Day 8: We started out the day a little later today as well as Calvin hosted us for a brief sendoff at 7:45 and we were on the road shortly after 8:00. We have 60 new cyclists joining us for the remaining two weeks of the tour, and the crowd for breakfast was a little larger and lines a little longer as the newbies negotiated the flow. (Ah, yes, I am no longer a newbie, I am a veteran!) As we were cycling away from the Prince Center, Brent DeVries was hugging his new bride goodbye (they got married two weeks before he left for nine weeks on the tour and she came to Grand Rapids for a visit) and I think of the commitment of those who were leaving spouses behind for the nine weeks. We started out along a bit of a bike path, and soon realized that Len was not with us. Hmmmm, where did he go, he was right there. We continued cycling slowly, but he never came. It took Bob cycling back to the Prince Center parking lot to steal him from his wife’s embrace to bring him back to the group.
We had some fairly quiet streets and worked our way towards Ada and came across a covered bridge which of course needed a photo op. Many groups stopped here, and as we wear reflective vests, they showed up in the flashes that went off in the shadows! The local cyclists weren’t so happy with our lounging for pictures though, we were in their way!
At the far end of the bridge, I came out of the shadows and someone yelled my name. I stopped, and lo and behold, Al Fischer was there, cup of coffee in hand, watching us go by. ( He works not far from there and walked over to see us go by!) Not a lot of time to talk, but had a brief conversation before continuing on into Lowell where we had a stop at the Calvary CRC for a second breakfast with quiche, baked goods, and fruit.
We had approximately a 15 mph tail wind today which lent itself to our making great time on the road. We stopped for a lunch break at a little sub and pizza shop, Harleys (in Westphalia?) where Justin, Katrina, Kincso, Billy D, and Corey joined us. Justin managed to ingest 18 inches of submarine sandwich for lunch, and even licked his plate clean.
We continued on to Sleepy Hollow State Park, getting in early for the distance (oh, we like tailwinds) and because it was Karen’s birthday, we were also in search of ICE CREAM! Erinn was traveling with us still at this point, and Sleepy Hollow State Park is in the middle of nowhere so Karen, Lisa, Erinn and I piled into her vehicle and drove into the thriving metropolis of Laingsburg…wait, not so thriving, and not so much of a metropolis…one grocery store and one ice cream shop (Arctic Wolf)…but they had 72 flavours of soft serve so we were happy! The best part of this trip into town was that we could not find the ice cream shop initially. One lady told us the ice cream shop was in a strip mall. We drove, didn’t see a strip mall, so we stopped to ask a gentleman walking on the side of the road. He explained that he was dressed the way he was (coveralls) as he had just come from tending his “bees”. I thought he said “peas” as in the Green Giant variety (I had harvested peas for two summers in high school) and the girls got a great hoot out of that gaff on my behalf. The hitch of all that laughter is that the first lady’s version of a strip mall is two buildings side by side with one parking lot!
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