Day 8: Sunday, June 22, 2003

I woke up about 8 AM and started packing my things. Elyse and Boris were up about 9 AM. Boris took their dog Bela for a walk. I took some pictures with my digital camera when he returned. Then we had breakfast of coffee, cereal, fruit, and bagels at home. After breakfast, we started talking about stock market investing. Elyse and Boris had a lot of questions. I tried to give them my best advice. By the time we ended this discussion and I finally got my bike packed and ready to go, it was one o'clock and starting to rain lightly. Not to be bothered by a little rain, I suited up in my rain gear and set off north from Minneapolis, then angled northeast across Wisconsin to Ironwood, Michigan. The rain ended after about the first 75 miles. The sun appeared, and the rest of the ride across Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan was clear. From Ironwood I rode east on Michigan highway 28 through the Ottawa National Forest to Ishpeming and Marquette, where I ended my ride with a fast-food dinner at Taco Bell and settled into a nearby motel for the night.

The scenery for most of the day was two-lane highway passing through hardwood forest with a few spruce and pine trees mixed in. The cuts for the roadway were wide enough to provide sufficient visibility to watch for deer in most cases, and the clearcut areas adjacent to the road were often covered with wildflowers. Pretty, but a bit boring after the first hundred miles or so. In all, I covered about 400 miles in 8-1/2 hours, but with the one hour time-zone change this got me to Marquette just a bit before 11 PM.

I stopped at a rest stop along the highway about dusk. Many mosquitos were swarming.

As with the deserts of Nevada and the plains of Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, the seemingly endless woods of northern Wisconsin and Michigan constantly impress me with the vastness of the American heartland. There are large geographic areas with very low human population density when one gets away from the major metropolitan areas. The U.S. population is highly concentrated in the metropolitan areas, and I would guess becoming more so. I am also surprised by the number of small towns that appear to have been prosperous at one time, but are now nearly ghost towns, at least from a small-business standpoint. One sees many shuttered businesses, some shuttered homes, and it even appears that the number of gas and service stations has decreased significantly in rural areas in the past few years. In the United States, economic activity appears to have become highly concentrated in urban centers while other areas are increasingly relegated to retirement and recreational use.