I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but I like to ride my bike around lakes. Big lakes, small lakes, it doesn’t matter. If there’s a lake, I’ll do my darndest to ride my bike around it. Sometimes, I ride my mountain bike around lakes, and other times I’ll take my road bike. It depends on the infrastructure. Most recently, I rode my bike around Lake Whatcom. It’s a relatively small lake with 32 miles of shoreline that requires riding a 48-mile loop from my house. In this blog entry, I’m not here to talk about that small fry lake even though it shares similarities with the big fry lakes I’ll get to soon.
The big lakes I’m talking about are, of course, The Great Lakes. These glacial lakes hold 20% of the world's natural freshwater and provide for millions of Americans and Canadians. With numbers like those, it makes our mission of riding around them seem rather silly. Most recently, my friend and I biked around Lake Huron. Huron is the flattest lake, with only 14k feet of vertical over the course of 850 miles. It took us 6 days to cover those miles, with big days on days 5 and 6 to “get it done”. I had just gotten back from riding from the west coast, so another 6 days of riding was no biggie.
My friend Andrew started this mission 3 years ago, and since then we’ve been able to circumnavigate 3 of the Great Lakes. Superior, Michigan, and most recently, Huron. Lake Superior was the biggest and most challenging, taking 10 days to ride the 1300 miles of road and bike path around the lake. I’ll do a whole post summarizing that trip, but to sum it up in one statement: Hard. Hills. Scary roads. Lake Huron was, by far, the easiest. It wasn’t the smoothest, Andrew had some issues arise that took two days to fix, but other than that, the wind and weather cooperated, and we averaged 130 miles a day and stuck very close to our scheduled plan.
Highs and lows? Well, the high was the 15mph tailwind on the last day, which was also the longest day. 167 miles of tail and light crosswind makes the riding go quickly, and we were able to finish in the daylight! Another high was the hospitality we received from my friend Maggie’s parents. I feel bad for forgetting their names. I will update and edit this blog as soon as it comes back to me. Lows? The third day. Andrew broke his seatpost clamp while we were riding down a snowmobile trail and was then forced to ride the next 35 miles standing, and the 120 miles after that with a slipping seat post. Eventually, we got a replacement clamp from Maggie’s parents and were well on our way. A quick highlight so I can make this a sandwich. Day 4! Day 4 was the day we got to ride with Maggie’s dad, got Andrew’s bike fixed, and biked past three of the great lakes within one route! (Superior, Huron, and Michigan.)
It takes a lot of planning to bike around a great lake, but the satisfaction and relative easy-going nature of these trips is beyond worth the time and money commitment.
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