Daily Summary

The Ride

Today was an awesome 87 miler. The weather was great all day. We started the first 30 or so miles on nice and mostly deserted roads. Then, we spent close to 50 miles on trails of all kinds. I included pictures of several as well as a nice river view. We passed through several small towns while on the trails.

Some of the trails here are very long. You can see a picture of mile marker 118 of the one trail. We started a number of miles before this and I have no idea how high it goes as we were counting down.

One big trail is the Fred Meijer trail. It is named for the founder of Meijer stores. For those who don’t know, Meijer is a large format store like Wal-Mart and Target. However, Meijer up in Michigan actually invented that concept and the others followed them. That’s a little retail history from back in my consulting days. I visited Meijer HQ a number of times over the years and often stayed in the same Hampton Inn we staying in last night!

You can also see a nice park pavilion with bathrooms and seating right off the trail. If you zoom in, you can see the guys having lunch in the shade.

Happy July 4th!!

I wore my flag-themed outfit from the Spin For Special Ops event in Atlanta. You can see in the picture that I was clearly giving a mad drip maxxing aura today! 

I did a video call with each of my wife and both kids while riding on the trail since nobody else was around. It wouldn’t be safe to do that in 99% of scenarios, so I gave it a go. It was fun talking to them each while riding. We did keep the video calls short though.

And Then There Were 5 …

Well, we had another rider drop out today. He was the oldest rider remaining and had been struggling with some old injuries, general fatigue, and navigating the routes. We were all sorry to see him go, but we also agree that it was the right and safe thing to do. We have been worried for a while now that he was going to really hurt himself or cause an accident.

The Hotel And Food

We are in a local motel today. The really odd thing is that it is a 2 story place and you can see in the picture that it is configured very oddly and like nothing I’ve seen before.

On the right side is what clearly used to be the outside facing doors. They added a layer of glass in front of the existing building to make it so that you had to come through a single door with a room key to get to the “hall”. I guess this was much cheaper than a bigger remodel.

No big news on food. Just pretty standard stuff all day.