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First of two blogs for Tuesday and Wednesday:
Looooonnnnnggggg day. 610 kms. Started at 8:05 am from Grand Rapids, MN and ended in Escanaba MI at 7:30 pm. One more hour change. Rode through Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The Route 2 ride from Rapids to Duluth, MN was definitely flat and winding, blessed with bumps along the way, but any view was obscured due to the road being flanked by bare birch trees still dormant in a bed of snow. Saw a red fox running through the snow, so pretty. We each stopped to take photos of each other on the bikes riding alongside the snowy banks.
Route 2 turns right, abruptly, at Duluth where you are confronted, with no warning, with grey large-scale industry, smoke stacks, traffic-jammed concrete jungles and bridges. We passed through Duluth quickly as a result, stopping the other side only for a short coffee break.
Reached Ashland, Wisconsin and the first of the Lakes today, Lake Superior, and we could feel it approaching 5 miles out as the temperature started to drop. Ian plugged back in, I stayed plugged in and turned the heat up a notch. Much to our surprise, it was
completely frozen, even under warm blue skies and it truly felt like we had just ridden into an icerink. It was that cold. The rest of the ride through Wisconsin to Michigan was short and forgetful (sorry), I am writing this the next day and it's so difficult to remember where we were the day before. Stopped at WalMart to grab more salad for lunch, then didn't get a chance to enjoy it because there were no rest stops on this stretch of the route, just placards placed precisely every 2 miles notifying you which family or local business had adopted that section of the route. Please someone, build a rest stop!
It got very hot in the afternoon, enough so for me to finally unplug my vest and grips. We decided to push on to a small town called Escanaba on the shores of Lake Michigan, which turned out to be disastrous. No hotels/motels on the water, other than an old whitewashed mansion missing most of its whitewash and resembling Psycho's house on the hill. We booked into the Best Western, absolutely exhausted and beaten up. Ian had the salad for dinner in bed - I missed that
because apparently I had already fallen fast asleep. 12 hours later ...... a new day had arrived. Over to Ian now to write a few words:
Ok my turn. Please read slower as I can't type that fast. I mentioned earlier in my other entry to this blog that this was a learning experience. Do you want to know what we have learned? Too bad I am going to tell you anyway.
We have learned that riding a motorcycle for thousands of kilometres is extremely demanding, physically and mentally. Its physically demanding because of the time sitting on the bike. Try to imagine sitting on a hard chair in a theatre for 10 hours a day. Now don't move your legs. Now make the chair bounce up and down continuously. Now take the back rest away. Now put your hands on the seat in front and don't let go. Now that you are completely uncomfortable you can get up to go for a break every hour, but you have to be back in your chair in 15 minutes. Now every time you take a break you must add those15 minutes on to your day.
Its mentally challenging
in the sense that there is no down time. Unlike a road trip in a car, we can't take turns doing the driving. As long as we are moving we both have to be 100% engaged in what we are doing. So when we travel 500 kilometres in a day we have both earned the whole 500.
I am sure that there are some of you reading our blog each day and are thinking "they sure did not travel very far today!" I don't care what you think. Sorry , yes I do. We have learned that it is so hard to travel as far as we would like each day, or to even come close to the daily mileage that is possible by automobile. Here are some of my excuses for this.
There is no way to multi task while riding a motorcycle. If you are riding you can't do anything else. Really,nothing. If you are doing anything else, you can't ride a motorcycle. Really anything else. Here are some of the things we did not take into account.
In a car if you want to have a cup of coffee, just pull up to a
drive through window grab a coffee and a snack and your on your way in 5 minutes. On the bikes there is a good chance we would take five minutes to get inside the restaurant. Park the bikes where we can see them, take off our helmets, scratch our heads. Then we have to take the gps off the bikes, take the tank bags off and maybe take out the ipad. Once we go in and order a coffee, we need to stay and drink it rather than take it with us. We take the ipad in so that we can plan our travel for the upcoming miles. Then its back to the bikes and repeat the process, except we don't scratch our heads again. We need to repeat this process every hour or sooner. There is no way for one of us to navigate while the other drives if there is any confusion in our route we have to pull over. Somewhere! One of us can,t rest while the other drives. If one of us needs a break, we both have to break.
Hotels!!! A whole new set of problems. Once we arrive at our destinations we are
generally so tired its difficult to take the time to find appropriate hotels. Wrong location, poor quality, too expensive for what is offered. But you may ask "why did you not just book it on line?" I am going to get to that. Its because we just don't know where we are going to end up until we get there. When we do choose a hotel, then we have to unpack the bikes. Thats 3 trips to the room at the far end of the corridor. Then repeat this process in the morning. Oh yeah, and if you miss something in the room there is no back seat to throw it in. Open the luggage and repack. So there you go. Everything takes longer. Even typing this log takes me longer than if I was in a car. So its it and thats that.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
I was thinking you rode too far each day
I wish you had more time to explore and enjoy the small towns you are driving through. Still enjoying your adventure.