Fall Vacation Part 3: Madeline Island (Sept 9)

Thursday turned out to be a beautiful, brisk fall day. Good timing because this was the day we'd planned to spend biking on Madeline Island, the centerpiece of the trip. Madeline Island looks like such an idyllic place to live, but I couldn't help thinking about the logistics as we rode across on the ferry. The friendly woman in the tiny Chamber of Commerce office answered some of my questions. Yes, the natives get a discount card for the ferry, but it is still expensive: several hundreds of dollars per year even if you leave your car behind and do all your mainland errands on foot. Apparently having friends on the mainland who you can carpool to the store with is a godsend, and almost a necessity once your kids outgrow the elementary school on the island and need places to stay overnight so they can participate in afterschool activities.

Besides chatting with the locals, we hung around town long enough to stock up on cheese and crackers for lunch, then hopped on our bikes and headed for beautiful Big Bay State Park on the other side of the island for a few hours, then back to the ferry, taking the longer route along the south shore to get us to 20 miles, our unofficial goal for the day. It was near sunset when we got back to the mainland, but we had time to pick up a couple of wearable souvenirs in the little tourist stores (earrings for me, a tie-dyed sweatshirt for Richard). Oh, and and a bottle of wine to drink by the fireplace back at the B&B.

Madeline Island Ferry (Thursday, Sept 10) Thursday brought us a beautiful, brisk fall day. We rode our bikes down the long hill to the docks and took the 10am ferry to the island.

( More pictures behind cut )

Fall Vacation Part4: Last Day (Friday, Sept 10)

Another sparkling fall day, so we decided to try a guided kayak tour of the "sea caves" along the shore north of Bayfield. But that didn't work out. Some of the outfits that do these tours had already closed up for the summer and the one that was left couldn't fit us with a boat that worked. Getting into those little kayak holes requires more bending, folding and spindling than Richard's joints can manage, and the tacky looking plastic canoe that Kayak John offered us instead didn't look all that sea worthy. So we wandered over to Tom's Bike Shop (aka Bayfield Bike Route) to look for a map of local bike routes. This was a perfect move. There aren't a lot of dedicated bike paths in the area, but good old Tom knows the road routes like the back of his hand and was able to suggest a poorly marked but perfectly paved forestry road that was actually on our way back to the cities. It really was a lovely bike route, although hillier than we expected. Still, by breaking our jaunt into two parts we achieved our 20 miles and headed home.

	National Forest Road #237 (Friday, Sept 10) Tom the bike shop owner tipped us off to this lovely road ride west of Washburn. Turn off to the south just before Hwy 13 swings north towards Cornucopia. It's like a great big bike path - 20 miles of brand new smooth asphalt with practically no traffic.
	More of NF 237 About this time we had figured out the catch with this lovely ride - it's pretty much all downhill north to south. Which means, since we started at the north end, that we'd be riding uphill all the way back to our car. Into the wind. Ouch. So we sensibly stopped at 5 miles and rode back to the car.
	Ino Bar Since we were trying for 20 miles a day of biking, we came up with this great solution to the hill problem. We drove to the south end of NF #237, where our intel told us we would find a bar. After fortifying ourselves with beer and fried chicken fingers we set out from the south end of the trail, heading uphill.
	NF 237, south end We made it 5 miles up the trail, and now it's downhill all the way! Whee!