Looking at the stats for today, it seems like an easy ride: 40 miles, half of it on a bike trail. But, it was actually a bit of a slog, mainly because we were fighting against a 15mph headwind all day. Winds generally blow west-to-east here, and along our entire route, but there's always going to be an exception here or there.

This was also our hilliest ride to date (you have to climb out of a valley to leave Grand Rapids), and our bike trail was unpaved and not in great condition. So, this was our slowest day since the first few days of the trip.

There aren't many good biking roads out of Grand Rapids. So, when I was planning this trip, I routed us through lots of shenanigans: Cut across a college dorm parking lot here, use a middle-school access path there, take advantage of a shortcut path through the woods, etc. It's actually really fun when this all works out in real life -- you can't be sure what these will be like when planning them on a computer monitor.

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We took a day off here in Grand Rapids today. This wasn't for resting (we've only done 50 miles or so over the last 3 days), this was for exploring the city. We've never been here before, and we probably will not be getting back anytime soon.

As an overall impression, I guess I would say this city feels like a midwestern version of Hartford. They both feel like they're trying to be big cities with modern glass towers downtown, and so on. They both have a good amount of cultural institutions: museums, live performance, sports teams, etc. They also both feel a little sterile and corporate, not a lot of character/charm.

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Today was a beautiful day for riding. Mostly sunny and in the low 60s. Warm enough to be comfortable, cool enough so you don't get sweaty. We've now gone 500 miles, which is farther than we've ever done in one trip before (previous longest was about 450 between Québec City and Boston).

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We took a day off here in Muskegon. Generally speaking, we planned our days off either as rest days (after a long stretch of riding), or as tourism days (when we want to see/do things in an interesting place).

Today was neither. Instead, this served as a kind of insurance day. If we had been unable to ride on one of the previous days due to weather/injury/sickness/whatever, then we could have got back on schedule here. Or, if we had been waylayed two days, we could have skipped Muskegon entirely by riding straight from Holland to Grand Rapids. We have a few more of these insurance days scheduled later in the trip.

But, as it happened, everything has gone according to schedule over the first 18 days. So, we had a day off here in Muskegon.

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Today was a fairly uninteresting ride from Holland to Muskegon. This is the end of the second leg of our trip. We're still in good spirits and feeling good, although honestly the last two day's rides weren't anything special.

I say we started in Holland, but we actually started in Beechwood, which is right across the river from Holland. Beechwood is gross: every road is a multilane high-speed road with a Burger King and a Chick-Fil-A. Sidewalks randomly just end. Every business is a chain store with a gigantic parking lot in front.

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We got an early start today, and finished most of our riding before lunch. Today's our first theme park of the trip!

Today's ride was about 2/3 on-road, and 1/3 on sidepaths. Roads were very quiet today. I'm not sure if that's because it's Sunday, or if that's just how things are around here. We will find out tomorrow.

Summer has reached us! Despite being within a stone's throw of Lake Michigan for 12 days, today is the first day that it was warm enough to actually go into the water. Good timing, because we'll only have about 10 more miles near the lake.

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Rest day today!

We had a day off in Milwaukee, and we had two days off in Chicago, but in those places, we had lots of things to do. Here, we mainly spent the day resting. So, there's not a lot to report.

This was our first of probably many days of doing laundry in the bathtub!

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Today was a bit of a "challenge day". It's our longest and hilliest ride so far, coming the day after the previously longest and hilliest ride, and is the 4th consecutive riding day. (Although, these rides are still relatively short and flat compared with the rides we were doing 15 years ago)

I'm very happy to say that the day went pretty smoothly. We're definitely not in tip-top shape by any means, and we were definitely a little lacking in extra power to get up hills... but neither of us had any pain or cramping, and we actually had the leg energy to make this our fastest average speed of the trip (I highly encourage you not to look up the weather to learn if we had a brisk tailwind pushing us!)

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What a great ride today was. Easily the most varied day in terms of scenery so far. Another chilly morning. 45F when we were leaving!

This was our first ride over 50 miles, as we continue to work ourselves into shape. I was expecting the last half of today to be a bit of slog, but I actually feel pretty good still. Tomorrow will be a bit longer of a ride, so we'll see how that goes.

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State #3! Indiana!

Today was a great day of riding. A little chilly, but we dressed for it. Clear skies all day, and generally very good bike infrastructure almost all of the way.

A wise philosopher on the internet once told me "There is no such thing as a day with a tailwind. There are days with headwinds, and then there are days where it's easy riding and you're going fast because you're in good shape and you're doing a really good job". Today was the latter.

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