Written by Dave

Day 62 – July 29 – 57 Miles, 400 feet climbing (Evart to Midland)

We had some rain overnight in camp in Evart but so little that it barely woke me up. Had Nancy not nudged me and told me to close the rain fly, I think I would have missed the entire thing. We had the fly open because it never really cooled off much below 70 degrees overnight. I slept outside the sleeping bag until about 3AM when I started to get a little chilly. I have no idea what time it rained (yes, I closed the fly but no, I did not stay awake long enough to look at my watch). We set an alarm for 6AM – knowing that 3 days ago we were in the Central time zone where it was 5AM and barely light. We managed to be riding from camp at 8AM.

About 30 feet from our campsite, we hopped on the Pere Marquette Bicycle Trail. We spent most of the next 50 miles away from traffic riding the trail. The surface was paved and mostly in good nick. There were a few spots where roots were coming through and a few small stretches with frost heave cracks. But it would be unfair to complain. It’s so easy to get used to not having cars passing all day. Though you need to really switch your mind back on when moving back out to open roads – after trail riding, even minimal traffic feels overly frenetic. When we hopped off the trail to reach our hotel in the afternoon, the traffic seemed crazy.

Other than photos we didn’t really take our first break today until 27 miles and the town of Clare. In Clare we happened upon a fun bakery called Cops & Doughnuts. C&D first opened in 2009 when nine officers in the police department of Clare purchased the Clare City Bakery, which was about to go out of business due to the GFC. The bakery had been open since 1896 and the 9 members of the Clare police force hated to see another business in town close. Since 2009 they’ve developed a pretty good business with a couple more retail locations and distributing their doughnuts in a few other retail outlets. We enjoyed way too much sugar and some ordinary coffee.

Cops & Doughnuts is credited for helping revitalize the Clare downtown. Most of the shops around the bakery are open and busy. There were a good number of people stopping to purchase boxes of doughnuts. Out behind the bakery, they have created a back alley art scene with some interesting installations, including a lovely license plate retaining wall. After passing through a good number of small towns with closed shops, it’s nice to see the cops of Clare making a difference there.

We hopped back on the trail after Cops & Doughnuts and surprisingly none of us had a sugar crash – phew. About halfway to Midland, we came upon the town of Sanford where they have set-up a solar system model on a long straight section of the bike path. To model the solar system, they use spheres of 600 million to 1 scale. They have also scaled the distance between objects at the same 600 million to 1 ratio. The sun is a 4 foot sphere; the earth is less than an inch. It’s kind of weird riding the path away from the sun as you very quickly pass Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Reaching Jupiter and beyond seems to take forever. Just riding you almost forget about the model, your mind drifts, then you reach another distant planet. You get a real sense for how vast the solar system is and how much completely empty space is out there. On the path, its 5.6 miles from the Sun to Pluto – in reality, it’s 5.6 times 600 million miles to be exact. Walking the model would be even odder as for sure at a walking pace, you’d forget there even was a model, and then you’d reach another planet and remember…

In order to reach our hotel, we had to leave the trail a little before it ended in Midland. This worked out fine as they have actually closed that last section to work on fixing the frost heave cracks that I mentioned earlier.  Our hotel is out by a busy highway and a bunch of big box stores. It would have been more fun staying in old-town but it seems all of the hotels are now out the freeway interchanges. We saw our proposed campground coming into town about 8 miles back – it was basically a mobile home park and I’m not even sure if they offer tent camping. Midland is kind of bigger town with close to 50,000 people living here.

Tomorrow, speaking of town sizes, we’re off to Otter Lake where we will camp right in town. They have one restaurant and maybe a servo for emergency supplies. We definitely enjoy being in the small towns more, even if the food options are somewhat limited.

PS: 80% Man reports being more than 90% Man today – life is good.