Santa pays a visit in July

July 14 is of course Bastille day in France. In Michigan it seems to be celebrated as a gift receiving holiday.

Jeanna and Kerry received the first gift of the day when they checked out of their hotel room in Petoskey this morning. The front desk clerk forgot to tell them they had a package waiting for them when they checked in last night. As their front chain has stretched, it has sagged more and more. To correct this, they ordered a second idler from Rans, the tandem manufacturer. Rans sent the idler to a hotel we stayed at back in the UP, but it arrived after we left. FedEx has been trying to get it to us ever since.

This pic was taken back in May. After just one week the chain was sagging.

The next presents arrived when we checked into our hotel in Traverse City. We had a box with new panniers for team A to replace the duck tapped panniers, and a package with some new bike shorts for Viktoriya.

We hope these last, but we're keeping the roll of duct tape just in case.

The biggest gift giving occurred when Geoff and Marty (team A+) showed up bearing gifts. We had cached some supplies with them at the start of the trip, and used them as a mailing address for additional supplies we ordered during the last 2 months on the road. They had new tires, tubes, lube, fenders, and 4 new jerseys. Our original jerseys had some printing errors and the jersey maker had offered to send us corrected jerseys at no additional cost, but it took a while for the new jerseys to catch up with us.

I wish these tires had arrived a couple of days ago when our rear tire was disintegrating, but our spare folding tire got us here.

A longer fender should cut down on the road grit Jeanna gets sprayed with on rainy days.

When we weren't receiving gifts, we did a little biking. Half the time we were on nice trails, the other part of the day was on US-31. The road had lots of traffic, especially around the few towns we passed through. Some sections had really nice shoulders, other places had narrow shoulders with crumbling pavement that sometimes forced us out into the traffic lanes.

We were in cherry country. Sweet cherries, sour cherries, tart cherries, yellow cherries, red cherries, black cherries.

You might imagine that harvesting cherries is labor intensive. Not so. They have a machine that spreads a net under a cherry tree and another machine that grabs the trunk of the tree and shakes the whole tree until the cherries fall into the net.

We were traveling down the ring finger today.

The tip of the ring finger is big rock point. It's the site of one of the first nuclear power plants in the country, which started generating power in 1962. It was decommissioned in 1997.

Across Traverse Bay we can see the pinky finger.

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