GPS on Tour

For the last two bike tours (small, two- to four-day affairs), I have carried along a cheap TomTom gps unit. On previous trips, there were several occasions when, despite detailed local maps, we didn't know where we were, either because we took a wrong turn, or because the map was not detailed enough. (This happens fairly often in towns and cities.) So I thought, Wouldn't it be nice to have a gps unit to consult at times of uncertainty?

Obviously, there's no way to keep a normal portable gps unit turned on all the time, even if I wanted to. The battery would last about an hour. But as a supplement to maps, and to help find stores and restaurants, it might be nice to be able to turn it on and have a look.

The verdict? I have found it useful. Not a substitue for county maps, but useful. I keep in in my handlebar bag. It takes about a minute to power up and find the satellite, so I don't consult it often. But several times on our Door County trip, I gave it a quick look to tell us which road would take us out of town in the right direction, and it did successfully predict several restaurants and gas stations. Unfortunately, one very unfortunate time, I did not allow it to find the satellite before I consulted about restaurants, and it used the previous coordinates. I didn't notice because I was looking at the list of restaurants, which does not show the map, and I wasn't familiar with the streets that the restaurants were located on. So we went in pursuit of a much needed breakfast stop that wasn't there. Whoops. If I had waited patiently for it to find its satellite, the problem wouldn't have happened.

I suppose the ultimate solution is to use the new Nokia adapter that allows a bike generator to charge electronic devices (supposedly arriving in the U.S. soon). With a generator hub providing steady charge, a gps unit could be mounted on the handlebars and the nice lady could narrate every turn.

Nice, or not? Not, I fear. It won't replace a good map. (But it would be very handy for keeping electronic doodads charged on a long tour.)

Summer 2010 Mini-Tour

Jon and I continued the recent tradition of small bike tours this summer, riding out Door County, WI, and back, for a total of about 240 miles in four days. We have been doing such rides for . . . hm . . . I'm reluctant to say . . . 35 years (although we had a 20-year hiatus while our kids grew up).

The gear: The usual Trek 620 (1984 vintage, although the only original parts are the frame, cranks/bb, seatpost, front derailer, and rear rack) with trekking bars. I liked the rear basket with the Rivendell "shopsack" so much, I bought a small basket and small shopsack for the front. The front bag held my clothes, the rear bag held my tent, sleeping bag, air mattress, stove/pots, poncho/tarp, rain jacket, towel, miscellaneous loose stuff. In order to make room for the front bag, I attached the handlebar bag to the handlebars with the bracket that came with it (it's a Nashbar bag), modified with a stiff metal rod under the stem to keep it from drooping. In that bag I carried personal and small stuff (phone, camera, wallet, spf, head lamp, bug spray, granola bars, gps unit). Tools lived in a seat bag. My fold-up stool was strapped on top of the rear bag. (Both bags had cargo nets, fantastically useful on the road for holding odds and ends like hats and flipflops and drying towels.)

The whole set-up was a little front- and top-heavy, but it was also completely stiff (much less lateral swaying than regular panniers), which was a pretty good tradeoff. The bike handled fine. The advantage of the bags-in-baskets arrangement was that I could pop the front bag out of the basket and take it into my tent (where it served as a lovely pillow when covered with my fleece pants), and I could get at the contents of the back basket without fooling around with flaps and deep panniers. Very convenient.

This year, I rode the slow ferry from Ludington to Manitowoc, arriving at 11:30 pm. Jon drove up from Milwaukee, having worked a full day (and frantically tried to get his new Surly LHT ready). He met me when I rolled off the ferry.

We decided to take our chances on camping this first night. Jon had called the ferry office, and they assured him we could camp near the docks with no problem. This proved to be correct: There was ample grass, benches, even, and a nice wall to hide us from the road, in case the gendarmerie happened by (and cared that we were there). When we arrived, a freighter was unloading nearby; it left in the middle of the night. This was not a scenic wilderness experience, but it was actually quite nice, and it perfectly met our needs.

Up early the next morning, with a good bit of puttering by Jon to make his rig road-ready. Breakfast at the Two Rivers McDonalds after a warm-up ride along the coastal bike trail. This first day proved to be a long one: by the time we arrived at Potowatomi State Park, we had ridden 72 miles. Although it was our first and longest day, it was not our hardest one. In fact, it was pleasant. (The general flatness helped.)

