Day 62 – Aug. 13, 2015 – Frankenmuth MI to Imlay MI – 67.5miles

Day 62 – Aug. 13, 2015 – Frankenmuth MI to Imlay MI – 67.5 miles

It is 9pm. I am tired. It is pretty hard to find some words after a hard days ride. I suppose it is the story about each day that I have to find. But honestly, it’s hard to keep it up. I guess a few people may be reading this. I know a few close bicycling friends from California and my Mom and Dad, that’s enough for me.

Michigan on the long lonely country roads. The Adventure cycling tours try to bring you out on pretty good riding roads away from the big cities. For the most part that it good. The quiet and the countryside is worth it. But sometimes they take you way out of the way, to locations without accommodations or campsites that are far off the route. That is what we experienced today.

We left Frankenmuth, or as Gregg said “escaped” it, in pretty good time this morning. We did not want to eat in the disney land like hotel, so we stopped at a coffee shop for a bagel breakfast sandwich and coffee. Enough of Frankenmuth. Though leaving town I looked around and saw how much pride they took in it. The street were lined with flowers and some of the buildings actually did remind me of Germany. But the over priced chicken dinner had a lingering bad taste in out mouths and we wanted to skip town as soon as possible.

The ACA maps are sometimes difficult to read. We got a few miles in and went the wrong way for about 2 miles. Once back we made are way to a nice bike trail where we chilled with some iPod tunes. We got about 45 miles into it to a town called North Branch and decided to get a cold one at the local pub. We looked at the maps and saw that Yale, our original destination, was another 30 miles away. There was a hotel there that I called. $50 rooms with no toilet or shower. Communal showers and toilet down the hall. Nope couldn’t do that, especially after our LeRoy experience. The next campsite was a KOA about 45 miles away on the ACA route. It was 85 degrees with about 90% humidity. Nope could not do that. We located a town down near the Interstate about 15-20 miles away. Perfect. They had the usual motels along the highway. We booked a motel room and the bartender said you must go to this GastroPub called Mulefoot. It was a “farm to table” place run by two brothers who moved back here to take advantage of the fresh farm products. I had seen it listed when looking for a motel. Strange, a Gastro Pub in Imlay MI?

Well we made are way down following the Google maps route. It said that about 5 miles down we would hit the “Polly Ann Bike trail”. When we got to the advised turn off, the road did not exist. We road a 1/4 mile down to the next road and turned in direction of the “trail”. I kept looking at my Google Maps to keep us on track. Well, we hit this bad dirt road, kept pedaling for a while hoping to intersect the bike trail but we saw nothing. I do the Google maps thing without the route details to save power. Well, I turned her on, she said turn around, for the second time today. When we got to her “turn left on the Polly Ann La Peer bike trial” we stopped. It was a gated dirt, of maybe grass trail that was not a trail at all. It looked like perhaps in the winter it may be open for snow mobiles, but nothing going for bike at all.

So we made it back to the main road and kept going. No shoulder, trucks, fast moving cars, my version of Hell. One thing that I would like to remark about right now, people in red pick up trucks are the worst yahoo obnoxious drivers of them all. Consistently it is the red pick ups that drive close to us, or downshift and speed up right next to us to spew their diesel in our faces. Yes, that happens. Many people do not want to share the road. Just shy of killing us, they express their annoyance by showing us how “powerful” they are. It jostles me but I would never get angry, that is probably exactly what they want to see from us.

After another 10 miles or so we made it into town. The restaurant was on the way to our motel. We stopped and heard that we could not have a table for another 1 1/2 hrs. What? Where are we? We found out that sitting at the bar would be fine. We had great drinks, with local beers and even a local “Two James” gin. I had smoked trout wrapped in a smoked pepper with feta. Great had pork belly, and a chilled squash soup. For main course I had the smoked pheasant and Gregg the smoke Kielbasa and dumplings. It was superb. We found out that 90% of the customers were from Detroit (50 miles away). It got a bike write up in the Detroit newspaper and the people keep coming. It was worth it. Let us hope this detour was worth it too and that Detroit will not be to difficult to approach from this angle. I am very anxious about this. The big cities scar me on a bike.