In the three previous years, we split each year's ride into smaller one-to-three- day segments. But we were now far enough from home that the entire year's ride had to be done over consecutive days.

 

The ride toward Cleveland was a homecoming of sorts for me, having grown up in the suburbs there before moving away some 20 years earlier. A decade of life in southeastern Michigan made me quite familiar with the overall countryside between there and Cleveland.

 

Still, there were many places along the way that I'd never taken the time to visit. One such place, and a pleasant surprise, was the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Museum in Fremont. It housed all sorts of neat stuff, including such oddities as one of Richard Nixon's Watergate tape recorders and a variety of Civil War memorabilia.

 

Megan and I stretched our single-day longest ride to 60 miles. We ended the ride with stops at the homes of my sister and brother in the Cleveland suburbs.