Leg 3, Ride 4: Lansing to Stockbridge

What a contrast between today and our last riding day. Today had beautiful weather all day, and we were on smooth pavement for virtually the whole day. A great ride!

We got a late start this morning, which was part of our plan. We checked out of Lansing hotel at 10:57 with three minutes to spare, then we headed to "REO Town" for lunch. REO Town is the former location of the REO Motors factory. Now, it's got a small commercial strip with some restaurants and shops. All but one were closed for the holiday today. We had some pretty good BBQ and ice cream, and headed out of town.

There's an extensive system of trails in and around Lansing, and the ride out of town was great. We hit one snag: a river had overflowed its banks and covered a few inches of the path where it went under a highway. I decided to ford it, but Marna portaged around. This actually worked out well for me, since the water cleaned off a lot of Saturday's dried mud from my rims and shoes.

Hero of the day: A guy on the path was doing some sort of dance-run thing, where he'd lunge forward one step, but then kinda take a 1/4 step back before continuing forward. Hard to explain. Is there such thing as "telemark jogging"? Well, there is now, because my dude just invented it. It's gonna be huge -- the next pickleball. Anyhow, he was shirtless and wearing 80s-style shorty shorts and was blasting some tunes. I smiled and nodded as I passed and he gave me finger guns. So, that's the coolest person we'll see the whole trip, probably.

Today was a short ride to Stockbridge. It was too far to go all the way to Ann Arbor in one day, so we split it into two short days.

That meant we got into town just a little after 3pm. We wanted to eat dinner in town on the way through, because we're staying 3 miles south of town, and we didn't want to have to ride back and forth to eat.

So, we had time to kill, and let me tell you: Stockbridge has the best pump track I think I've ever seen. I absolutely had to ride it, which is probably not a super-good idea on a squirrely touring bike with clip-in pedals, but it just had to be done. I rode it conservatively, and didn't get too rad. But, there were a couple of other guys there who were wallriding and catching decent air. One of them even did a tabletop.

Dinner was from a small takeout sub shop, and we made the final push to our hotel. I was a little worried that the road would be bad, but there was very low traffic (maybe thanks to the holiday), and so it was fine.