The Spokesrider

  Up ahead at the stop sign there is a very slight jog in the road.   It’s where Osborne Road in Barry county crosses Manning Lake Road.  Manning Lake Road forms the boundary between Barry and Johnstown townships. Whenever I’m traveling on an east-west county road in Michigan and I come to a slight jog [...]

Whoever would have thought Banfield would get yuppified? What you see in this photo is most of the little village. Usually I see it riding from the south on Banfield Road (from the right, in the photo). But early yesterday evening, I came to it from the west. It had never looked this pretty before. [...]

On a late Sunday afternoon bike ride I rode along much of Osborne Road in Barry County. Much of the road is gravel, and I spent a lot of time looking down, watching for patches of loose gravel. I almost ran over this snake coiled up, but with my trifocals wasn’t even sure that’s what [...]

  This photo of Woodland Town Hall in Barry County, Michigan, was taken on the first day of my ride to Drummond Island, which trip I started to tell about here. You can read the marker here at www.michmarkers.com. At the time I thought this and other old township halls had no particular significance for [...]

The ride to Huntington in mid-October 2004 was the last of my bicycle tours for 2004. (The route is shown in the red oval on the map below.) The first was a June vacation to Drummond Island. On that one I rode 610 miles in 6 days of riding. But it wasn’t six consecutive days [...]

This is the gravesite of Nawehquageezhik (Noonday) and his wife, Somonoque, at the east end of Cressey Road in Barry County, Michigan. The gravestone is in the mowed area to the right of the bicycle. This story of this gravestone is connected with another gravestone near Vincennes, Indiana, that I’m hoping to ride to this [...]

This road is just a few miles from where I work. I took a few hours off from work to go riding late last October, and wanted to ride on a least one road I had never been on before. This one fit that criterion. Before riding there I hadn’t know that there were any [...]