Day 12 MI to WI

The plan for the day is to get from Ludington, MI to Shawano, WI just under 170 miles but nearly 6 hours travel time. To be fair, 4 hours and 60 miles was on a ferry.

Our stay last night was very nice at The Summer’s Inn, and we got an early start after breakfast, Mandi got a couple of pictures of the garden area of the Summer’s Inn (we both would recommend). Then we were off to board the ferry crossing an extremely interesting vessel the SS Badger. Rather than me trying to explain it, other than it’s quite different than any ferry’s we’ve ridden before, here’s a video that explains it quite well.

We sailed at 9:00 am and arrive in Manitowoc, WI around 12:00 pm gaining an hour while crossing due to time zones. At the moment of writing this blog it’s 11:07 and I can just see land on the leading horizon. We arrived exactly an hour later, and made the choice to explore the little roads as big roads would only take an hour.

Normally I might enjoy an early day, but it would get us in too early to check into our room, and it added an hour and maybe ten miles this way, so little roads it is. After about an hour we rolled into Freedom WI, and we saw a place called Buzz’s Bar & Grill. Well we had to stop for a drink to toast our freedoms to be able to enjoy this ride. Cheers to Freedom! The bartender was awesome and very attentive our food was excellent and drinks were cold. The locals were friendly and even helped us learn how to say Shawano (apparently it’s pronounced Shawno by the locals), and they were kind enough to notice our accents (Wait, what accent?), anyway if you’re ever in Freedom check out Buzz’s.

Next was a scenic ride through some more backroads arriving at The Four Season’s Resort to check-in. Then it was time to do laundry, of course neither this hotel or our next had on site laundry facilities so we gathered all the dirties and headed for the Washette, to sudz our dudz, while Mandi did laundry I ran down and washed and topped off the bike. Our next task is finding dinner…

We chose the Longhorn Saloon for grub, it’s a BBQ style place, that was bbqy. The locals were nice and only reminded Mandi of her accent, but small world we ran into a former Washingtonian who had moved here not too long ago from of all places Roy, WA where I lived just before getting out of the USAF, and moved to the Tri-Cities, and even more ironic he retired from the USAF out of McChord AFB, my last duty station a number of years before it became a joint base with the Army.

After dinner we rolled through downtown Shawano back to our hotel to call it a night. Tomorrow we roll further west to Barnum, MN, so stay tuned…