Driving to the UP

On Saturday (19 July) before the MUP tour started, we had to get ourselves and our bikes and our gear to the UP. That's about a 5 hour drive from Lansing. We had so much stuff that we took our van and Grandma and Grandpa's van. The drive was the easy part (although some folks had some trouble with the Mackinac Bridge). The hard part was packing and organizing the gear before we left.

I had posted a question to the LMB Shoreline Tour discussion group to see if people with experience on the Shoreline Tours could give some suggestions on how to pack. I got some answers, but it seemed that different people had different packing methods. We just put our tent, some camp chairs, and our sleeping pads in a big duffel. We put our sleeping bags and cycling clothes in two more duffels (one for the S & Q, the other for A & C). Then we had another pair of bags that held non-cycling clothes, similarly divided. That arrangement was fine, but the clothes were packed in semi-waterproof bags inside the duffels, and it was pretty hard to get out any one piece of clothing without dumping out the whole bag. An inefficiency that slowed us down a bit on the MUP travel days. To make matters even more complicated, most of the waterproof bags were the same color, so it was hard to locate the right one. All the duffels ended up on the truck each day, not on the bikes, so we didn't have to worry about carrying everything with us.

Back to the drive: it went fine. A little wind, some heavy rain, and then the big bridge. The Mackinac Bridge stretches about 5 miles from end to end, and the suspended portion ranks pretty high among the longest suspension bridges on the planet. If you need more info, try Googling it. Providing statistics on long bridges is not the purpose of this blog. Here's a picture:



You might think that this picture was not taken from the bridge. You would be correct. I took it the next day from a boat (remember that if I were doing this properly I wouldn't have the picture yet becuase tomorrow wouldn't have come when I wrote this). It's easier to take good pictures of the bridge when you're not on it.

We made it to St. Ignace, MI, where the ride began, just over the bridge, and pitched our tents in the grass outside the Little Bear Arena - that's a place where St. Ignace folks play hockey in the winter. We had dinner at a local pizza joint on a deck overlooking Lake Huron, and with a view of Mackinac Island. It was nice. The pizza had a really yummy soft crust.

Inside the Little Bear Arena was the ride registration station. Also inside, breakfasts were served the next two mornings, and there were showers available for those who were dirty.

The only really unpleasant thing that happened was a wedding reception. Our event was one of two taking place at the Arena. The other was a very loud wedding reception and party that continued until well after midnight that night. Sleeping was not possible until after the party shut down. And lying in a tent with our kids beside a parking lot full of cars that belonged to the noisy people drinking beer in the doorway to the Arena was a little disconcerting. We survived.

I didn't get any pictures of the tents or the Arena, but Abbey did:



The tent on the left is our 4-person REI tent. It's a really nice tent and it fits SCAQ just fine, but with little room for extra gear inside. There is plenty of vestibule space for stuff - you can see a little of it under the fly in the photo. The tent on the right is the Sierra Designs tent that we bought in the days when we were just SCA. Once we had Q there was not room in the tent. It seemed to work quite well for Grandma and Grandpa, and was possibly the most storm-proof tent on the tour, a trait that was valuable a few days later.

I didn't hear any complaints about either of our tents (excepting the earwigs).