The adventure continues

So after our almost 10 hour bike ride 50 miles north, we went to bed feeling awesome! We woke up on Saturday, Day 2 of our vacation not feeling so great. We had planned on riding to the next city further north and getting breakfast in town there. For some crazy reason we actually went for. The hubby checked the map and thought it looked about 4 miles north. We didn't think we would have a problem biking 4 miles. We ended up stopping probably 3 times on the trip to town which ended up being 6 miles away. The path was paved. There was no excuse other than we were sore and should have trained a bit to ride 50 miles in a day.

We sat at breakfast and ate everything we could get our hands on (maybe that's where these 10 pounds came back from). We then began to face reality. We realized we may not be able to make the ride back home. We had thought two days of rest would be enough to recover, but we also forgot to factor in not having a car and actually having to use our bikes/walk to get everything we needed. We decided to walk around town a bit before heading back to camp and possibly calling to schedule a ride home for Monday. We walked to the grocery store and bought some pain pills, energy bars and energy drinks. We tried to go to the library so little lady could play and we could possibly just sit down, but of course it was closed. So we headed back to our bikes and began our ride home. I don't know if everything (pain pills, energy bar/drink) just kicked in at the right time but we were back to camp in no time and feeling great!

That ride changed our outlook. We had just ridden twelve miles the day after our 50 mile ride and survived. We started thinking of what our options were. We realized that we didn't have to ride 50 miles in a day, we could try to split the ride home up. We had decided to go low tech on this trip so we had no way of looking up information. We went to the camp office to try to get information, but unfortunately the area we wanted to stop in wasn't in their county. We headed over to the grocery store near camp (3/4 mile away) to get food for dinner and they actually had a phone book (remember those?). We looked up motel and campgrounds in the town that was right in the middle of the worst stretch of unpaved trail. There was a motel, but the grocery store clerk said they rent it out by the week and it's quite shady. The hubs called the campground and they said they were about 1/4 mile from the trail we were riding on and actually gave discounts to cyclist! We quickly reserved Sunday night there and felt excited again.

We went back to camp and made dinner and quickly tried our best to enjoy our last night at this campground. This campground does have a fish hatchery at it which is fun to check our and feed the fish. Little lady liked feeding the fish and this time she didn't try to eat the fish food her self. However, we really didn't enjoy our stay at this park. It was very crowded (I know Labor day weekend, what did we expect?) and the sites were crammed together. The absolute worst though were the people around us. They were so loud! They stayed up until 5am Sunday morning talking and laughing loudly. We were ready to get out of there by Sunday morning after a not so restful night.

Sunday we loaded up and hit the road by 9.30am. We would have liked to have left earlier, but we couldn't pre load the trailers since we were actually using everything we brought. We hit the trail and stopped at the first stop which was right before the unpaved portion. We fueled up on energy drinks and granola bars.
We only ran into one issue on the way to our new campground. The hubs loves a good short cut and had looked over our trail map to try to avoid the grassy trail area in the next town. He discovered a road that he swore would cut off a couple of miles.We hit the road he just had to take and of course it was a dirt road. Not just any dirt road though, a dirt road that consisted of about 7 giant hills. We had to walk our bikes up the last portion of each hill and then fly down hoping that we didn't hit any rocks and wipe out. It was terrifying! I was not happy to say the least. This was the portion of the trip that I was closest to tears. The bumps felt so rough to me and I felt awful for the little lady. She had been sleeping and the bouncing woke her up and she was crying on the downhills. He heard about that for awhile.
Once we were back to the trail we actually had an enjoyable ride to our campsite. There were no other good stops along the way so we had a back up drink and some snacks. We stopped along the trail a few times, but felt pretty good the whole way.

We absolutely loved the campsite we found. It was a bit more money than the previous campsite, but well worth it. They had a really nice playground for little lady, a pool (although we didn't bring suits), laundry (which we definitely needed to do), mini golf, arcade, camp store, and bigger sites with better neighbors. We were in heaven.

This is taken from the campgrounds site since we didn't have a memory card in the camera. This is actually our site. There is a mini golf course on the corner and we camped on the other side of it.

