With the memory of last night’s dark and unsettling ride from the restaurant to the motel fresh in our minds (we jokingly exhorted each other to pass on our love to our respective wives should disaster befall us along the way), we awoke with an eye to reconsidering our planned ride to what we would later learn is the chart leader on the FBI’s shit parade of America’s most dangerous cities – Flint, Michigan!

Laura, Roger’s wife, had expressed some concern about us going there, and Roger had learned via TripAdvisor that our motel, which had plenty of rooms available, was in a bad neighborhood. Last night’s short ride was a salutary reminder of the limitations involved in getting around cities at night especially when all you have is a cheap lightweight cable lock that a bic lighter could burn through. So I started typing an internet inquiry “Is Flint…” and very helpfully, google provided the next word “dangerous” – which is how we got on to the FBI rankings.

So we thought about it as both of us wanted to see how Flint was faring and we already had a motel reservation there. But in a rare triumph, prudence won out over curiosity, and we rerouted to Lapeer, which would entail a detour by me to Davison so I could get a new bike tire.

Bowing to the unforgiving demands of blogging, Roger opted for a later start, and I set off on my quest. Naturally, I elected to turn this into a speed game and ended up covering the 56 miles to Davison in a little over 3 1/2 hours at an average speed of 15.9 miles per hour (and that’s for a fully laden African swallow…).

Along the way, I did take some pictures. I didn’t stop for the church sign that read “That part about ‘love thy neighbor’ – I meant that – God” which I thought was weird, pretending to quote God and all, but it was a sentiment I could get behind in a non religious way, but I was zooming along and didn’t feel like turning around.

But when I came to the next “God quote,” I did stop for a picture because it was just creepy. Could be just me though:

And then because road surfaces were uppermost in my mind and the road I was on had a shoulder that was pretty much the gold standard, I took some pictures that I present, for your possible edification, as a triptych.

The Good:

Wide, smooth shoulder separated from the road by a rumble strip. This is what I had most of the way down route 15 from outside Bay City toward Davison.

The Bad:

The “Balance Beam of Fear.” Narrow shoulder with high-speed traffic to your left and a gravel pit of woe to your right. Lots of mental focus here and a white-knuckle ride as somebody blows past you on a blind curve, oncoming traffic shows up and gravel encroaches on the shoulder. Good times; got honked at a few times. Thankfully, this was a short 10-mile ride from Davison to Lapeer, and for a bit of that the road was not so bad.

The Ugly:

Again, I know nothing about road construction and repair but what is this shit? It’s like somebody took Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic as a template (Ding Ding Ding – we have a winner for most contrived and obscure simile; thank you for playing).

The shoulder has good width, but riding on that crap sucks so it’s a cat and mouse game where you duck out onto the road for as long as you can until you see a car in the distance – and you quickly learn to get over pretty much as soon as you see one because they are on you in a flash. I encountered stretches of these conditions as I came into the final stretch toward Davison.

I got to Big Al’s Quick Release bike shop in Davison where Dakota took good care of me.

He scoured the shop looking for a 32-mm tire and pondered the pros and cons of going with a 35 or a 28, which is all they had. In the end, the 186 miles of crushed gravel that awaits me (and Rachael) at the end of the trip inclined us toward the 35, and Dakota had to grind down the head of one of the fender screws to get enough clearance.

That sentence underscores how long I’ve been out here and how my frame of reference has shifted. To me, now, it seems highly pertinent and interesting – it’s the kind of fix on the fly that one really appreciates. But I fear you, dear reader, can’t bring yourself to care and would rather see a picture of something.

So here are some Pygmy ponies we saw in Wisconsin:

Tomorrow we are off to Port Huron, famed among lefties for the eponymous SDS statement written mostly by Tom Hayden.

Several miles from today’s destination – Bay City, Mich. – I ran over something and heard a loud bang followed by a furious hissing sound. Thinking it was probably nothing, I kept up my torrid pace.

