After Rest Day in Madison, my legs felt great and I was ready to get going again – especially since it was an easily manageable 86 mile ride with only a few registered climbs and an elevation gain of only 2,100 feet. Rolling out at 8 AM from the Indigo Hotel, I said my goodbye to Val and decided to stuff my rain/wind breaker into the back pocket of my jersey, even though the sun was shining in the 56 degree air temperature – the forecast looked good, until it didn’t.
We are now firmly ensconced in the American Heartland and we’re just a few miles away now from Lake Michigan. Today we crossed the 2,500 mile mark and 2 weeks from today, we’ll almost be able to smell the Atlantic. It doesn’t seem that we have come that far but the odometer doesn’t lie.
The ride out of Madison lasted for around 5-6 miles. Once we got just a few miles east of Madison, the landscape began to slowly change again mile by mile. No longer were we seeing the lone farmhouse backed by a 200 acre field of corn or soybeans, now the same kind of homes were on the tree lined streets of Waukesha, WI as we got closer to Milwaukee.
With the first SAG stop at mile 22, many of us pulled in and, given the coffee and juice we consumed at breakfast earlier, headed to the trees lining the edge of the church parking lot where we had stopped to pee. You can only imagine how bad we felt when we looked up as we finished to see the next door neighbors in the back yard looking right at us with a scowl on their face. I wish we could find more appropriate places to stop but we don’t get to choose.
The ride was uneventful until lunch at mile 53, again at a small park this time without bathrooms. It was a good lunch but we wanted to get moving again quickly as it looked like rain at the time, so on went the rain/wind breaker – I am glad I kept it with me. We made it only a mile or two down the bike trail we were on before it started to rain. It wasn’t that bad at first but after 10 minutes or so my feet were wet and it was getting a little cold. The rain lasted for an hour and the damage was done.
As we got closer to Milwaukee on another long bike trail following a large electric transmission line, it started to clear a little and we began to dry out with the wind pushing against us. We passed Carroll University and later Marquette University on the bike trail – and now I understand why Trek Travel designed this route to by-pass the Chicago area – navigating through dense urban areas isn’t easy.
So we pulled into the Iron Horse Hotel around 2:30 this afternoon, still a little damp but glad to get that wet ride behind us. I have only been to Milwaukee once over my 33 years of business travel and it kind of looks the same to me – and I can’t even remember exactly when or why I came here. Milwaukee has a deep and rich history of brewing due to the waves of German immigrants that began arriving in the mid-1800’s. With such an abundance of readily available grains from the nearby farms, how would you guess those German immigrants spent their time? They know how to make a good lager – not that I would know what a good lager tastes like. There is still plenty of evidence of the great American breweries like Miller, Pabst, Blatz and Schlitz all around the city. Harley Davidson is also based here. It’s an All-American city – perhaps that’s why Garry Marshall, the creator and producer of Happy Days in the 1970’s decided that the setting for the show would be the City of Milwaukee? I don’t know.
It was a nice treat this evening for 4 of us to have dinner with our Coach – Tom Murray, of VisionQuest Coaching. He drove over from Chicago to see us and it was meaningful to me that he would make that effort to spend time with us. He is the one guy that got me properly trained for this adventure and not only is he a great cycling coach – he is also a great guy!
So tomorrow should be an easy day from a cycling perspective. We have short ride down the ferry on which we’ll cross Lake Michigan to bypass Chicago and land in Muskegon, MI – our 9th state – and finally back into the Eastern Time Zone! Once we depart the ferry, it will be a short 37 mile ride down to Holland, MI. Once again, it’s hard to believe we’ve come this far – but onward to the Atlantic we will go!
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