Day 8 - Paulding MI to Three Lakes MI

Today’s Miles: 56

Total: 422

Carey said it best.  She said, “You guys are getting soft”.  I guess that is the truth because we are back in a motel tonight.  The day was mostly great.  We had a nice quiet road to get things going.  For the first 15 miles we rode and I don’t think that two cars passed us by.  We rode by some falls that we wanted to see, but found that to see them, we would drop 150 feet and we would have had to climb back out of there.  Again, another example of getting soft.  We did not want to climb back out, so we passed them by.

Cool little post office that we had rest #1.

The rest of the day we rode entirely on one highway.  At times, it was a great road surface with a nice shoulder, but as the day wore on, the shoulder became this worn out surface and it was like riding on a gravel road or worse.  We stopped a couple times for snacks and after the second stop, we knew that a storm was coming but looking at the radar, we thought we had plenty of time in getting to the hotel.  The sky started getting dark and sooner than we expected it started to rain.  Not only did it rain, but the wind became real strong.  In fact, we were stopped for a minute and you could see the wind and rain coming up the road.  When it hit where we were, there was a tree off to the side of the road that cracked and came falling to the ground.  It was crazy.  We took off and luckily the wind was at out back, but it began raining pretty hard.  We rode a few miles down the road and saw a sign for a roadside rest area and I just prayed that it would have some sort of shelter and sure enough it did.  We stood under this small shelter with a couple of motorcycle riders and waited out the storm, which took probably about an hour. I did get wet and was quite chilled and had to dig out some dry tuff to get warm again.

See the little pin in the middle of the storm. That's us waiting out the storm.

Us waiting out the storm with the motorcycle riders.

Looks fun, right??

After the storm we only had 7 miles to our motel.  We laid everything out to dry and are now in pretty good shape.  This motel is one of those old motels that you see in the movies along some rural highway.  Hoping no Bates Motel type action. 😊Actually, it has been remodeled and is pretty nice.  It is $89 for the room and the three of us just share a room.

Our motel.

There is this real small restaurant close by and I ordered Cudighi.  It is freshly ground pork like a hamburger with marinara, onions, peppers and mozzarella with fries.  It was quite delicious. Hoping for better weather tomorrow, but still a 60% chance of rain.