I didn’t waste time in Mackinaw City. It’s 90% tourist stuff, and I’ve been there before. The park next to the bridge is nice, but it gets old. So I headed eastward on US23 toward Cheboygan. “US” normally stands for “UnSafe” in this context, but this one isn’t bad… for a US highway. I’d already ridden it a few times, when I did my Lake Huron ride. Having that stiff tailwind from the Straits helped. And it was just for 15 miles.
Heading south for there is an expedition into poor choices. The northeast Lower Peninsular isnt quite as bad as the UP in terms of having only one option for getting somewhere… but it’s close. I’d picked out a route along the Cheboygan River to get off M33 for a while, but it turned to dirt after a few miles. Another river route a little later turned out fine. (Tomorrow will pose similar challenges; M33 would get me there, but it’d be dull at best and miserable at worst.)
Clear Lake State Park is 10 miles north of the nearest town, and especially since I was running late, it made sense to stop in the town before for supper: Onaway. I’d identified the Woodwind as an option before leaving on this trip, and it was a good choice, a nice family restaurant and pizza take-out (Onaway is a small town) with kitschy gifts for sale. The bourbon-grilled turkey sandwich with bacon on multigrain bread hit the spot. So did the two glasses of cranberry lemonade. (Which I drank along with more than half a gallon of water from my travel bottle this afternoon, all without needing to pee. I sweat a lot today.) And really snappy wifi-enabled Internet access.
I arrived at Clear Lake a little before 7. I’m at the less-populated end of the campground apparently. My site didn’t have a picnic table (nabbed by someone for another site) but they brought me one pretty quickly. The park is on an appropriately-named small lake surrounded by woods. The hiking trails were surprisingly straight and wide… then I realized that they are cross-country skiing trails. I chose this park for its location rather than its character, but it’s definitely more my style than the one in Cadillac.