The next morning we woke up refreshed and ready for the final leg of our journey. We were 30 miles from home. We again had the breakfast of champs, energy bars and energy drinks and hit the trail. It was nice to get the worst over with first. It went pretty well, nothing to dramatic. I am sure we stopped on the trail and rested, but either way we concurred it. We stopped at 2 gas stations along the route and enjoyed snacks and water. Once we hit pavement, we were flying. There was 14 miles of pavement for the last stretch and no good stops. We flew through it even though we did have a ride an extra mile to head to our house from a different angle. We live on a slightly busy road on top of a big hill. We rode down the big hill early Friday morning, but were worried about traffic in the afternoon time of our return.

We survived! We managed to ride over 115 miles in four days both pulling at least 40 pounds behind us. I know for real bikers 115 miles in 4 days is no real challenge, but for us occasional riders, this is huge.

I didn't realize how badly I wanted this until we were in so deep. On the journey up when my knee started hurting I was so afraid we would have to call someone to pick me up. I am so glad it was just a slight pain and that I pushed through without damaging my knee.

When we thought we were going to have to throw in the towel before even attempting the ride home, I felt defeated. I was so thankful for the great 6 mile ride back to camp that gave us new light and a new plan.

I honestly believe this is the hardest physical feat I have ever accomplished. On the ride up my husband asked me what is harder, my running or the bike trip. I thought running at first just because I can't endure much with running yet, but once we kept pushing with bikes and I realized I was actually getting close to the point that I just couldn't physically bike anymore it became this bike trip. I have never actually hit the point of not being able to run another step physically. I definitely hit points of struggling to breath and walking a bit, but my legs never give out. The ride home I actually told myself that I would ride until we get home or my legs give out. Thankfully my legs held up and are feeling much stronger.

The start of the greatest adventure (known to us)

This is a story that allows me to cross something off my bucket list!

A bit of a back story that tells how long this idea has sort of been in the works: Between the time of our engagement (7.9.07) and the time of our wedding (9.20.08) my husband and I got a little into biking. We didn't do anything to special, but we loaded our bikes onto our car about once a week and went for a short ride on some trails. We also pimped our rides, but that's a different story. My husband told me during this time that he had always wanted to just take off on his bike and carry everything he would need to a campground and camp like that. I thought it sounded fun, but honestly never really saw it happening and didn't put much more thought into it.
My husband is of a different breed though and once he gets an idea in his head, it stays there. Sometimes it gets tossed to the back, but it is still there. During the talks of this bike camping trip, he actually built a trailer out of scrap steel, wire, and odd wheels (not positive what it's made out of). It sat under our deck at our old apartment waiting for the day this adventure would happen. It didn't happen while we finished our time in the apartment and some how it got loaded up and moved into our house back in May of 2010. Since then it has sat alone on a cement slab behind our garage. I think it stared hubby down every time he saw.
I can only assume that hubby saw my new found hobby of running and loving the outdoors as the time to finally attempt this bike adventure. He brought the idea up in the middle of this summer and I hesitated to answer. Things are a bit different now with a child and I wasn't sure how she would fit in with this whole biking adventure. He basically said, "Man up, if we are ever going to do this thing now is the time." Maybe not quite that, but it was implied. We discussed that I could pull little lady and he would pull the trailer with all of our gear. And so our biking adventure was born.


There is a trail about a half mile from our house and heads north for about 90 miles. Originally we thought this trail was paved the entire distance from Grand Rapids to Cadillac. As we researched, we discovered that there were portions that were unpaved. The trail is on an old railroad line so it's relatively flat, so we didn't think it would be to bad. We were wrong, but I will get to that.

This is the only picture of the adventure. We brought our camera, but forgot to put the memory card in it. Here we are posing at the start.

We left on a Friday morning at about 8AM. Hubby was pulling his trailer which held our tent, a pack and play, sleeping bags and a Styrofoam cooler with his clothes and odds and ends in it. I pulled the baby bike trailer with little lady and her blankets and our overnight bags in the back of the trailer. We made great time getting to our first stop. In fact, I don't think we even stopped in the first city we passed. (The gas station in that city was about a block from the trail and I wanted to add as few extra miles to this trip as possible).