As usual, it was good to be back on the road. We had a nice tail wind, which never hurts, and the temperature was pleasantly warm but not really hot. After our intrepid breakfast (I had cinnaminis and coffee), we set off northwest. Unfortunately, I hadn't really studied the map, so I didn't notice that we should have been going northEAST. By the time we reached Mishicot I had seen the error of our ways. Alas, we needed to start angling back east, losing our nicely won westerliness. Following lovely Wisconsin farm roads, we went north and slightly east, never really hitting any towns as we went.

Finally, by mid-afternoon, we were ready for a break; juice, snacks, and a nice sit-down. But there weren't towns, not between us and Sturgeon Bay. Such route selection is a bad idea. Always have towns to go through. Go out of your way to have towns to go through. We nearly detoured back to Casco at one point (my TomTom, whom we affectionately called "Mrs. TomTom"--actually, Jon called her something like Svetlana--told us that there was a gas station two miles out of our way). We were tempted, but two miles out the way is a long way. Instead, we jumped on the Ahnapee State Trail and booked it for Algoma. 

This was an acceptable trail. Not heavily used, so it was more of a two-track than a full-width trail, but it was in rideable condition. When it looked like the trail might miss the retail section of Algoma, we abandoned it for SR 54. Busy, narrow shoulder, but it took us to Algoma, where we reveled and delighted and gorged at McDonald's.

Gawd. Two McDonald's in one day? Sure. Large drinks were $1, all-you-can-drink, and I drank a lot. I also had a mini-flurry, and I bought a bag of peanuts in the shell at the adjoining convenience store. I didn't really need a whole pound of peanuts, but we enjoyed them as we made a terrible mess. 

For some reason, even though we had gone 50 miles and the afternoon was getting on, we didn't feel discouraged. First day naivete, perhaps. We set off again up highway 42 (the first of many encounters with highway 42), a lovely stretch that we stayed with until Maplewood, at which point we rejoined the Ahnapee State Trail.

Between Maplewood and Sturgeon Bay the trail is very nice, probably because lots of people from Sturgeon Bay use it. It's wide and hard, with nice benches every few miles. We made very good time, arriving in Sturgeon by dinner time.

We decided that cooking was silly on one of these trips. It's not like we're hiking in the wilderness, where you have to boil water to reconstitute your freeze-dried kibble or else starve. No. If one plans carefully, one can be near restaurants at or near dinnertime, at least in civilized parts of the country. And the little extra you spend on restaurant food is more than made up for in convenience and expeditiousness. I'll leave the expedition cooking to the kids. Old farts like us can let someone else make our dinner.

So we had a perfectly acceptable meal in an Italian restaurant in downtown Sturgeon. Not great, but good enough.

Our final goal for the day was Potawatomi State Park, northwest of town. The signs indicated that we needed to take a busy highway to get there, but Mrs. TomTom said that there was a coast road. We started down her coast road, but signs warning of a dead-end stopped us. I suspected that this was a ruse, a dead-end for cars only, but we didn't dare risk it, so we took the busy highway. (The next morning, we accidentally took the coast road: Sure enough, a barrier keeps cars out, but not bikes.)

The state park was fine. Very state parky. On past trips, I have been happy to stay in crowded campgrounds as long as they have showers (and as long as I have ear plugs). But I am starting to get a little sick of crowded campgrounds. The showers are nice, and Jon and I enjoy a good campfire at the end of the day (we each have little folding seats to use by the fire), but I'm starting to get tired of it. My favorite campsite this trip was the first night, on the grass by the ferry dock. Quiet, private. I am going to explore stealth camping on future trips, at least on solo outings.

When we awoke on day 2, it was pouring rain. We have been lucky on our trips, really going all the way back to when we were kids. On our West Coast trip, we had no rain in four weeks. In all our subsequent trips we've had very little rain. (We avoided it two years ago by staying in a motel on the one really stormy night.) But this rain was the real deal. It came down steadily all morning as we were packing up, and for several hours as we rode.

I have been in denial all these years about my tent (Alps Mountaineering Comet I): I knew it leaked, but I didn't want to deal with it. This rain made me want to deal with it. I had puddles in all four corners of the tent. Luckily, my air mattress keeps me high enough off the tent floor (and my mummy-style sleeping bag is very tight, so it doesn't hang over), so nothing got wet. Still . . . if it were to rain for multiple nights, the tent would be pretty unpleasant. (I sealed the seams when I got home. I think the problem is solved.)

