Since we first decided to take this trip, we’ve talked about doing a ‘shakedown ride’. This shakedown ride was to be a multi-day bike trip that served to test all our accumulated gear and make sure everything works/fits/performs adequately/doesn’t need replacing. This weekend, we finally did it! Although it wasn’t quite exactly what we thought it’d be…

We’d planned a 5-day trip from Chicago to roughly South Haven, Michigan and back. Alyssa had ridden this route once before and we were excited to have scenic Lake Michigan shores to accompany us on the entire trip. We picked our campgrounds, got our gear in order, and… nature required that we adjust our plans. Such is the nature of this type of thing (as if rescheduling from 2020 wasn’t evidence enough). The weather forecast became increasingly grim with every day approaching our trip. Eventually, the weather gave up and decided to just tell us that it was going to rain forever.

Okay, fine. So we adjusted, and decided to simplify our plans. We switched itineraries and decided to head north instead, to Illinois Beach State Park, for an overnighter. There were optimistic notions of going for one more day, but that was the ‘real plan’. So, 1 day late, we waited out the morning thunderstorm and set off.

It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg question, but the weather more or less reflected the general mood as we biked out of the city. After some frustrated riding, we spotted what seemed like the perfect spot to attempt curing our grumpy mood. A peanut butter cookie and M&M-Oreo ice cream didn’t make the vibe all that different, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

Eventually we made it out of the most frustrating sections (I’m looking at you, wet gravel parts of the needlessly complicated Green Bay Trail) and started getting some good speed going. Somehow, despite how bad the forecast (and the clouds in the sky) looked, we managed to not get rained on. 44 humid and sweaty miles later, we rolled into Illinois Beach State Park.

The vibe at Illinois State Park is distinctly Soviet – maybe it’s the weird boarded up buildings that all reminded us of the swimming pool in Pripyat, or the spooky fog that hung about everything despite the fact that it was broad daylight and in the 80s, but we felt like we’d entered some bizarro Exclusion Zone on the shores of Lake Michigan.

As we rolled into camp, it started to rain, so we set our tent up ASAP and then got to testing the rest of our cooking gear underneath the awning of the Chernobyl Swimming Pool building. Pasta with spinach, parmesan, pine nuts, and garlic… not bad for an inaugural meal! We were both really proud of the glow up our cooking setup has undergone – it’s so nice to not NEED to make an entire campfire just to make a hot dog, or whatever.

The rain kept our evening plans to a minimum. We cleaned up (by which I mean Alyssa showed Kevin how a pine cone is nature’s scouring pad), took showers, and then spent the waning light hanging out in the tent and relaxing. The rain continued through the night and into the next morning. After a nice night’s sleep in our new tent, we woke in the morning and packed up in between thunderstorms.

The forecast seemed to say that we might have a few hours to ride in, later that morning, so we decided to head into town and get some breakfast at a healthy foods-themed restaurant staffed by a couple and their 14 kids… we were intrigued based on that fact, but the food and service were really excellent. The sour cherry pancakes Alyssa got were beautiful.

The ride home was wet. We got pretty heavily rained on for about 45 minutes or so, and spent the rest of the ride drying out. Certainly one way to verify that our bags were waterproof, for sure. Really though, it was useful to know how our gear (and we) operate when there’s nothing to do but exist in rain, or wait out the rain, or deal with rain, et cetera.

We did make sure to stop for ice cream as the weather cleared up, because as we’ve previously discussed, this is a reliable method for correcting the arc of your day.

Suffice it to say, this shakedown ride wasn’t the 5 day pleasure cruise through southwestern Michigan we thought it’d be. Instead, we got a trip that is what a friend of ours once described to us as “Type 2 Fun” – if Type 1 Fun is something that’s fun while you’re doing it, Type 2 Fun is something that’s only fun in retrospect.

That being said, what it did accomplish was what we were really setting out to do – test all our gear. Our camp cooking setup performed admirably for the first time, our tent and sleeping arrangements were great, and our bikes are approaching being dialed in. A lot of useful information that all amounts to this: we’re pretty close to being ready to go. What a crazy realization that is, let me tell you.

That being said, we both look forward to the days on our trip that are NOT 24 hours of constant rain. Fingers crossed for those days!