Our Memorial Day Holiday weekend in the Traverse City Leelanau County area was a great time. The partial contingent of the Sole Sistas all had a successful Bayshore Half Marathon. All completed the course under their 2 hour goal. The weather was incredible for camping, running and riding.
Craig, the Younger, and I managed to do a ride around Torch Lake in the afternoon of the girls running race. This was a nice undulating ride with some fast sections and a couple of easy hills. The hot tub and the beers after the ride made for a good day.
To refuel the entire group, with kids, went to Pearl's restaurant in Elk Rapids for some Cajun Crawfish dinner. Pearl's is a fun and popular place for food and drinks in the north. The food is good and the New Orleans style music is great.
Later on that evening, I was enlisted as the "designated driver" for the "after race" celebration. The three Sole Sistas" had a really good time traveling to some of the local Elk Rapids pubs. I will say that the celebration was complete and full.
Herself and I traveled back to our campsite at the Platte River campground of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. As I have said before, this is a great place to camp for its isolation and the night sounds of the critters, birds and the wind.
After sleeping in late on Sunday, we had a very nice brunch at the L'chaim Deli in Beulah. This place is a real jewel in a relatively desolate area for good eats.
Our Sunday saw some rest for Julie and a delightful ride in the Park for me. I love riding in this area because the vast majority of the roads are maintained by the federal funds from the Park. The examples of the roads that are maintained locally are really bad in many cases. The Park roads usually have paved shoulders and seem to be repaired well when there are issues.
Julie wanted to spend some time relaxing on the beach of Lake Michigan. I dropped her at the Esch Road beach and started a ride from there. This is a tough place to start from as you are essentially at the Lake level and then have a rather steep road to immediately tackle. I then traveled north through Empire, via Wilco Road. This route takes you up the back side of the Empire Bluffs with a fun ride down the hill through the woods into Empire. It is a bit tricky as this section of the raod has been "chip sealed", which does not repair the road, it merely covers up the defects and makes them almost impossible to see.
I stopped shortly at the Park HQ for a water bottle fillup. Again heading north toward the Glen Lakes I ran into some road construction. The detour shunted everyone from M22 onto M109 to get around the West side of the lake. This is required because the bridge across the "narrows" is being replaced. The detour was fun as you go up over a large rise and then get some 35-40 mph cruising down the back. As I got down to the west side of Glen Lake I turned east. This road takes you right along the shore of the lake until turning up hill toward Inspiration Point.
The climb up to Inspiration Point is a nice challenge that gets you way up over the east part of Glen Lake with a nice view of North Manitou Island and the two parts of Glen Lake. I missed a shot of a Bald Eagle soaring by just as I arrived at the turnout. The ride down the back of Inspiration Point is much steeper then the ride up. This results in a 45 mph cruise through a couple of nice turns and then out onto the flats beyond. I love it!
The rest of the ride took me on a counterclockwise tour of Glen Lake. This is on M22 and M109. The road travels through Glen Arbor, a nice northern Michigan destination for summer and winter activities, and then west past the Dune Climb and the DH Day farm buildings. The large barn and other buildings have been preserved by the Park to demonstrate the farming history that took place in an earlier time.
My ride back through Empire took me back up to Empire Bluffs in the opposite direction which I had traveled earlier. The climb is one that gradually gets steeper toward the top and wanders back and forth through a tunnel of trees.
The wind had picked up out o the NW while I was riding. This provided a helpful push back to the campground for a shower and some rest.
Our evening was capped by a nice Mexican dinner at the Roadhaus in Benzonia. A nice camp fire was our nightcap for a fun day in the north.
On Monday, we broke camp and decided to take an easy cruise home. It always amazes me the size of some of the "camping" trailers you see on the road.
Tuesday was a rain day to provide some sustenance for the growing grass, flowers and trees. Wednesday I went for a ride on Lakeshore Drive south of Grand Haven.
Part of this route is used for our Thursday evening Rock&Road group rides. As is usual in Michigan the asphalt roads take a beating from the weather. The resulting holes in the pavement cause the typical flat tires if the riders in the lead do not adequately warn or steer the group around the obstacles.
