Day 38 - Rest day in Ashland, WI

We are at that point in the trip where it’s hard to fathom that we’ve come this far, and yet we have so much further to go, but when we look at the calendar the days seem to be ticking by so fast. We only have two more rest days left before the end of the trip, which means three more ride weeks (not calendar weeks). When we switched the route because of Canada being closed, we cut out a rest day, so we are biking 53 days and resting 7 days for the total 60 days. While we look to the finish line as our goal, we only focus on the next day’s ride and try not to get too far ahead of ourselves. It’s important to take one day at a time, because as we know “each day has enough to worry about (Matthew 6:34).”

Today was a free day off of the bikes. One boy flew out this morning to attend a family function, but will rejoin us in Cleveland. The rest of the crew we gave the option of coming on a hike or staying at the hotel. Two chose the hike, three chose to wash their bikes, one visited with grandparents, and one chose to get some extra sleep. Those of us on the hike enjoyed a good leg stretch and the opportunity to be amongst the trees. Also, it’s important to show off the tan lines you’ve worked over a month to create. The hikers departed at 10am to head south to the second highest waterfall in Wisconsin (80ft). Since we couldn’t visit Niagara Falls as originally planned, this was the next best thing. Besides if you closed one eye turned your head slightly and imagined the sound of 1,000s of gallons of water dumping over a ledge, then this was just like being at Niagara Falls if it ever got slightly dammed up. So basically it wasn’t even close to Niagara, but we can pretend. The one good thing about this waterfall is you could climb up next to it on the rocks, can’t do that at Niagara! Note if you ask one of the boys to take your picture, specify what you want to see in the picture. Otherwise you will get a series of you climbing the waterfall rocks, but not one of you standing at the top.

After the waterfall excitement, we headed to St. Peter’s Dome. This was about 1.5 miles on an undulating trail shaded by trees. If we didn’t know better, we could have been on a trail in Lancaster County, PA. It’s nice to be able to stretch different muscles than just the ones used to make pedals go in circles. We also got to clean out our pours with sweat, because it was slight warm and the trail was a nice climb to the Dome. St. Peter really likes to make people perspire apparently. The vista at the top provided a view of the valley below all the way to Lake Superior. We met some ladies on the trail enjoying their college reunion (of sorts) and they recommended that we visit the town of Bayfield.

Following the hike, we jumped in the van and drove to Bayfield hoping to catch a better view of the Apostle Islands. Well, we didn’t really get the better view, but we did find some orchards and got some fresh blueberries and locally made apple and cranberry cider. I might just have to return to kayak around the Apostle Islands and do some ATV exploring of the area. It’s definitely a place for water sports and the need for a vessel of the sailboat variety to do some more exploring.

For dinner we headed to Culver’s, partly in honor of my nephew telling me he heard great things about the burgers and custard. It was good and if we find another one, we will return! Upon returning to the hotel, we had devotions led by Zander and he talked about courage. A fitting topic as we look to push through to the end.

Tomorrow we enter another state, Michigan, which will be our second longest state with 10 days of cycling. I’m looking forward to some country roads (hopefully)!