Finally, the rains cease

I live on the north side of the Kalamazoo River, but most of my riding destinations are on the south where there were settlers at the time of the Black Hawk war. The places to cross the river are limited, but one of those I use most frequently is on the east side of Galesburg. It’s a quiet crossing where I don’t have to compete with cars entering and leaving I-94. The street shown in the photo is where I turn off of MI-89 to get to the bridge.

This time there was extra water. Not that the river was quite this high, but there was standing water in a lot of places due to the extreme amount of rainfall we’ve had lately. We’ve now (Monday) had two dry days in a row, so maybe things will get back to normal, except that there seems to be an outbreak of Eastern Equine Encephalytis in the area. It’s a mosquito borne disease, and the mosquitos know how to make use of all the standing water. I don’t know if it will affect any bicycle camping plans in the next few weeks.

I was amused by the commercial real estate sign standing in the middle of the pool of water. But while moving in for a photo I was also distracted by a sign behind me.

I did a double-take and then a triple-take. Finally I realized it was not trying to tell us that Galesburg is one of the nations. Short attention span, I guess. I should have read further. But when I did still didn’t quite get the connection between Galesburg being one of the nations, whatever that meant, and Galesburg being a great place to raise kids. Until, that is, I saw that the two phrases are enclosed in a single set of quotation marks: “One of the Nations GREAT PLACES TO RAISE KIDS”

It could also be pointed out that Galesburg apparently is not a great place for kids to learn punctuation, such as how to use an apostrophe to make a noun possessive. (I like an excuse to crank about Galesburg schools even though I know some fine people who attend them. I’m still disgusted with that school district for despoiling the landscape by building its new school at the mouth of what was once one of the prettiest little creek valleys around. It’s now filled up with asphalt parking lots, school buildings, and a housing development next door to it. A favorite scene on my bike rides is no more.)

Galesburg is about 10 miles from home and Mendon is at the 30+ mile mark. I decided to try something new as I neared Mendon — a different route — taking Osgood Road as far as it would go until it turns aside to avoid running into the St. Joseph River. The last few miles are gravel. It was surprising to see all the washing of gravel that had taken place, but the road was already dry enough to be firm except for a couple of spots, like the one in the photo.

There are a lot of gravel washouts even along the paved routes. I imagine it’s going to be expensive to repair them all.

YTD mileage: 1403.0

Oops. I almost forgot that I should have given myself a few more miles from my ride home from work last Thursday night. I waited until a heavy rain ended, and then took off when it looked like the next storm was quite a ways off. But my boss flagged me down and said an alarm had been reported in one of my equipment closets. So I turned around to check it out. That added one mile. But as I departed again I began to realize there must have been a lot of wind with the rain. The further I went along C Avenue the worse it got. For some time I have had my eye on certain trees that I figured would come down on the road in the next big windstorm. (I prefer not to be riding when they come down.) But some of those that were down were big, healthy maple trees that were just uprooted. Maybe a factor is the softness of the ground from all the rain. At one point a power line was down across the road, too, so I turned around and took a different route around to the north. But all the extra time on the road meant the next rain was just starting to catch up with me. Close to home a volunteer fireman was stopping traffic at the intersection to our road, but it was because of downed trees and wires in the direction of my usual commuting route. We compared notes — he wasn’t aware of the downed power lines that had caused me to divert my course — and then I rode the rest of the way home to tell Myra about all my adventures.

Myra wasn’t very interested in my story, though, because she had just got home after being chased by a tornado. She had seen one touch down out by the airport, and drove away from it at right angles to its path. The tornado just touched down briefly, but she didn’t know yet that the worst of it was over. She was trying to get through a driving rain that made visibility difficult, but it eventually let up as she got closer to home. She didn’t think my story was as exciting as hers, and I suppose it wasn’t. But it was all one storm that cut through the area from northwest to southeast. We got several more inches of rain that evening, and then more for the next couple of days, all of this coming on top of other rainstorms that have kept coming, day after day.

I suppose my extra riding didn’t amount to much more than 4 miles, despite how it seemed a big detour at the time. Corrected YTD mileage: 1407.0