Leg 3, Ride 3: Ionia to Lansing

Today was... not good!

We are at our hotel in Lansing, with no injuries, so there is a happy ending to the day. But, today was the toughest day of the trip, and the toughest ride I've had in many years.

First, it rained all day long. That's not the worst thing, and actually we're really really lucky that we've largely avoided rain up until this point.

It turns out that my aging rain jacket has lost some of its waterproofing. It will hold back water for a little while, but eventually it started seeping through.

The main problem for today was the mud. Most of our ride today was on unpaved roads. But, we really underestimated how poorly maintained the roads were going to be. These weren't just wet, they were muddy. Muddy enough for our tires to sink into. For miles, we were only able to manage about 5 miles per hour through the mud. At one point, we were going down a steep hill at 7.5 mph.

Eventually, we worked ourselves back to civilization and got on a paved road. At that point, the wind kicked up, and we were fighting a 20mph headwind for about 8 miles before reaching DeWitt, our lunch stop.

We had initially planned to get to DeWitt by about 11am. That would allow us to get to our hotel by 2pm, then take a city bus to the Michigan State campus in order to visit the MSU Museum, which closes at 5 today, and will not be open tomorrow. But, we didn't actually arrive in DeWitt until 1pm.

The restaurant had the AC cranked. Or at least it felt like that way to me. By the time we left, I was shivering and my fingers were going numb. Food was good, though!

For the last 10 miles into Lansing, the rain got a lot heavier. However, at this point, we were on paved roads and out of the wind, so this was the easiest part of the ride.

We did eventually arrive at our hotel, and spent quite a while cleaning all the mud off of our bikes and bags. We took nice long hot showers, and put on some clean clothes. We're too late to get to the MSU Museum, unfortunately. But, we're kinda not feeling it today anyhow. Today feels like a day to sit in bed and watch Forensic Files reruns.

We've got a day off here in Lansing tomorrow. We're now halfway done with Leg 3, halfway across the state of Michigan, and approximately 33% done with the total trip distance.