I hid out in a simple motel next to the trail while it rained yesterday. Needed a time out.

The sun was shining this morning, so I was on the road at 8 am.

Then the overcast moved in, so the rest of the pictures are in flat light, but it was a comfortable temperature for cycling of about 20 C.

The trail has signs for the planets in the solar system, spaced in proportion, every so often. They are accompanied by model planets on lampposts. I’ve seen this before in the Chicago area, but this was done with flair, and I stopped, gaining astronomy knowledge and a nice slow warm-up.

Traverse City has a nice lakefront, with walkers and bikers, and kayakers testing some boats.

This is the largest cherry growing region in the world, so they say. I saw a few of those orchards today, as the trail heads into the woods. I passed the Traverse Area Recreational Trail Association office, and rolled into wine country, also with no pictures.

I rode and talked for about an hour with Tom from Williamsburg, Virginia and Jan from Detroit, who were taking a day off from a three week tour around the lake. Talking makes the miles go almost effortlessly, and being on a trail makes it worry free.

Twenty five miles of trail got me to Suttons Bay, another tourist town for gallery shoppers.

Then twenty five miles of road to Glen Arbor. Strange road, in that I climbed over the hump in the peninsula for maybe twenty minutes, and then it seemed like twenty miles of steady downhill from there.

I talked with three other cyclists along the way, and then discovered that Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park campsite was full, and they do not follow state park policy of giving self-propelled campers a grassy spot somewhere.

I went back into Glen Arbor and got the last room in a small motel for $152, this being a weekend in vacation country.

No pictures of Glen Arbor due to grey sky and it is a clone of Bragg Creek. Seriously, I travel hundreds of miles, and I get back to the same place. I can hear a nice group playing Heart of Gold at the bar down the street.

A while back they played Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which the guy also played on Mackinac Island. I heard Lightfoot in a bar in Guatemala one time. So haul out your old Lightfoot albums, pretend you’re in some woodsy little town of B &Bs, t-shirt shops, galleries, and bars, and you can have the same experience I’ve got, without the effort or the cost.

Maybe not quite the same, because I really do feel quite relaxed.