A Minor Odyssey
A minor odyssey
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
SINCE 9/11,THINGS HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT. There was a strange shift in American psychology following that murderous event, and it seemed for many months that no one, including Barb and me, wanted to venture very far from home.
Lavish trips and endless hours in airports suddenly seemed pointless. Why lose long days in transit when our families and friends were right here? Why go halfway around the world when virtually all of us in North America live in places that are never more than a few hours’ drive or ride from some small (or spectacular) natural paradise we’ve never fully explored?
Since those dark days, American travel patterns have gone, more or less, back to normal, but the tendency to look into our own backyard for diversion has not entirely gone away.
Barb and I are much more likely, these days, to get out a map of Wisconsin (where we live) or the Great Lakes region when planning a vacation. We’ve been taking more short, fun motorcycle trips and fewer road-pounding forays into the Great Plains or beyond. We’ve also found it’s nice to be within a single day’s ride of home when the house-sitter calls and says, “Your dog ate three pounds of cat treats, and 1 think he’s hallucinating.”
So it was an easy sell when our friend Randy Wade called a few weeks ago and said, “Marilyn and I are thinking of taking a four-day motorcycle trip to Michigan on our Honda VLR800. It might be fun to take the high-speed Lake Express ferry from Milwaukee to Muskegon and then ride up the Lake Michigan coast and explore the Leelanau Peninsula. I found a cabin we could rent on a bay near Manistee. You guys interested?”
“That clattering you hear is our touring gear falling out of the closet,” I said. Or something less clever, possibly.
Randy did the legwork (i.e. Internet work) of getting ferry tickets-$240 round trip, per couple and motorcycle-and securing the cabin. All Barb and I had to do was pack.
Ah, but what motorcycle to take?
I walked out to the garage, where my two choices were the new KTM 950 Adventure and my 2003 Triumph Bonneville. Not too difficult a choice; the KTM’s free hard bags-part of a sales promotion when I bought the bike in May-still had not arrived after 2 xh months of waiting. (You’d think an Austrian company
might grasp the concept of a short riding season, but no...) Soft luggage was out, because the high pipes tucked under the seat would set the bags on fire. Also, Barb found the stock KTM seat too hard for a long trip, and 1 hadn’t yet ordered a costly aftermarket one.
So, I strapped our set of soft bags on the conventional, comfortable Bonneville, and off we went on a bright and sunny Saturday morning, riding two-lane backroads all the way to Milwaukee with Randy and Marilyn. We ate lunch at an outdoor café downtown, then rode down to the ferry terminal. About 10 bikes were waiting-all of them Harleys-beside the line of cars. We were loaded first, parked in a special bike area with Drings built into the steel floor. The crew gave us ratcheting tie-downs to secure the bikes, and we went above to the nicely furnished passenger lounge.
A long and honorable tradition, carrying bikes on a ferryboat. Barb and I had taken the Liverpool ferry to the Isle of Man in 1982 for the TT, and just two summers ago Pat Donnelly and I had ferried our Ducatis across Lake Michigan to Ludington for a track day at Grattan. But this new Lake Express ferry was something special: It was fast. We blasted across the lake in 2 Vi hours at 40 mph. I went outside on the deck and nearly lost my hat and sunglasses in the wind. Women in dresses fled back into the cabin, or at least the modest ones did.
Disembarking, we rode through the city of Muskegon-a strange mixture of lovely lakeside homes and lost industrial magnificence in an eerily quiet downtown-and then headed north along the coast on the sinuous and charming twolaner that is BR-31.
Checking into our deluxe cottage on Portage Lake (actually a bay, with a narrow outlet), we went off to dinner at a grand old lakeside lodge called Portage Point Inn, then returned to watch a moonrise on our bay. Moonrises on bays are seldom bad.
Sunday’s loop around the Leelanau Peninsula was one of the nicest rides I’ve ever had. The twisting and dipping coastal road took us past huge sand dunes, high cliff vistas, fishing villages and deep woods that reminded me, alternately, of California’s central coast and parts of New England, but with their own wild, northwoods flavor. We returned to our cottage right at sunset and rode to dinner at a superb-yetreasonable restaurant called The Blue Slipper Bistro in nearby Onekama.
A leisurely ride down the coast on Monday brought us back to the ferry, where we killed some time until our 10:30 p.m. departure by dining very slowly at a good bayside restaurant called Dockers. We were supposed to leave on a 4:30 ferry, but got bumped off because the Kerry/Edwards campaign entourage had taken it over. This is a sacrifice I didn’t mind making because a) I’m a patriotic American voter; and b) the ferry company kindly refunded our full fare and gave us a free trip.
When we got to Milwaukee at midnight, Randy and Marilyn rode home to Madison on the interstate, but Barb and I got a motel room so we could rest up and take a meandering backroad trip home the next morning.
As we pulled into our driveway at noon on Tuesday, I looked at the odometer and realized we’d gone only 700 miles on the bike. Not very far, really, yet we’d had a wonderful trip, with spectacular scenery, a high-speed lake voyage, great meals, good friends, endless curves and not one mile of boring road.
It hadn’t been a relentless blast toward the far horizon, but it didn’t have to be. One thing I’ve discovered over the past three years on these short weekend trips is that the lakes don’t get exponentially bluer as you get farther from home. □
