Day 72: Frankenmuth, MI to Yale, MI

Aug 16 blog

65 miles

3,006 miles so far

We began this morning’s ride in a town called Frankenmuth, MI. Frankenmuth is a quaint Bavarian themed town. How did we get here you might ask?

Well, since we had been forced to take the alternate route north through Michigan’s UP which added a couple hundred miles to our overall route, we decided that we would rent a small Uhaul truck to reposition us from Mackinaw City. The objective was to rejoin the route directly south where we would have been had we taken the ferry across Lake Michigan as planned. So we rented a truck in St. Ignace, loaded our bikes and bags, and drove about three hours south in the rain to Bridgeport Charter Township where we turned in the truck, put on our biking rain gear and rode about 6 miles to the Marv Herzog Hotel in Frankenmuth! By the way, as I gathered from reading the memorabilia on the walls, Marv was a renowned musician/bandleader who was born in Frankenmuth.

From Frankenmuth we had a 65 mile ride to a small town called Yale, MI where we we would stay at the Sweet Dreams Motel. We decided we would have a nice breakfast at the Honey B’s Eatery next door, as they had gluten-free pancakes! We still managed to get a relatively early start and headed down the Main Street and over the Cass River on the Bavarian Inn’s Holz Brucke, German for “wooden bridge.” The Holz Brucke still stands as both the youngest two-lane, two-sidewalk covered wooden bridge in the world and Michigan’s largest covered wooden bridge. It was a beautiful way to start our ride today.

We passed several farms as we traveled the country roads and had a nice surprise, as we got to ride on the Southern Links Trailway for the section from Millington to Otter Lake. We eventually made our way into Yale which had a little downtown and Main Street. There we found the Sheldon Pharmacy where I was able to pick up a prescription, the Yale Wash House where we did our laundry, and finally, the Yale Tavern where we had our dinner - all just minutes from our hotel where we would retire for some “Sweet Dreams.”

Words to live by.. Honey B's Eatery