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Peninsula State Park is so large that we decided to spend the day weaving around the park’s miles and miles of trails, especially the bike trails. The park has two kinds of bike trails: 1) Rugged mountain bike trails. 2) Smoother touring bike trails. Our bikes, skinny-tire relics of the 1990s, require a smoother surface. The 10-mile crushed limestone Sunset Bike Trail fit the bill.
With ebikes exploding in popularity, let me say a couple of things about our ebikes. When we bought our first airplane, a two-seat Cessna 150, we wanted folding bikes to throw in the back, behind the seats. There were a few folding bike brands back then, but Bike Friday made the best one. They were very high-end and custom-built according to each owner’s body specifications. The folding system worked for our purposes. The bikes performed well enough, but we just weren’t avid bikers. When we bought our four-seat Piper Cherokee, we purchased two folding Italian-made DiBlasi motorbikes and the Bike Fridays collected dust for two decades.
We sold the Piper Cherokee in 2016 when the hours on the engine reached the “rebuild time”. Rebuilding an engine is a $20,000+ proposition and we just didn’t want to spend that much on the plane. By then, the motorbikes were also getting “long in the tooth”. In the summer of 2016, we purchased an old 1996, nicely maintained, 24’ Class A RV for $11,900. It was an inexpensive way to try out RVing. (We sold the RV 3 years later for $10,000.) As we planned for our inaugural RV trip to the Ozarks that fall, we thought about digging out our Bike Fridays. However, when we were in Europe in 2014, we noticed that a lot of bikers in Holland were using electric bikes, especially the oldsters.
Well, we were getting to be oldsters, so I tucked that electric bike idea in the back of my brain. Ebikes hadn’t hit the US yet in 2014. By 2016, they were just starting to make some small inroads. I called Bike Friday to see about retro-fitting our bikes with an ebike system. They recommended the Bionix retro-fit system and that’s the route we went. We left for the Ozarks with folding ebikes.
And they worked great, especially climbing up the steep mountains in the Ozarks. Being folding bikes, we could strap them down on the deck of our kayaks and have transportation back to our vehicle when running rivers. With this shuttle system, we were able to run two of the most gorgeous rivers in the Ozarks: The White River and the Buffalo River.
OK, fast forwarding back to the present: We still had plenty of charge left in our batteries after yesterday’s Washington Island tour so we tackled the Sunset Bike Trail. This wonderful trail features tunnels of cedar trees; the coast of Lake Michigan; a lighthouse; some hills; cattail-lined swamps; bright birch tree stands; and dark woodlands in the interior of the park. After riding the trail, the lonely back roads through the park’s backcountry is also available. If we ever replace our Bike Fridays, I would like to get an off-road ebike and tackle Peninsula parks mountain trails.
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