I hadn't really made good rain preparations. I accidentally had the right gear, but it wasn't perfect. My Rivendell shopsacks are quite waterproof, and I had draped a poncho over the bike the night before, so none of my belongings were  wet. With a large garbage bag across the top of the shopsack (held in place by the cargo net) as I rode, the bags were very dry. But I didn't have rain procedures for my handlebar bag, so all my maps and papers got soaked. (I have now added zip-lock bags to my gear, large enough to hold the map case. And I'll just automatically store not-in-use maps and papers in a ziplock bag.) The handlebar bag itself was dry, so my wallet, camera, phone, etc, didn't get wet.

The other innovation that I could have tried was to use my large poncho as a tarp: using the stretchy clothesline as a ridge line as at one end, the poncho could be draped over and secured to create a canopy for the tent and/or the bike and/or my little chair (if I didn't have a picnic table). That way, even if it were pouring rain when I was setting up camp, I could create a shelter to help prevent rain getting into the tent as I was pitching it, and while getting in and out.

On that rainy day 2, then, we set off up the newly discovered coast road. It was warm enough that my cheap Nashbar rain jacket was enough protection; I just wore shorts and let my legs get wet. We rode across the bridge and entered Door County proper. For breakfast, we stopped at a nice little restaurant in the middle of town. I ordered pancakes.








We rode for a few hours in the rain, but by the time we reached Egg Harbor, the sun was coming out. We stopped for juice and a sit-down, and hung up our wet gear to dry a little. Egg Harbor is an unpleasant little tourist hole. I have always thought so. I was glad to leave and head up into the peninsula's beautiful interior.

Once you get away from the west coast and Highway 42, Door County is gorgeous and peaceful. (The west coast is gorgeous, but it's hardly peaceful, since that's where the tourists congregate in a vast multitude.) But the beautiful rolling farmland and largely empty roads in the interior make for lovely biking. The one exception was Old Stage Rd, which is the major north-south thoroughfare for locals trying to avoid the crowds of Sister Bay, so traffic is fairly steady, and everyone drives fast, since they're not sight-seeing.


We avoided Fish Creek, Ephraim, and Sister Bay on the way up, so the next town we hit after Egg Harbor was Ellison Bay. I was happy to discover that Ellison Bay is still fairly quiet, as it was when Cindy and I summered there 25 years ago. Give me the tip of the peninsula any day. Because we had a ferry to catch, we soldiered on, arriving at the Northport Ferry dock (which is still not shown correctly on the state highway map) at about 6:00. We were going to eat in Gill's Rock, but nothing seemed appropriate, so we decided to take our chances on Washington Island. Good choice.

The ferry was easy and fun, with beautiful views down the rugged west coast of the peninsula. Washington Island was a biker's paradise, with flat, empty roads. At the main intersection, we found The Albatross hamburger stand. We both had Albie Burgers (but no milkshakes—what were we thinking?). The Albatross is clearly a beloved island tradition, which we were happy to experience.

The campground (Washington Island Camping Retreat) on Washington Island was fine. Not crowded, even on a Saturday night, nicely wooded, acceptable showers. The little camp store sold things like batteries, which our headlamps needed, and drinks, which we needed. They even had free coffee in the morning. Once we got the wet firewood burning (which took a while), we had a roaring blaze.

The next morning, we needed to hurry to catch the 7:45 ferry so we wouldn't be stranded on the island waiting for the next one, unable to start our long day to Algoma. It was five miles, all flat, but we only had 20 minutes. By my math, that meant we needed to average 15 mph. So I set us a brisk pace. I confess that I panicked when it looked like we might not make it, so I raced ahead to employ delaying tactics, if necessary. It proved not necessary. The ferry wasn't close to being on time, and there was no problem slipping the bikes on. There was a long line for cars on that early ferry, but not bikes.

We rode for eight miles, as we like to do before breakfast, and found a nice coffee shop in Ellison Bay, where we had coffee and pastries. Tasty. The hill out of Ellison Bay was the first whopper of the day, the hill out of Sister Bay was the second. The hills are another reason to avoid Highway 42 in DC. The west side is hilly, the east side is flat. So we turned onto Highway 57 in Sister Bay, and rode down the east side, through Bailey's Harbor and Jacksonport. 

We decided to stay on the main roads this day, since it seemed like we had a longer day than usual (which proved to be not true). Mostly, this was fine. Highway 57 is very nice all the way to Jacksonport. Quite pretty, really, with a nice shoulder and moderate traffic. When it leaves the coast, however, it becomes less nice. Traffic gets heavier and moves much faster. And because it's less sheltered (more fields, fewer trees), a south wind makes a difference, as we discovered. We labored away on this stretch until Valmy, where we discovered a convenience store that was selling brats, complete with onions and saurkraut. How could we say no to that? Actually, Jon rode by, perhaps thinking that I wouldn't want to stop. Foolishness! I brought him back to his senses. It was a good thing we did, too, because it was the last food we'd get until Algoma.

