More snaps from the '97 bike ride

Here we are, master mechanic Steven Couture, and his assistant, Igor


A day later, we're ready to roll

What is the price of gas? $1.29?

This is the Cedar River, in the Upper Penninsula

Notice how I have the weight equally distributed! The truth is that the frame on this Fuji broke a couple of years later.

Here I am, posing with smoked fish

Lake Michigan in the background

Hmmm

I wanted to take a picture of myself before shaving off the goatee.



Why did I grow it in the first place? I guess I wanted to look cool, like Spike Lee, or Evil Spock (a near anagram, hmmm):



The thing of it is that it's a hassle to trim, and I find myself stroking it constantly, and then little whiskers find their way into my mouth.

So, off with it. No more distinguished professor look, back to my normal clean-cut good looks.

Monday Night at Guadalupe Cafe (11-12-07)

No comment this evening, just a few images from last night's proceedings. If, by chance, you want to hear me go on about these musicians, go to the side bar, click mcouture, and scroll down.

Tyler, swinging:



Wells, holding the bottom down:



The young cats showed up, to sit in:



Jamming:

1997 Lake Michigan Bike Trip (2)

I talked with Steve, and he updated me on some of the facts of the ride. I can recall now that we camped just short of Cedar River (no, not the one in Mancelona) and the next day we rode, quite hard, to Palms Book State Park, just West of Manistique. Here is found Michigan's largest spring, called Kitchitikipi ("Mirror of Heaven") by the Indians. The big spring is a pond, 200 feet across and 40 feet deep into which 10,000 gallons of water a minute gush from fissures in the underlying limestone, keeping the pond a constant 45 degrees, all year long, according to the park's website.

They have stocked the pond with trout, as you can see from the glass-bottomed raft:




The next day we rode almost all the way to the Mackinaw Bridge, to Pig Island camp ground, where we met a couple of Steven's friends, Lisa and Mohammed. We had a nice cookout, had a swim in Lake Michigan, and crashed ... I got onto the Google Maps website and traced our route along the the Lake Michigan shoreline on satellite photos, from the Wisconsin state line almost all the way to the Mackinaw Bridge.

This picture is from that day. You can vaguely see the Mackinaw Bridge in the background. Even though Lake Huron and Lake Michigan are theoretically one body of water, the bridge marks where one lake hypothetically ends and the other begins.



The second-to-the-last day, we rode from there all the way down to Petosky. You can't ride your bicycle across the Mackinaw Bridge, but there is an office, and if you stop in, they'll take you across in a pickup.

Steven has county maps for all of Michigan, and I recall that the ride that day was very pleasant, no main roads, a dip now and again in Lake Michigan.

On the last day of our trip we made it back to Mancelona. Exhausted, but happy with that feeling of having pulled off the adventure.