Sep 18-19 Heading Home, Part 1

  To get back home, we had originally planned to take a rental van. However, Kay's sister and husband from southeastern Michigan ended up driving instead of flying.  So we were able to ride back to Michigan with them yesterday and stay at their house overnight.  
  We put our gear back on the bikes and this morning set out on a 3-day adventure back to Holland.  We had a thunderstorm and rain last night but by the time we left we had sunshine. 
  The first 15 to 20 miles were busy,  then we joined the Mike Levine Lakeland Trail.  This is a rail trail that is one of the linear Michigan State Parks.  This took us almost to Jackson which is where we are staying tonight.   
       The  first changing leaves we noticed

  It was a good day for wildlife.  We saw a 12" snapping turtle, a 3-foot beautifully patterned snake, and a few frogs, one of which we were able to identify as a leopard frog.  We saw one bald eagle while still in the southeastern Michigan suburbs, and white egrets and blue herons on the rail trail.   We saw 4 chipmunks, numerous squirrels and 3 deer.  Sadly we passed two prison complexes today, one at each end of the trail.  
   Late in the day, we came across something we hadn't seen since Wisconsin--a tree down across the trail.  This one was too big to move, even if we had had all our crew to help.  It took some work and the breaking of many small branches, but we made it across. Before that we had only seen a lot of twigs and leaves, presumably from the storm last night.  

   We had received a mylar balloon in celebration of our crossing of the US and we tied that on Jim's bike for the ride home. But it must be strings are not made for that as about 17 miles along, Kay saw it break loose and head upwards out of reach. While it lasted, it was a great visual alert on the roads.  We also discovered that we lost the top part of our 2-part flag even before we lost the balloon.  Jim made a new flag tonight to go on the pole that is left.  We had carried extra flag material on this trip and had replaced them once before after they had gotten faded.      

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