For now, let us back up just a few days to the weekend of 23 April:
Saturday morning, smearing mud on fresh drywall in the basement kept us busy. I do enjoy building walls, and the improvements to our laundry area will, I hope, be one more step towards getting us out this place. And, if we never do, it will at least make spending our lives here a little more tolerable.
Being a holiday weekend there were no soccer games, lacrosse tournaments, or bicycling events on the calendar, so we got to make our own fun. Cindy had the weekend off because we'd planned to go camping to make up for the weather-related cancellation of our spring break camping trip, but since the rain was still coming down like the tears of a half-giant who'd lost his baby dragon, we'd once again cancelled the camping, this time replacing it with a couple of shorter bicycling trips.
We had previeously noticed a rail trail passing through the small towns of Stockbridge and Gregory. We learned that it was the Lakelands Trail, one of Michigan's linear state parks, comprising about 13 miles of rail trail, surfaced with crushed-rock, and open to most types of non-motorized recreation. With our skinny-tired blue Burleys, we've avoided significant amounts of non-paved surface, but now that we have the two fat-tire tandems rolling, all of these soft surfaced trails are open to us.
It was a chilly and very windy Saturday, but the Lakelands Trail was quite nicely sheltered in most places by trees and hills or berms. We started at its western terminus, and rode eastward. The trail passed through a few suburban housing areas, but mostly through farmland, patches of fragmented second growth forest, and noisy wetlands. The frogs, spring peepers, I think, probably among others, were singing at their best, and it sounded just like the final track on Neko Cases's "Middle Cyclone."
The setting was quite nice, as I said, but the trail surface was not quite nice for bicycling. All sections of the trail were covered in a finely crushed rock, much of which had a particle size similar to course sand intermixed with some fine sand. In some sections, this material was compacted sufficiently to make a smooth and firm surface for our tires to roll across, although we had to pick a path through the horse prints.
In most sections of the trail, however, the surface was substantially churned by horse prints, and we could not find a firm enough or smooth enough surface for comfortable bicycling. Even with the big-hoop 29ers and suspension fork on the Fandango tandem, the constant pounding from riding on the rough surface fatigued my arms (and butt), and the skin on my arms began to itch from the constant vibration. It was probably even worse for the girls on the Cannondale tandem with its rigid fork.
When we set out, we thought we would cover the 13 miles of trail out and back pretty easily since it was a flat rail trail. We did not. We rode for at least and hour and a half, but did not complete 13 miles before we decided to turn back. The trail surface had continued to deteriorate as we rode eastward, and it soon began to feel like we were trying to cycle on a rough, dry, sandy beach: progress was very slow and difficult. We passed four horses on the trail, and I would have to say those big feet and long legs were better suited to the trail surface than were our wheels. This condition, of course, was the result of those feet.
It was a good day for seeing wildlife. Many waterfowl, shorebirds, and red-winged blackbirds were out in the marshes; we looked for the frogs we could hear, but they were hard to find. Not surprisingly, we saw a heard of at least 15 deer. We saw a wood chuck a couple of times as we passed his home, and we saw this water snake lounging in the sun on his island of grass.
We stopped to take some photos of this strange creature. At first we worried it might be dangerous, and Cindy and Abbey kept their distance while I took some photos, but after observing it for a while, we concluded it was in fact mostly harmless.
After returning to the car and loading up the bikes, we took the shortest route to the ice cream shop, where we stopped for a round of milkshakes for the drive home.
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