Three states later, and the first one to GR!

Last week, in 5 days of riding I travelled through 4 different states. Monday started in Wisconsin and ended in Illinois. Tuesday (which ended up being one of my longest riding days ever!) we arrived at Trinity Christian College outside of Chicago. Wednesday we stayed at Indiana Dunes State park in the northwest corner of Indiana. Thursday we entered Michigan, and on Friday a few of us pulled a double and found our way to Grand Rapids a day early.

Here's a little recap of this weeks highlights:

Monday was the infamous ride with my mom, see previous post.

Tuesday was my sweep day and we were on a bike path for about 35 miles. However, several riders (yours truly included) took a wrong turn at a fork in the road. We successfully navigated our way back to the route and stumbled upon the usual suspect, everyone's favourite 'long day rider', Gayle Harrison. When we got to the next SAG we took a good half hour nap to give her time to get ahead. Unfortunately, that was the last we saw of her... she made it in safely, but our crew had a few problem flats that kept us out until 7:40pm. This was too bad too because I was supposed to meet my parents at Trinity that afternoon... although as this was the place where those two lovebirds first met i'm sure they were lost in the memories and didn't even notice my absence(jk)! So mom said her final good-byes to everyone she had met on the tour and my parents were off to return home to the real world. That night I enjoyed a few local brews at Aaron's parents' place - I highly suggest the Goose Island 312 if you can find it!

Wednesday was a very eventful and enjoyable day. We were well fed by one of the local churches along the route, after which I joined up with the usual suspects: Hans, Nick, Julie, Carrie (who returned to the tour for this week), as well as Stephanie. We were laughing and carrying on as usual, and enjoying a beautiful bike path which lead us away from the urban mess which some might more affectionately refer to as Chicago. At one point on the path Nick was pulling three of us... literally pulling, yes! Carrie grabbed on to Nick's safety vest, I grabbed on to hers, Hans grabbed mine... then Julie tried to grab on to Hans and things went wrong. Hans went down and landed square on his rear end, and i'm still not quite sure how I didn't go down with him. Steph was behind us the whole time recording this scene with her camera, i'll try to get the clip soon. Somehow my rear wheel went out of true in this incident, but it wasn't too bad and I was able to get it fixed in Holland on the way to GR.

Thursday we entered Michigan and I stopped to visit Lesa, who is back from her Peace Corps assignment in Guatamala, as well as her family at Ben and Mindy's house in the St. Joseph area - the route came within three blocks of their house, so it was easy to find. I showed up earlier than expected - around noon - and I surprised Mindy who was cleaning the house in preparation for the family's arrival. In typical fashion, I figured Lesa (aka Mota) would have let them know I was meeting them there, and Mota figured I would have called ahead of time, but everything worked out fine and the rest of the crew showed up an hour later. It was good to see them all again, albeit a brief visit.

On Friday, Kevin, Kyle and I decided to skip the night in Grand Haven and head straight to Grand Rapids. After a quick pitstop in Holland we carried on to GR and arrived much faster than we anticipated even though we were biking straight into a headwind. With extra time to kill I found my way back to the ole butter factory to surprise some of my former co-workers. It's been two years since I worked at Butterball Farms, and not much has changed since then - I did found out that my position is once again vacant... But as much as I would love to work with that crew again, I just couldn't move back to that city.

We stayed at kevin's old house in east town, and we completed the typical GR experience by going to Yesterdogs for some late night hearty grub. It was great to wake up Saturday and know that I didn't have to get on my bike, other than a short 10min jant to the alma mater, Calvin College, to meet up with the tour again.