Lake Michigan Loop: A Trip Full of Surprises

Surprise Wedding
This trip was full of surprises. The first surprise was the very reason for the trip. It was the news that my aunt was getting married, in one month’s time, in Chicago. Originally we had planned to go cycling in Oregon for two weeks at that time, so a new plan emerged – go to Chicago for the wedding, then do a cycle touring trip near Chicago. But, wait a moment, “cycle touring near Chicago”, never heard of that… Fast forward some time spent staring at online maps and searching, and we made two key discoveries: 1. There is a ferry across Lake Michigan (in fact, two ferries!), and 2. There is a US Bicycle Route along Lake Michigan, both on the west and east sides. A natural plan emerged: we would cycle north from Chicago to Milwaukee, on the west side of the lake, cross the lake, and then cycle down the east side back to Chicago.  

Surprise Cold and Rain
May in Chicago is normally warm and sunny, right? We spent five days in Chicago around the time of the wedding, and most of them were cold and rainy. In fact, I had to go out and buy a long sleeved shirt for the wedding, since I had only brought a short one. The coldest day had a maximum temperature of 9 degrees Celsius, and we were thinking “what on earth drove us to this god forsaken place, when we could have stayed in warm and sunny Vancouver”. Little did we know that we were about to enter a furnace… The wedding was a fun and rare opportunity for the whole family to get together, with people coming from all corners of the US and the world.

Surprise Bikes
Once the wedding was over, we started thinking about our trip a bit more. Since we flew with American Airlines, and they wanted to charge us an arm and a leg to bring our bikes along (a total of $600), we decided to leave our bikes at home and to find a store that will rent us bikes. Unfortunately, it turned out that the one bike store that does bike rentals in the area was renting out all of their rental fleet, in three different locations, on a particular day during our trip, so that wasn’t going to work. It also turned out that the cost of renting was going to be almost the same as bringing our bikes with us… But then we had an even better idea – “let’s borrow bikes from someone for free”. Luckily, my aunt Dina and her newly-wed husband Mike were willing to loan us their (not often) used bikes. We just had to buy two rear racks and install them, and we were in business!

Surprise Trails
The middle of the US is not where one would expect to find some nice bicycle trails, but… We were able to cycle most of the way from Chicago to Milwaukee on trails. Yes, they were straight and a bit boring, and yes, they were exposed to the sun, and yes, they sometimes followed power line rights of way, but we love trails. So nice to be off the road, and it gave Neil an opportunity to ride which he took up most of the time when offered, and later in the trip he started riding some quiet roads as well. We also found some totally unexpected and delightfully shady trails, such as from South Haven to Van Buren Park and between Holland and Saugatuck.

On the southern outskirts of Milwaukee, we stayed with a very nice host family. The father was doing a cleansing fast, which involved drinking only vegetable juice for a week, with plans to race across the US in the TransAm race next year. The next day we cycled one of the nicest sections of trail on the trip, right along the shore of the lake, with views that extended so far that it would have been easy to mistake it for the ocean. The trail took us into southern Milwaukee and directly to the ferry terminal. Looking back towards the skyline of Milwaukee, the skyscrapers faded into the distance fast – the ferry isn’t cheap, but it’s fast and comfortable. When we arrived, we took a detour to a bike shop, but it was worth it to cycle the beautiful board walk trail right into Muskegon.

Surprise Heat
After the initial cold and rain, we got hit with a heat wave with temperatures up to 34C. Growing up in Israel, those kinds of temperatures would have only qualified as warm, not hot. But after many years of living in Vancouver, where anything above 25C is a “heat wave”, I guess our perspective has changed. We had brought along our bathing suits, as an after thought, thinking we probably wouldn’t use them. Given the weather, they became absolutely essential – we stopped at beaches to swim almost every day. It turned out that there are many beautiful sand beaches along the lake. With their white sand and shallow turquoise water, one could be forgiven for thinking we were in Thailand for a moment. All one has to do to shatter that image is to look at the ends of the (public) beach and see the “private beach” signs, and it is gone.

