Day 40 - Upper Peninsula

Day 40 - Bergland to Isheming, MI - 98 miles - 1427 feet of elevation gain

Well, I did it again! I typed up this whole thing and then had a glitch with a few pictures and lost the entire thing. My evening was short because of biking almost 100 miles, then I ran a kid to a bike shop for more tubes, left for dinner (which took forever), stopped to see a lighthouse, and then came back for devotions. Any way, I’ll try to recreate this post and make it better the second time. 🤦🏻‍♀️

After we turned out of the hotel this morning our next turn wasn’t for 50+ miles. Except, the hotel didn’t have breakfast, so at Al’s suggestion I called ahead last night and ordered our breakfast for 8:30am at a restaurant along the route. We had a granola or fig bar to hold us over for the 20 miles until we reached Char’s restaurant. They had our food ready in minutes after our arrival. It was perfect! Char even posted about us on the restaurant Facebook page.

The morning was a cool 51 degrees. I didn’t think about it being so cool until we started pedaling and my arms had goosebumps. Even after eating breakfast I was still cold, so I put on sleeves. A mile or so down the road we had a little hill climb and then I was hot. It’s a battle of the temperatures! By the time we finished it was in the 80s.

The roads today were great! Smooth shoulders with little debris and not so many bumps. There was a section with no shoulder but wasn’t crazy with traffic. The cars definitely increased the closer we got to Marquette. We hit our 8th section of road construction (according to Monny’s tally). We were able to speed right through without any issues.

Speaking of speeding, these guys are getting stronger. For the 98 miles most everyone averaged over 16 mph. That’s moving, especially for almost 100 miles. Just wait until we are back in PA and hitting the short steep hills, then we will see how we fair.

One rider had two flats today. He changed out his tire tonight so hopefully that takes care of part of the issue. We had another issue today with a Di2 system (not mine). Two of us have Di2 which is electronic shifting. It has some safety features to prevent damage that got activated and we needed a FaceTime call with Zach from Green Mountain in Ephrata, PA to get it working again. Now we know what to do, but hope to never have to use the info again.

Most restaurants near us are closed on Sundays and Mondays. So we drove to Marquette to a restaurant that turned out to be closed as well. I found another one in town that had a good menu, but was beyond slow with the service. After we finally finished, we drove a short distance to the lake to see a lighthouse. The boys liked the beach area and were disappointed this wasn’t our rest stop. Tomorrow we have a shorter day of just 64 miles, so there are plans afoot to hit the lake for some swimming.