63 miles ridden – 1450 feet climbed

Weather forecasts are absolute pants. Despite the thunderstorms during the night the forecast for today was clouds clearing by around 9am and then a sunny day with westerly (tail) winds. 

As we left the sky did appear to be clearing but just 5 miles in as we stopped to see the historic lighthouse on Lake Winnebago we heard thunder and the sky darkened. The lighthouse did look interesting but we lost any desire to spend time looking around for anything other than shelter.

I’m sure you have guessed by now that we were heading straight into the dark clouds ahead ( well around the south end of the lake first). As it turned out we didn’t really get rained on but the result of the heavily laden clouds not emptying by way of rain was that we cycled for about 25 miles through a fine mist that thoroughly soaked us (as if we weren’t sweaty anyway!) and the brisk southerly crosswind didn’t help either. 

It did start to brighten up and at one point I even put my sunglasses on but as we neared Lake Michigan the temperature dropped a bit and the mist got worse. Here is my first view of Lake Michigan:

It is approximately 307 miles long and 118 miles wide and is somewhere at the end of the grass……..

One highlight was when we saw a Bald Eagle:

The other highlight was at 52.4 miles when we reached Lake Michigan and turned north enjoying 10 miles of strong tailwind and about 5 miles of newly resurfaced road but by then we were so wet the joy was diluted. We were pretty much all at the hotel by 1:30 and of course then the sun came out and the clouds disappeared. Great, but we did see the eagle.

Tomorrow we take the ferry across Lake Michigan to Ludington in the state of Michigan itself. That meant this afternoon we had to compress our rest day activities -laundry, bike cleaning, eating, and re-packing – into about 4 hours. It was a frenzy but I did have the excitement of changing my front tyre which had some splits and glass fragments in it.

It is a shame about the last couple of days’ weather as we all agree it tends to make us just want to grind through the miles and get dry. We worry we are missing potential memories from this once-in-a-lifetime trip until we look at pictures like those above and realise that we couldn’t see anything anyway.

The forecast looks much better over the next week as we head due west through Michigan and then, crossing from the US into Canada, passing through Ontario to re-enter the US at Niagara Falls.