Surprise Rain
After the intense heat, came the intense rain. For most of the nights we camped in official campgrounds. When we saw the forecasted 79mm of rain for one night, we were a bit concerned. We arrived to Dune Lake Campground and dawdled around, swimming in Dune Lake, watching the clouds moving in. Just after we got out, the storm arrived, right on schedule, and we ran to seek shelter in the bathrooms, not for the first time. It rained hard for close to an hour, and by the end of it the whole campground was full of large puddles. Luckily the campground had cheap cabins for us to stay in, and we hadn’t set up our tent yet. We were nice and cozy in the cabin, and of course, it didn’t rain during that night at all…

Surprise at the Graveyard
We had very few mechanical issues on this trip. Only one flat tire, with a rather awkward timing. We had just stopped at a graveyard for lunch – it had nice grass and shade. After lunch we picked up our bikes and were about to leave, at which point we noticed the flat tire. At that same time, the forecast storm started, and it was raining so hard, that I could almost imagine I was in the shower. We arrived to Weko Beach Campground, just a few km’s away, totally soaked, and decided that staying in a cabin would be the saner way to go – a good decision, this time it kept on raining. Neil loved climbing up and down the bunk beds, his playground for that evening.

We did have some other mechanical trouble. Mid trip we noticed that one of the trailer’s wheels was a bit wonky. Turns out a bunch of spokes had gone completely loose. Sure enough, this was the one trip I had neglected to bring a spoke tool on. Then on our last day, and just one hour from the end, the bike I was riding started making some crunching sounds, probably from the bottom bracket. I started thinking how ironic it would be if we had a break down that would force us to call in a “rescue”, so close to the end…

Surprise Hosts
We stayed with four different Warmshowers hosts on this trip. All were very hospitable and nice to talk to, and obviously passionate about cycling, but in other ways they were very different. Our first host lived alone, in a house that is absolutely full of stuff, with barely room to move around, let alone sleep (we camped in the tiny yard). When we arrived to our last host, in Beverley Shores, it was after riding through a pristine swampland on a very quiet road, and even seeing houses was a surprise. But when we saw this house, or should I say castle, we double checked the address – surely we were in the wrong place. We were wined and dined appropriately, Neil got to play with more toys than he has seen in his entire life (only a slight exaggeration, believe me), and we enjoyed the tree house (large enough to live in, by Vancouver standards), zipline, slackline and so on!

Surprise Holland
We had seen on the map that we’d be going through a town named Holland, which seemed like an odd name for a town in the US. Given our usual lack of planning, we didn’t know anything about it. We arrived and started noticing windmills and other signs of European influence, and started thinking maybe there was something to the name. We stayed with wonderful hosts there for two nights. This gave us the opportunity to explore the area a bit more, on a “rest day”. We headed to Windmill Island, where there is a working windmill that was transported from Holland laboriously (one can buy the flour there), a cute horse carousel, and a mechanical music machine. It’s an overpriced fake-feeling tourist attraction, but it’s also fun, a fresh breath of air – something different.

Surprise Chicago
We caught the train into Chicago, to skip an industrial zone that we figured wouldn’t be a large loss not to ride through. Arriving to downtown, we were surrounded by the famous Chicago skyline, literally scraping the sky. We headed over to Millenium Park, to see the Bean again – it is a huge mirror-like sculpture, shaped like a bean, and it reflects the impressive skyline playfully. From there we took the excellent Lakefront Trail, which follows the lake from downtown Chicago to the northern edge of the city, at Edgewater. The lake was very high, the water lapping over the trail, with no barrier stopping Neil from cycling right into the (deep) lake. With the top of the buildings shrouded in clouds and the fog over the lake, it was like a scene out of a movie.

Surprise Hummus at The End
At the end of the Lakefront Trail, in Edgewater, we found a middle-eastern restaurant, which happened to be playing Israeli music. Over a large plate of hummus, it could have been a scene in Israel. We then connected quiet streets into Evanston, a cute college town, where there is a new separated bike lane right through Northwestern University (Google Maps didn’t seem to know this, take that!).

The final stretch was along the train tracks, on the Green Bay Trail, right back to Highland Park. We stopped at every playground along the way, at Neil’s insistence, but really, we were happy to sit down on a bench, rest, and reflect on the trip’s looming end. After cycling through four states, and getting a new perspective on the American Midwest, we arrived back to Dina and Mike’s place, where we had started.