Sleepy Hollow State Park

The Apple Cider Century is on our calendar for the end of September, and we have our sights set on the metric century, which will be our longest ride yet at 62 miles. With that ride still a few weeks into the future, we're trying to make sure we put away some miles every week so we can stay in decent condition. Cindy suggested that this weekend we could go back up to Midland (see the Search for the Tridge Broll) and ride the Pere Marquette trail. We thought that would be fun since the ride would be long, smooth, and free of traffic. We checked the map, remembered it was a good hour and half away, thought about the needle on the fuel gauge in the van, and decided something local would be better.

We'd previously talked about riding up to Sleepy Hollow State Park, but it had seemed too far away. We looked again, and decided that it would now be within our range. Our expected route was pretty direct, the park is almost straight north of us, and we tweaked our route around with Google Maps to estimate a distance of 19 miles each way.

We went to Sleepy Hollow last summer with our other tandems to ride the mountain bike trails. That was some of our first riding with Quinn on the back of a tandem. Here's one of my favorites of him on the back of the Rodriguez -



Abbey and Cindy were riding the Cannondale MT800 mountain tandem back then. This is a picture of that machine, although the photo was taken back in Redmond Washington in spring 2006 -



The trails at Sleepy Hollow were pretty fun. They don't see much use, and they are maintained by mowing grass trails through the forest, much like the trail my parents have along the creek by their house. The kids really enjoyed the trails because they were fast and fun. Maybe we'll do it again someday, but right now the child stoker that had been on the Rodriguez is installed on the bigger blue Burley, and the Rodriguez is hanging in the garage, stripped of nearly all it's components.

Coming back to the present, this morning the kids were off playing and yelling after wolfing down a pile of blueberry muffins Cindy and Abbey made from a muffin kit given to us by the Dillon family in return for eating vegetables from their garden while they were vacationing in coastal New England, when we decided we should take advantage of the cool temperature and light winds and ride to Sleepy Hollow SP. We're getting better at this. We decided to do the ride around ten, changed our clothes, filled our water bottles, ate a light lunch, yelled at the kids a little, and were on the bikes a little before noon.

The first few miles of the route were quite familiar to us. We followed our old weekly route to Lake Lansing, but continued north once we'd reached the northern side of the lake, which is our usual terminus. We followed Upton Road for quite a few miles, took a short mile west on Round Lake Road, and turned back to the north on Shephardsville Road until we reached the park. The roads were in good condition, and had some nice rolling hills, with a few short, steep climbs that pleased my need to feel my thighs burn. The shoulders, where there were shoulders, were small. Traffic was light, although sometimes fast, so it was a decent ride, but one best done at times when traffic is light.

We reached the park 20 miles later at 1:30 p.m. Not a bad pace, given that we made a few stops along the way to shed layers of clothes. It was 50 degrees when we left the house, so we dressed accordingly, but the temperature was climbing into the T-shirt zone. At our 12 mph average pace, we won't be winning any high profile races in the mountains in Europe, but we are just a family of four out for a Saturday stroll on our big, steel tandems.



As we rode into the park, we saw a sign advertising a campfire program at the park campground. Raptors of Michigan, 2:00 pm. Perfect timing, we thought. The campground was just a mile or so up the road, and we arrived in plenty of time for more muffins before the program began. The park naturalist showed us the feathered wings and scaly feet of a red tailed hawk. She talked about the different kinds of raptors, and food chains, and DDT, and bioaccumulation (getting pretty close to home - or work - for me there), and then, best of all, pulled out some owl pellets for us to pick through. We found little bones, and teeth, and tiny skulls. It was great! We brought the tiny animal parts home with us in a bag in our rack trunk. On the way home, we were going over some bumps and laughing because the bumpy road was rattling our bones.

We stopped along a bridge to take picture of the lake and watch a Great Blue Heron fly low across the green layer on the water. There was interesting pile of dead bones and fur on the road, that I thought at first might one have belonged to a beaver, but decided that it was more likely the flattened remains of a large wood chuck. Cindy caught us examining it from our bicycle.



Abbey, always with her own creative perspective, took a nice picture of the lake reflected in the sky.





She thought it might be hard to tell if the picture was right-side-up or up-side-down. What do you think?

From there, our return retraced our earlier route, once again with several stops to adjust clothing for temperature regulation. It was cloudy, and we felt a few drops of water on the way back, but not enough to wet us more than our own sweat had done already. We completed the ride with an average pace of slightly under 13 mph with a little over 3 hours riding time. Not a bad day. And Cottage Inn Pizza brought us some dinner right after we got home and showered.

The campground and Sleepy Hollow State Park was thickly forested with young trees, clean and well-kept, and had nice shower facilities. Not exactly right on a sandy beach like the spot up at Lake Charlevoix, and of course it was absolutely incomparable to a secluded spot along the cold and rugged coast of the Olympic Peninsula (as a tear drips down my cheek), but it did seem like it might be fun to try a bicycle camping trip here sometime. We could probably pack a night's gear in the trailer and ride up some Saturday morning for a single night of camping.

Oh, and about that tour I mentioned last post. We've been thinking about it, and we may have come up with a "supported" alternative. Check it out here. Right now the information for 2007 tour (which just ended) is still posted, and registration hasn't opened for 2008. We're thinking it looks like a great tour for us.