July 6 2023 Day Thirty

July 6 – Imlay City MI – Day 29

 

Yep, didn’t make London Ontario, no not London England and decided to shut it down which I thought was early according to my iPhone, but the bike was right with the time, and it was already later than I had thought because for some reason it was only the bike that automatically applied the time zone change. My iPhone is set to do the same, but it didn’t switch until I shut the thing off and back on. I need better service than that and need everything on better time. I found that out when I ordered my last beer at the steak house and I said you close at 9:30, correct, yep, she gave me the beer and said it was 9:50, but I had plenty of time to drink it since she had a lot of cleaning to do. Had I known I might have skipped the last one, but it’ll help me sleep. 

 

I’m in a little town called Imlay City MI and I really wanted to spend the night in Canada, but the weather wasn’t cooperating with that at all, which put me here at the Lucky’s steak house with Brooke taking good care of me. When I say the weather wasn’t cooperating, I started hitting rain in Lansing MI and it didn’t stop that because of the weather and the time, I figured what better place to stop than here where I saw a steak house and a Days Inn just up the road. Now for how I ended up here.

 

I made sure I had my alarm set for an early morning start from Colby, because I didn’t want to miss the Milwaukee ferry to Muskegon Mi with a 12:30 departure, which gave me about 4 hours from Colby to the ferry. I did make great time and had plenty of time to chill at the ferry station and did some checking of the weather to the east. For me it was a nice warm dry ride to Milwaukee, but I did see according to the weather I could hit some of that rain that has been plaguing the East coast before I made the Canada border from Mi. There were no issues loading and strapping down the bike on the ferry and I guess I’ve done it enough that I kinda knew what I was doing. It was a beautiful day on the lake and an enjoyable ride across Lake Michigan. I did have something to eat and worked on my Colby story a bit, but nothing that really stood out with the ride. We did make pretty good time getting into Muskegon just after 3.

 

According to the map it would be a pretty straight shot to London ON taking the I96 to the Canadian border. The traffic was light thru Muskegon and nothing to complain about, but it did put me thru Grand Rapids close to rush hour that my trip was slowed down a bit more than I had hoped. Once I got out of the rush hour traffic, I did make pretty good time to Lansing where that’s when the rain started and fortunately it was not a heavy pour, but enough to slow me down from the 90 I was doing to just around 70 mph. You know I like hitting it hard when I’m on dry interstate pavement and doing 90 will get me places a lot quicker. 

 

So why Imlay City? Well, I had to make a gas stop and this is where I made my stop to top off the tank. I didn’t think it was too late according to my iPhone where once again I thought the iPhone time was better than the bike time. Once I was topped off, I decided to hit the road again and about 5 mile east, I hit construction that would be for the next 20 some miles. Again, remember it has been raining and even though the rain let up some, I pulled over to check the radar and it looked like heavier rain East that I made a decision at that point instead of getting caught in the construction and who knows how far to the next city, I figured that Steak House back in Imlay City looked promising that I turned it around and headed back. Found the Days Inn, got checked in quick and took a quick shower, even thought I had ridden thru a light shower part of the day and took a hike to the steak house where I did have a good steak dinner and enough beers to close down the joint. Right now, I am just hoping, rain rain go away and come back some other day.