After our brats, we turned inland, or at least away from Highway 57. Suddenly, the life of the biker was good again, crossing beautiful Door County fields on empty roads. We crossed 57, still glad to be off it, and took the back way into the outskirts of Sturgeon Bay.

Here we faced a dilemma, one created mostly by our lack of attention to map details. We wanted to cross the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal at the new bridge on 57, but we couldn't tell if bikes were allowed. We hemmed, we hawed, with studied the map (not very carefully), then decided to take a chance, and set off down the four-lane highway that led to the bridge. Turns out that not only are bikes allowed, there's a separate bike path, right across the bridge. (It's shown on the map, which we missed.)

We had been hoping to find a McDonald's (which, with its free wifi--good for ipod touches--and $1 all-you-can-drinks, is a biker's very good friend), but it was nowhere to be found. Instead, we found plenty of nuthin. So we headed down Highway U toward the coast and Algoma hoping to find a gas station or at least a place to fill our water bottles. 

This proved to be a long slog. At one point, we found a park and collapsed. Well, Jon collapsed on a picnic table. I roamed around looking for cellphone reception. We then dragged our sorry asses back onto the bikes and continued the slog for Algoma, never finding a gas station or store. When we turned south the wind was still blowing pretty hard, so I tucked Jon into my wind shadow and bulled my way through. Not pleasant, but we made it.

Dinner at a sports bar. Bad BBQ beef. But dinner, which was good. The campground was just south of the downtown, so we didn't have far to go (luckily). Not much of a campground. Soggy, with yet more soggy firewood. This batch took hours to catch. We fussed and huffed and puffed and rearranged and added paper and relit and said prayers to the fire gods. Finally the wood had dried out enough to burn, which then made the fire hot enough to dry out and burn subsequent pieces. We sat in our little folding chairs and enjoyed the blaze. I went over to the Piggly Wiggly and bought potato and macaroni salads and salted peanuts in the shell (way too much of everything, it turned out).

The next day, our last, we needed to cover 40 miles by 12:00 so that I could catch the 1:00 ferry. Easy! Except it wasn't so easy, thanks to the wind and the lack of places to buy food. We figured we'd ride 10 miles to Kewaunee and get something there. Sure enough, there were several restaurants. But I, loving McDonald's as I do, consulted Mrs TomTom who told me (I thought) that there was a McD's just south of the town. Actually, she said it was four miles south, which, when I thought about it later, made no sense. So we wheezed our way up the giant Keewaunee hill and headed out of town. But all we could see for miles and miles were corn fields. No McD's. No chance of McD's. Just 25 miles to Two Rivers. On empty stomachs. Into the wind. No coffee.

So we turned around and rode the several miles back into town, down the huge hill. (I hoped that it would disappear as we ate; it didn't.) Lovely breakfast at the restaurant where we should have eaten in the first place. I had pancakes.

And then we set off across the barren wasteland, into the stiff headwind. Very stiff. It was coming at us over the starboard quarter, so drafting was hard, particularly for Jon, who didn't have a mirror, since it required the drafter to ride over to the left, in the traffic lane. Not being able to see the cars and trucks coming at you as you were riding in their lane was a problem.

We labored along like this for a while. But as I looked at my watch and my odometer and my speedometer, it seemed like there might be a chance that I might not make it. So with Jon's blessing, I left the team and set off on my own. I felt bad doing it, not knowing if an arctic storm might bury Jon and the dogs in five feet of snow, but it seemed necessary. I just had more legs for bulling through the wind. I put my head down and churned along at 13 mph. Jon became a tiny speck and eventually disappeared in my mirror. 

Turns out it wasn't necessary. I waited for Jon in Two Rivers (at the McD's, of course), and even after a nice drink at McD's and more slogging into the wind between Two Rivers and Manitowoc, Jon made it to the ferry in time. I had already arrived, but even if I had stuck with Jon, as a good teammate would have done, as a compassionate person would have done, as a patient person would have done, even then, I would have been on time. 

To his credit, Jon was cheerful about the whole affair. Didn't call me names. Didn't accuse me of abandoning him (which I did, after all). Didn't say that I had ruined it for him. No. He seemed glad to have caught up in time. We said our goodbyes, I wheeled my bike onto the ferry, and away I went.