Just kidding! I pulled into a driveway and watched my rear tire deflate faster than my dreams. Off everything came (from the bike), upside down went the bike and a quick release later, I was futilely trying to inflate the inner tube to see where the problem was.

Turns out, the tire gave a pretty good indication of what had happened. I’m afraid the pictures were all a bit rushed as I was more concerned with making repairs, but here you can see how big the unwelcome intruder was:

Here’s another (blurry) view in situ:

So you can see from the fact that the pointy bit is sticking out through the tire that the nail head actually went in first and punched a nice round hole in the tire. Here is a later, better picture if that:

So I must have ridden over something that the nail was in but with the head protruding a bit so when I hit it, it went clear through the tire and got pulled out of whatever it was nailed into.

Fortunately, the wise old bike shop guy way back in Kellogg, Idaho, suggested I buy something called a tire boot – it’s basically a tough adhesive patch that goes on inside your tire to give it some emergency protection until you can get a new tire.

I’ve put almost 10 miles on it so far and intend to ride 55 miles to Flint before I can get to a bike shop that hopefully has my correct tire size in stock.

Nothing against the guy at the bike shop in Spearfish who sold me my “bombproof” Kevlar tire, but right now it’s Kellogg 1 and Spearfish 0.

The Pere Marquette trail continues for 30 miles from Clare to Midland, and since Roger opted for a later start time, I blasted down to the trail and across to Midland in less than two hours. I did slow down to give a shout out to the Unawheeler:

And then I was in Midland – where Dow Chemical emerged from the bromine:

Though I gather the HQ is no longer there, Dow still has a commanding presence in town. There’s a funny sort of park celebrating chemical equations:

and a statue of the man himself, Herbert Dow:

But all is not bromines and bromides; I took a couple of pictures of some of the chemical plants:

and got chased off by a security guard who didn’t like me nosing about. He called me to come over to him but I didn’t think he wanted to ask me how far I was riding so I exited stage left.

On the way out of town, I passed further evidence of the downturn’s grim toll. Despite the primal appeal of the concept and the clever naming, somehow this restaurant is with us no more:

as chants of “3K! 3K! 3K!” filled the air

(sigh)

If a guy rides his 3000th mile on a cross-country bike ride and there’s no one there to see it, did it really happen?

HELL YES!!!

Although the staff at the lodge graciously accommodated our request for an early breakfast (7:15), we abashedly lingered at the table waiting for the temperature to climb up into the 50s before we set out. In the end, my rain jacket proved suitable especially as it was sunnier and less breezy than yesterday.

We had good country roads for our ride down to Reed City, which was good as the bike trail was unpaved and we chose not to take it. Along the way, we stopped to take in this monument to the local reverend who penned “This Old Rugged Cross”:

I liked this old green barn:

and this bit of “found” natural art:

There was a muscle car show in Reed City:

and a very nice couple at the farmers’ market gave me a peach and an apple (noticing my hesitation before picking out a small apple from the box, the woman encouraged me to “go ahead, don’t be afraid to take a big one,” so I did! Thanks lovely farmer lady!)

And then we were out of town on the smoothest surfaced bike trail I’ve ever been on. Even Roger, who quickly gets bored on bike trails, enjoyed himself; here he is on a breakaway:

I am not amused:

There was some good scenery:

and ice cream:

a crazy homemade Amish buggy:

and a store sign that made me laugh:

The bike trail, the Pere Marquette Trail (dig deep in your dim memory of learning about who was exploring where and when in this country; no, not La Salle; the other one – got it?) was a real delight to ride on. Every so often, we came across one of these:

which, according to something Roger read, was an indicator for the train engineer to blow his whistle as the train was approaching a crossing.

The trail was full of wonderful oddities such as this:

and of course it had a picturesque bridge:

and even a couple tunnel-like features:

All-in-all, it was a great 64-mile ride (that’s for you Jeanne!); tomorrow we are off to Bay City.