“Some difficulties meet, full many. I find them not, nor seek for any.” James Holman from A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler.

With detours, which I’ll explain shortly, my route today from Romeo, MI to Fenton, MI, was about 50 miles. The sun was shining as I left the idyllic historic village of Romeo, founded in 1830. Like a number of small towns outside the Detroit metropolitan area, Romeo celebrates the history of the town even as the metropolitan area has now drawn much closer, with its attendant traffic and development. It was a delight to have a place to stay in a Vrbo in an old home on Main Street close to the center of the village. I learned that the town was named Romeo by Laura Taylor, wife of the first merchant in town, who thought the name was “short, musical, classical and uncommon.”

About 13 miles west of Romeo, as I neared the town of Lake Orion, MI, I encountered signs telling me the road ahead was closed and I would need to take a detour. I wasn’t inclined to pursue an unknown detour, so I decided to have a closer look at the construction site, which you can see in this photo.

After I biked through dirt paths in the construction area, I talked to these guys who were taking down some trees on the site to see whether they thought I might be able to get through on a bike. They said that since I had already gone past the orange traffic cones, I might as well continue on through, but that I should “be careful not to be caught in the stump grinder.” They were very interested in my trip. I got some hearty fist bumps from them and then was on my way. But I was not to be so lucky in avoiding a detour as the day progressed.

I passed through Lake Orion a few miles further down the road, another example of an old town that has a number of historic sites, including this Methodist Church which moved to its present location in 1901 to “escape a noisy railroad.”

I stopped for a quick snack here in the center of Lake Orion, near a Children’s Park and Paint Creek, which runs through the park.

Around noon, the weather deteriorated dramatically, and the storm activity came in waves, so that just when I thought I was done with it, it returned with a vengeance. I had rain gear on part of the time, but I got pretty soaked when I didn’t. It was not the best biking experience–rain, heavy traffic, and sometimes very narrow or non-existent shoulders. Then, after a mile and a half on a dirt road with potholes filled with brown water, I got to this road closure sign, on Ratalee Road near Clarkston, leading to a bridge over a major interstate. Or, I should say a bridge that had been over the interstate. Some quick internet research informed me that the bridge had been demolished just a week or two before, presumably because it was unsafe. I had no choice but to take a detour to another bridge, which meant backtracking down the wet dirt road.

Just when I thought my difficulties were behind me, the skies turned very dark, and an even bigger storm blew in quite suddenly, with a lot of lightning. I stopped under a tree for a little bit of shelter in a huge downpour. Yes, I know this is not what you’re not supposed to do, but I picked a shorter tree that I thought might not be a lightning rod. As the rain got a bit lighter, I was on my way again. And then the clouds parted, and the sun came out, revealing a double rainbow as I looked back down the road. The following photo doesn’t do it justice–it was pretty magnificent.

I arrived at my hotel, a Marriott, in Fenton, MI not long after that last storm cleared. In checking in, I learned that lightning had struck the hotel during the storm, taking out their internet service. I apologize for this late entry, but the day’s blog will need to be sent a day late because of this. The good news is that I did get a couple bags of free chocolate chip cookies from their snack station because they weren’t able to put any credit card charges through during the outage.