10 miles ridden.

Nice day today with only token cycling. The centrepiece of our day was the crossing from Manitowoc, Wisconsin to Ludington, Michigan on the SS Badger. Built in 1952 this ship is the last coal-fired steam ship built in America and is certainly more quaint than the channel ferries. Bit hotter and stickier too as there is no air conditioning on it.

We had time to kill in Manitowoc so a group of visited the Wisconsin Maritime Museum and went on their main attraction, the World War 2 submarine USS Cobia which was pretty interesting. It was actually really nice to engage intellectually with something that had nothing to do with cycling. As you can see the weather was glorious with temperature and humidity down and NO rain.

Lake Michigan is huge. The crossing was about 4 hours and during it we crossed from Central to Eastern time – 5 hours behind London. If you look on a map, geographically Michigan really should be on Central time but apparently Henry Ford wanted Detroit on the same time as the New York Stock Exchange. Oh the power!

Time seemed to pass quickly with lots of little groups chatting, people sleeping, and others sitting on, or walking around the upper decks. Ludington looked really different and we mused on why this was as we cycled to the hotel until someone pointed out that it was later in the day than we had cycled before and the sun was low behind us which seemed a decent explanation. I will find out in the morning.

Anyway the first thing we saw once we got off the ferry was the welcome to Michigan sign.

In this picture – left to right – are CD, Peter, Paul, and Mark.

Tomorrow we travel to Mount Pleasant which is 112 miles away and is our last century ride this trip. No one is crying over that.