Lake Mich-again

What a day! We jam-packed so many things into yesterday that we were too tired to write the blog by the time we got in, and we forgot to charge the Gamines! Unheard of…

We set off pretty early from our super comfortable motel in St Ignace, MI (we wrote earlier this week about our accommodation criteria and the Moran Bay Motel ticked all the boxes, as well as being fantastic value for money – we can’t rave enough). After stopping at a nearby restaurant to grab a couple of breakfast sandwiches, we hopped aboard the ferry to Mackinac Island.

Mackinac island is a place where the bike is truly King. No cars or other motorised vehikkles are allowed: only horses and bikes. We rode the 8-mile loop around the island, which was stunningly beautiful and surprisingly unspoiled, given that the island was teeming with tourists. It was definitely necessary to keep your wits about you to avoid the “steaming road debris” (gotta love those horses) as well as the people who were on bikes but didn’t seem to have ever learned how to ride one…

By around lunchtime, we were ready to depart and caught another ferry to Mackinaw City, putting us back on the mainland and across the other side of the Mackinaw Straits that join Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. And then our brief but enjoyable flirtation with Lake Huron was over, as we will now be skirting down the East side of Lake Michigan for the next few days heading south to Indiana.

We’ve discovered that this part of Lake Michigan is a bit of a playground for the rich and famous. We cycled through a couple of really chi-chi little towns, where the houses were big, the views amazing and the cappuccinos plentiful. We took full advantage of this, stopping at a little café in Harbor Springs to sip a couple of lattes with another cyclist called Scott, who we’d met earlier in the day at a gas station. Arriving along a bike path into Petoskey, MI, our destination for the night, we overshot our motel by quite some distance, ending up in downtown and having to double back. Not the Gamines fault this time, but Google, who had put the hotel in the wrong place on the map!

This also contributed to us having a rather long walk into downtown for dinner, which we ate (late) at the City Park Grill. We had a ball talking to our waitress, Catherine Stakoe, who is having a great summer cavorting with said “rich and famous” in the area (her words!!) At the end of the night, Catherine offered us a lift back to our hotel to save us the 2 mile walk, which we gratefully accepted – thanks Catherine!

Us x