Day: 419.1 miles
Trip: 5244.7 miles
Today was the toughest day of the trip in terms of making miles, and that by far. This is the first day I missed the miles I expected to make. I set a goal for 440 miles to make it to a camping area I marked on the map. Somehow through detours or whatnot it was looking closer to 460 and I didn't have the daylight or energy in me to make that. Even getting to 300 today was rough, I would have stopped at 275 if I was just riding for the fun of it. Not that the riding was bad, beautiful foliage through Wisconsin and Michigan Upper Peninsula. Good temps for riding, mid 60s mainly. Pretty good roads, but lots of two lane highway with speed limits of 55 and going through towns every 20 or 30 miles so the speed limit goes down to 35, or 25 or there's a stop. It didn't help that I was pressing myself to get *somewhere* and I started seeing long shadows at ~4:00 so I started skipping breaks too. Traveling north and east meant a shortened day plus I lost a clock-hour moving back into the Eastern Time Zone.
But it wasn't all bad. I felt I needed to make 400 to keep on track and I did that, through effort and determination. I have a full tank of gas and got a hearty dinner at Sydney's down the street so assuming I get a good nights rest I should be able to tackle tomorrow bright and early. I'm just over 1,000 miles from home if I took the most direct route (skipping Grosse Pointe and Ithaca) so even if I do only 350 miles a day from here on I can still be home Wednesday. Actually it looks like Grosse Pointe would be my destination tomorrow- 415 miles from here. If I make it tomorrow I go, if not I stop where I stop and head across Canada again on Tuesday.
I think that's it for now, I'd love to provide some more updates about what I think about when I'm riding but today wasn't very interesting, mostly about how sore and tired and behind miles for the day I was! I did stop at a rest stop in Wisconsin, just before the Michigan border and do some reading about the history of ore miners in the area. I love that kind of thing. I got a pic in front of a little monument, art piece they had there. My only pic for the day.
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