We stopped at the next city, they had a gas station right off the trail. We ate a granola bar for breakfast and bought some cold water. We didn't bring water with us, other than a full bottle on each bike because we wanted to keep the weight we were pulling down. We rested for a few minutes and then took off. Here is where hell began. We thought we had at least five more miles of amazing paved trail. Not so much. It ended here and it got ugly. We had pictured a solid gravel trail for our riding enjoyment, but at this portion of unpaved trail the Amish (I assume) had been using as their horse and carriage trail. The center of the trail was all torn up from horse hooves and the sides had deep ruts from the carriage wheels. It was a challenge pulling through there. The challenge was made even greater when the hubby's homemade trailer needed some attention and his used bike kept slipping out of gear. We had to stop about every 5 minutes to fix something. At one point while working on the bike the actual couple with the horse and carriage passed us. We were very irritated. (Not anything against the Amish or people that would use a horse and carriage, but this trail actually has signs everywhere prohibiting the use of cars/motorized vehicles and horses on this trail and they were totally tearing it up and I am not even mentioning the presents the horses were leaving on the trail.)

When we got to the next stop we took another break. The pavement had started back up just before this town and we couldn't have been happier to see it. We thought we had another few miles of paved trail after this town. We rested, had a snack and just let little lady run around. This was about the half way point. If we continued past this point there was no point in turning around. We would have to make it to the campground (or look lame and call his dad to pick us up). When we felt ready we hit the trail again.

The paved portion quickly left us just as we passed town. This portion of the trip seemed the hardest on hubby. His bike was not doing well and I think failing was becoming an option in his head. I tried to be his personal cheerleader the whole 7? miles to the next town. We actually took breaks on the trail at the portion and at one point where the trail became quite loose we walked our bikes for a few minutes. We were actually pedaling as fast as we could and barely keeping the bikes upright so walking didn't seem like such a bad idea. This was the first stretch that we actually stopped to rest on the trail itself. We had stopped before to work on the bike, but now we were actually stopping to rest, stretch and drink water. At some point during this stretch hubby managed to fix his bike a bit better too. When we finally got to the next town we stopped for lunch. I think hubby was starting to doubt this whole thing here. We were at this stop forever! Eventually we decided it was time to keep moving. We had made great time on the first 15 miles of the trip, but the second 15 miles took us about 3 hours. Not good. Our dreams of possibly finishing this 50 mile trip in 6 hours were gone.

I hit a wall on the next stretch of trail. Thankfully the hubby was feeling good so he cheered me on (It seemed to work like that most of the trip. When one of us was up, the other was down. We could help cheer each other on.) I think I just couldn't handle the messed up trail anymore. Plus, I was starting to feel an aching in my knees. I had knee pain before, but have not had much knee pain since I started running so I sort of figured the pain was just from being overweight. I started to think maybe something was horribly wrong with my knee on this portion of trail. I pushed through though because really what else could I do. As we neared the next town the trail turned to just grass. Awesome! I guess the one good part about the trail at this point was that it seemed the horse buggy didn't go this far north. When we got to the actual town there really wasn't much to see. We sat on a corner and had some water. Hubs looked at the map and decided we would ride on their actual roads for about 2 miles and then get back on the trail. I thought it sounded great to ride on pavement and not grass. Although I was super afraid we would lose the trail and have to ride way out of our way.

We quickly got back on the trail since we were both excited that at the next town we would hit pavement again and have it for the last 5/6 mile stretch to camp! Nothing eventful happened on this portion of trail. I think we were just counting down the miles until pavement appeared. I think we both almost teared up when we saw it. It was the most beautiful piece of cement we had ever seen. Just after the trail became paved there was an Arby's so we stopped for dinner and to rejoice that we would actually finish this trip out. I swear the sandwich I had right then and there was the most delicious thing I have ever put in my mouth. I was so hungry and happy.

We rode the last part out and felt like champs pulling into the campground! Somehow little lady was covered in dirt. She got her first shower at a campground. She does not like showers. Neither of us enjoyed that attempt at a shower. It definitely felt good to get some of the dirt of though.

We spent that evening feeling like champs and talking about how great we felt and how we could totally ride home. The next morning was a different feel though.