Bike Across America – Day 39

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Start: Birch Run, Michigan
End: Port Huron, Michigan
Mileage today/cumulative: 88 / 2,873
Elevation Ascended: 1,152′
Weather: Rain, 69° at start; rain, 75° at finish
3D Relive Video (approx. 1 minute)

Here is the opening paragraph of the letter I want to send to the fine state we’ve spent the past three days in:

Dear Pure Michigan:

Enclosed is an invoice covering the full cost of two new bicycles, which will be necessary if my wife and I must ride one more mile on your terrible roads. I will also be forwarding all medical bills for physical therapy and massages required to restore feeling in our hands and buttocks. For your information, asphalt is not supposed to look like a cracked eggshell, nor should it have potholes that can swallow children and small pets. Also, no other state has turned its entire road system into a vehicle durability test track. And here’s an idea – if you weren’t paying your college head football coach nine million dollars a year, you could repair some roads.

I’m sure that Michigan has a great deal of stuff to see and experience, but we’ve been too busy trying to keep our bikes upright. This is not a place we will be returning to with our road bikes. Today, we rode through some nice towns and pretty countryside. As we entered Port Huron, it was clear that there is a concentration of wealth here. One of our SAG stops was in the town of Yale and, by chance, the Traveling Vietnam Memorial Wall was set up in the same park. This is a full replica of the Wall in Washington D.C. but on a slightly smaller scale. Just like the permanent version, the traveling one includes the names of all 55,000+ American service personnel who died in Vietnam. It was set up in Yale just this morning and will be there only through the weekend, so we were fortunate to see it.

We also stopped to see a unique 9/11 Memorial at the Brown City Fire Department. It included a beam recovered from the World Trade Center and honored the 343 firefighters who died in the terrorist attacks. We did not know that pieces of the WTC had been given to cities for memorials. In fact, the New York Port Authority had a nearly 10-year-old program to give out 9/11 artifacts to municipalities and nonprofits that requested them. Recipients of the relics must agree to display the items publicly. The Port Authority has given remnants to some 1,500 entities nationwide, including public-safety departments, first-aid squads and schools. Additionally, several went to Canada, England, Italy and Germany.

These two memorials seemed appropriate for a rainy, overcast day. Michigan has been a nice state to power through but now we grab our passports and head into Canada!