Days 55-57: Edwardsburg to Ann Arbor

Posted by: Arin

Waking up in the graveyard, we were both covered in mosquito bites. That day off had been good to us, but the bugs hadn't been so much. We could tell right off the bat that the sun wasn't burning down as hard as it had been the day prior. In fact, rain was in the forecast.

We hadn't left our spot the whole day before, and being in the middle of farmland we were running pretty low on food. Maybe 12-15 miles in we spotted a sign for a little lakeside community that had a diner called George's Cafe. We stopped in for some breakfast and delicious cinnamon rolls. A few miles after getting back on the road, we ran into a couple other guys on a tour from Cleveland to Lake Michigan. They had big backpacks on and we stopped to chat for a while. I think their names were Eric and Kennedy. All the while the weather crept in from behind us. Those guys were heading right into the storm. We parted ways and soon after started feeling some rain.

You know you've been touring for a while when you would rather be in the rain than the sun. However, the rain we had was sporadic and the sun kept poking out. There wasn't even a point to wearing sunscreen and I could feel my skin heating up every time the sun came out. Our main stop for the day was in Sturges, the location of the biggest Harley meetup in the country. It was funny that there was a huge bike lane through the town. By the time we got out of there, the shoulder was back to a foot wide.

As it started to get darker, the rain had let up but we still didn't want to camp where we might get rained on. We stopped at a park in Quincy to sleep under a picnic awning. It was wide out in the open but there was nothing else around and some ladies at a donut shop earlier had told us we could probably sleep there. 

What followed was my most miserable night of the trip. We didn't want to set up the tent to not arise suspicion, but there were Mosquitos galore. I tried to sleep under a tarp to protect myself but it was so hot that I was sweating like crazy. I couldn't stay under there so I kept opening it up and closing it so that I could get some air. That way I got the best of both worlds but also the worst. I woke up sweaty with mosquito bites and only maybe four hours of sleep.

We got out of there early, more for my mental health than anything else. The rain had cleared up and we were able to get some good miles in. Our goal was Ann Arbor and we were on track for it until we decided to go swim in a lake. We stopped to get a six pack and took a little detour into Walter Hayes state park. The lake was nice and we swam and chilled for a while before heading out. 

It was starting to get dark but spirits were high. We were still going to make it to Ann Arbor. 

We didn't, but it was ok. We stopped in Saline and made camp in the corner of a park by some baseball fields. We got woken up by guys rolling up to the area with lawn mowers who didn't really care we were there. We got packed up and headed to a little cafe to get pastries and coffee. It was supposed to rain but it looked like things were going to be chill. The cafe was nice and had a cool basement.

It started to drizzle as we left the cafe, and that drizzle soon turned into real rain. Fortunately we were less than ten miles from Ann Arbor. Once we got into town we went straight for a laundromat. Almost all of our clothes were dirty by then. It continued to pour outside, but we were warm and dry in the building.

While we were there I looked up the closest REI. It was three miles back, we had even passed it on the way into town. It was ok though, we rode over there and I was finally able to replace my faulty solar panel. It was still raining pretty hard so we did something we hadn't done for the whole trip: we used warm showers. After skimming through several possible hosts, we decided to call one of them. Someone named Blair answered and he said it was cool if we came over, so we rode across town to the house he lives in.

We didn't expect this, but the house ended up being a sober, vegan, activist, anarcho-punk house (that's the best way I can put it). They were planning a protest against the MRA (men's rights activists) meeting that was going to happen in Detroit soon. I could totally get behind that. We ended up hanging out with them the whole day, going to a thrift store, getting vegetarian Mexican food, and even dumpster diving at a few grocery stores before retiring to bed. It was funny that using warm showers actually yielded us one of the grimier places we've slept, but it was a fun day.