2, which we will stay on until we get to the Mackinac bridge. Makes navigation easy, and the miles start to pile up. It’s not the most scenic route, but it’s OK and we end up going further today than we have on any other day so far. At one point I very nearly kill another bird. It must be the stupidest pigeon ever. It’s just walking around aimlessly in the middle of the highway. I make my best guess and take a line that just barely misses him. My turbulence sends him rolling along though. Ceci passes harmlessly by while he tries to get his bearings, but the car behind us clobbers him anyway.
It was wet when we started in Minnesota today, but it didn’t rain too much. We pretty much stayed dry. It was dry all day in Wisconsin and Michigan, and best of all the temperature was fairly cool. A much more comfortable ride than we’ve been having. I won’t say I quit complaining about my sore butt and numb hands, but the quantity of the complaints was much lower. Notably though, Ceci has started to mention that her butt is beginning to get a bit saddle sore. 6,000 miles in the stock saddle before she starts to notice any discomfort is pretty good I think. Now we can both powder our butts in the mornings.
As the sun starts to go down we find few places to stop and eat or sleep. I pass a couple of hotels that don’t particularly appeal to me. We eat hot dogs for dinner at a gas station. Finally we stop at a county campground outside Escanabra, Michigan. Ceci sets up camp in the dark and is not too pleased. She’s pretty ticked at me for not stopping earlier at a hotel.
We cover 399 miles today by my odometer. Pretty good for us, but might be a bit too far considering how sore (in more than one way) my wife is.