July 27 Day 57 Escanaba, Michigan 41 miles 2:54 riding
Cool and flat - one of our fastest days.
I was bitten or stung on the shoulder by something on the way into town. Impressively painful. If you stand on grass here, some sort of bug immediately starts biting your ankles. I've scratched mine bloody in response.
We took a half rest day. Michele did laundry and cleaned the bicycle chains while I updated the blog. I have invited Michele and Roy to put in their own commentary for the blog but they decline.
I'm sorry to have left everyone hanging for news for a while. By the time we get into town and get set up, it's generally too late to get to a library. Lots of towns, if they have a library at all, have reduced the hours to save money. I recall in Hope, Minnesota, the library was open a total of one afternoon per week. My companions are more purposeful than I am. If I suggest stopping at a library midway through a day, they pelt me with Gatorade bottles. Because of the especially shameful way they treated me yesterday, they relented today, thus the opportunity to update the blog.
Pasties are very big in the Upper Peninsula. Pasties ("pahsties") are different from pasties ("paysties"). The former are little meat pies, a cultural remnant of the Welsh and Cornish miners who settled here. The latter, of course, are worn by strippers. We were sent to Grams for the edible pasties. Truly dreadful - there's a place in Alameda that makes much better ones.
I meant to mention that the ice cream store in Mora goes back to the 1920's. There's a picture on one wall of four teenaged waitresses in outfits that mark the date as the 1940's or perhaps the 1950's. I asked the cashier if anybody knows what happened to those girls. The cashier replied, "Well, one of them still works here."