DALMAC - Part 1

I said I would write it and I wasn't lying. Here is a narrative of our extremely challenging and rewarding bike tour from East Lansing to the Mackinaw Bridge.

The beginning is always a good place to start and so there we shall start. For anyone who doesn't know, I take my niece and nephews on a trip every year. We call them the Auntie-Niece and Auntie-Nephew trips. I let the kids pick where they want to go.One day last fall I got a phone call from Samone while I was at work.

She said, "Aunt Becki, I know what I want to do for my trip next year..."
I said, "OK, what do you want to do?"

She then informed me that she wanted to do the DALMAC. I'm pretty sure my response began with, "Do you know that it's like 400 miles on a bike?!" and it was followed shortly with, "Ummm, I guess I need to buy a bike..." So this is how it began.

Samone decided that Uncle Mike could join the Auntie-Niece trip as well and we all bought bikes. Shortly after beginning training, we all bought padded bike shorts. Very needed. We trained for about 2 months and we rode about 700 miles in our preparation. I began to feel pretty comfortable on a bike. This was pretty dramatic for me because when Samone suggested this trip I could barely ride by myself, let alone with people without fearing I/we were going to crash! Training went well and we bought all kinds of things to prepare for the ride. We had spare tires, tubes, electrolyte chews, a bike pump, etc. And then, whether we were ready or not... it was time to go.

We drove Charlie's truck into the MSU Pavilion early Thursday morning with all three of our bikes and plans to meet up with Suzzy and Lisa (German exchange student) for lunch at our house because the route went within 2 miles of our house. We got someone to take a picture of us all before we took off, but it wasn't a great picture as you can see.

Day 1

Day 1 was great. We took off about 8am. We were so excited to be on our way and the lunch stop at home with grilled pizzas was delicious. It was mostly flat from East Lansing to our first overnight stop in Vestaburg and a pretty easy 73 mile day. We were into Vestaburg by 2pm or so and Suzzy, Scott and Lisa (our awesome SAG support that were driving an RV for us to sleep in) weren't even there yet! We beat our support vehicle to the 1st stop! We had a nice relaxing evening getting settled into the RV together and making adjustments here and there after our first real day of riding. Mike, Scott and the girls went to the football game while Suzzy and I had dinner and relaxed in the RV.

Day 2

Day 2 started about 7:45am. We were trying to get on the road earlier, but suddenly it was 7:30 and we knew we needed to get going. This was going to be our first test day. We had 89 miles to go and we were a bit intimidated by it. We headed out of Vestaburg and then we had our first unplanned stop. Samone was riding along and a car that drove by startled her. She went off the road a bit and got a flat tire. We were headed downhill, so she had to shout ahead to me of her problem and I in turn had to shout ahead to get Mike to stop. Mike pulled out all of the supplies that we had spent hundreds of dollars on for this very instance and we discovered we had a problem. The spare tube that fit Samone's tires was not on any of our bikes. Whoops! So we called SAG support-Scott and he lept into action. He headed out of town towards us with the tube and we began pulling things apart to see what we could do in the mean time. We had some patches and by the time Scott arrived we already had it patched and Mike was putting the tire back together. We decided to ride the patch and see how far it got us (foreshadowing.. Man I'm quite the writer, lol.). Off we went patched and feeling good about surviving our first breakdown.

The day continued and was very challenging. The last 10 to 20 miles of all of the days seemed like they took hours and hours and hours to complete. It was of course in these last few miles, when we were all exhausted and excited to rest that we had our second unscheduled stop. Approximately 1 1/2 to 2 miles outside of Lake City, Samone's tire patches gave out. Sweaty, dirty and exhausted we stopped to fix the flat. My suggestion of trying to fill it with air and riding it soft into town was a no-go. It wouldn't even hold air for 20 feet, let alone 2 miles. This time we had the replacement tube that fit and Mike expertly changed it out. We rode into Lake City to finish our day. We were relieved to be off our bikes, looking forward to Suzzy's cooking and a shower, after completing our longest ride yet.

To Be Continued...