I want to make one point very clear: all pictures of the road conditions on this post are the result of tax payer funded work that has been conducted in the last two weeks. These are not photos of "stuff" that is awaiting repair, these have all just been "repaired".What annoys me is the seeming lackadaisical method used by the road crews to "repair" these holes. In the week before the Memorial Day holiday, the Ottawa County Road Crews were out doing their "cold patch" repair. As anyone that has driven in Michigan knows, this consists of typically taking a shovel full of the heated cold patch material and tossing it in the general direction of the hole in the pavement. Then the rest of the job, packing the patch material, is left to the passing traffic to take care of. This results in haphazard bumps, depressions and a patch work of marginal effectiveness.
As can be seen from the included photos some holes are filled and others are ignored. One hole will be "filled" and another right next to it will not be. So, in effect the work was wasted.
On my ride on Wednesday, after the holiday weekend, I again rode the Lakeshore Drive down toward Holland. This time, I noticed, the shoulders of the road, had been "pulled". This activity is supposed to renew the gravel shoulder back to the level of the pavement surface. This erosion of the gravel shoulder is caused by many things such as vehicles failing to remain on the road, mail delivery, general water erosion and subsidence.
The "pulling" of the shoulders is completed with the large road commission trucks with a blade under it and a gravel dumper in the back. This work is usually, or should I say supposed to, accompanied be a rotary broom truck. The first blade truck "pulls" gravel from the outside of the shoulder in addition to adding the quantity if needed. Then the broom truck cleans the "pulled" gravel off the road surface.
In my totally unscientific analysis of this process, it seems the rotary broom truck is broken and not used probably 75% of the time. This results in gravel being left on the right hand one third to one half, or mare of the road surface. This is then left to the other traffic, and weather to remove from the road surface.
As you can imagine, riding a bicycle on this type of road surface is dangerous at best. At other times when dry gravel is applied to the road shoulders, driver visibility is reduced and vehicle damage from the resulting flying debris occurs.
I have always wondered why this activity is not conducted in a more consistent manner. Sections of the road will end up as huge areas of haphazard patch material. The holes are filled in an entirely arbitrary manner with unpacked shovel fulls of patch material applied in a manner that does not take into account the size or the shape of the defect. The "pulled" shoulders are treated in a similar manner. The obvious poor work of leaving large quantities of gravel on the road surface, is also demonstrated by its arbitrary application. It seems the only criteria to the work is that the trucks covered the distance, spread some of their gravel or cold patch, then made it back to the road commission barn at quitting time.
This type of work on the roads of this state and county, has been going on for years. There seems to be no considered plan or reason for "repair" or replacement. The pot holes that form are haphazardly filled then reform as soon as it rains again. Roads are ground up and repaved to fall apart in a couple of years because the underlying problems are not taken care of. A good example of this will be Sheldon Road in Grand Haven. The southern few blocks of this road were just ground off and repaved. The underlying structure of this section consists of a narrow two lane road that was poured concrete before the road was widened and curb and gutter was added. This has resulted in the typical transference of the joints in the concrete and the edges of the concrete road surface showing through to the surface of the asphalt that was used to pave over and widen the road. This mess was just ground down a little bit and repaved. I would bet that within a year, these issues will be seen again.
Another example is the road I live on. It is a cul de sac with approximately 14 homes on it. Last year we received a letter stating there was some federal government money available to upgrade some of the poor streets in the county to acceptable standards. This was done on a township level of government. Our road had some minor cracking of the pavement and a patch about 4 feet by 10 feet that had been patched ineffectively a number of times. If the small area had been cut out and repaired effectively, instead of standing back and throwing a shovel full of cold patch at it occasionally, the other repaving could have been avoided. As a result, our road was ground down, all the storm sewers and manholes were raised up and the road repaved. All this while less then a quarter mile north of our road, Warner Street remains gravel.
This type of mismanagement, poor planning, expend the funds before someone else does, lackadaisical work which seems to reward speed over safety, quality and longevity needs to be reviewed. This economy cannot afford to pay for haphazard work that then needs to be redone almost as soon as the original work is completed.
Its probably one reason the SUV culture has flourished in this country: because the roads are so bad you need an "off-road" vehicle to drive on them. Try riding a bike on them!
Be careful out there, watch out for the holes.
