Day 21: Morley, MI to Big Rapids, MI

July 6, 2012

(By Jeff)

We slept well in the yucky motel. Before leaving our room, I turned on the 1970s-era Maganavox television, and we watched a fuzzy image of the Today show for a few minutes. For some reason, they were showing a video of some guy singing the Seal song, “Kiss From A Rose” to his annoyed cat. This in turn annoyed me, because that song had already been stuck in my head for the last few weeks while riding. Now here it was again.

We decided to get to Big Rapids, a larger town, and figure out how to do our Utah home closing remotely. The closing documents had been emailed to us yesterday evening, but we hadn't had a chance to read them, figure out where to sign, how to mail them back, etc. Big Rapids was only fifteen miles down the road, so our plan was to get there, somehow get the paperwork done, and see how we felt after that.

The road looked quiet this morning, so we decided to take it instead of the unpaved White Pine Trail. There wasn't a lot to see. We rode through Amish communities with their always popular signs advertising eggs, and I saw my favorite egg sign of the trip: A former Stop Sign that had been transformed into an Egg Sign. Clever – motorists probably feel a subliminal urge to come to a complete stop when they see the sign, and read its important message about the availability Fresh Brown Eggs (except on Sundays.)

We pulled off in the small town of Stanwood for breakfast. This place had the most gigantic cinnamon rolls we'd ever seen – they resembled loaves of bread. After I saw them delivered to the table of a couple of older ladies, I regretted ordering pancakes instead. Oh well – I couldn't justify immediately ordering a second breakfast of the huge cinnamon rolls, given the short days we'd been doing lately (and would do today.)

We decided to ride into Big Rapids on the White Pine Trail instead of the road, which had started getting busier. The trail was pleasant, if not well-maintained – At one point the surface turned to something resembling slick moss instead of crushed gravel. Neither of us fell down this time, however. We got into Big Rapids with no difficulty, then began looking for a place to prepare our closing documents. We noticed Lakeland Title of Mecosta County, and I walked in and explained our predicament. They didn't have anything going on at the moment, and agreed to print our closing documents and witness our signatures. They actually went farther than that – they treated it like one of their scheduled closings, taking us into a conference room and explaining the documents as we signed them (well, they explained them to the extent they were able to, given that the documents were prepared in Utah, and we were in Michigan.) The lady didn't want to take anything for the 20 minutes she worked with us, but we did insist on paying her something.

For the last few days we had been contemplating a change to the trip. It became obvious fairly early in this tour that we could not do what we originally planned - to do a loop starting and ending in Lebanon, Illinois in six weeks. The extreme heat (many days over 100F), gravel roads in Illinois, and our general lack of fitness made it impossible to ride enough miles each day. So we knew at some point that we would need to rent a car or truck to get home. Because we wanted to see more of Michigan, which unfortunately has been the most difficult to bicycle in, we decided to go ahead rent a truck now, spend a week doing "regular" sightseeing in Michigan, then drive to Iowa, visit Joy's family, and then try to ride from there back to Illinois.

We rode a few miles to a Quality Inn, our arrival coinciding with that of the city pool inspector, to the chagrin of the lady at the hotel desk (“Well, it's definitely going to fail the inspection,” she told us. “It's full of children.” [who were presumably peeing – or worse – in the pool.].)

After a hot walk to a burrito place for lunch (how had we been riding in this heat?), we called a local Budget Truck rental place and arranged to pick up their smallest truck tomorrow morning.

Say what you will about the Morley Motel, but they seem to take Michigan's anti-smoking laws seriously.

We had breakfast in a cafe, and couldn't figure out WHAT these things were - they were gigantic cinnamon rolls.

The surface of the White Pine Trail had now turned to moss.

We stopped at a random title agency and did an impromptu closing on our Utah house. I'm sure it was the only "walk in" closing they had ever done. It took 20 minutes, and they didn't want to charge us anything, but we insisted on paying them something.

Today's ride: 18 miles (29 km)
Total: 869 miles (1,399 km)

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