Day 34, August 28: lake districts

Delavan, WI to Mettawa, IL near Lake Forest, IL http://cyclemeter.com/85ef50859d8f1e5c/Cycle-20150828-0725

Distance:  72.9 miles (contains about 4 miles of evening errands)

Total trip distance:  1979.9 miles

Average speed: 12.3 mph

Maximum speed: 27.3 mph

Riding time: 5:54

Weather: temperature was about 60° when I started at 8:20 and reached the low 70s. The dew point was in the high 50s. Not much wind at first, and then anywhere from SE to SW at speeds of 3-6 mph as the day wore on. The sky was overcast all day and a few raindrops fell for brief periods, but not enough to dampen any road.

Terrain: uphill 1160 feet, downhill 1425 feet. The profile shows lots of small hills as part of a larger downward trend as I approached Lake Michigan.



The route on this day had lots of recreational landscapes, thanks mainly to the many lakes in Wisconsin's Walworth and Kenosha Counties and Illinois' appropriately named Lake County. The Cyclemeter map below shows the lakes. The Wisconsin portion of the route tends to be more agricultural while Illinois' Lake County has more suburban and exurban development as well as a large green belt of preserved prairie, forest, lakes, and wetlands.

I often saw small cryptic signs at corn field edges such as this one near Geneva, WI. Helena Chemical's website says that Axilo is a broad line of 100% EDTA chelated, dry micronutrients. What is EDTA you might ask. It is Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. According to Wikipedia, ETDA is used to dissove lime scale, the hard, off-white, chalky deposit found in kettles, hot-water boilers and the inside of inadequately maintained hot-water central heating systems. Somehow it must also be useful for growing corn.

Roadside memorial at the edge of a marsh that's part of Geneva Lake.

The lakes in Walworth County, and maybe Kenosha County as well, are part of a large landform region called the Kettle Moraine, which stretches all the way to Green Bay. I noted in an earlier post that a moraine is an accumulation of earth and stones carried and finally deposited by a glacier. Kettle refers to a hole in the ground made when a chunk of glacial ice got entirely or partly buried in glacial sediment and subsequently melted. Kettles can be large or small.

Geneva Lake is the largest lake in the three counties I biked through. It is a kettle lake. This photo shows part of the tourist infrastructure in the wealthy city named Lake Geneva. The town of 8,000 is popular with tourists from Milwaukee and Chicago.

The city of Lake Geneva has a set of railroad cars used to house tourists.

Hooking a big one on top of Mad Dan's Cafe in Twin Lakes, WI.

Rock Lake is a small kettle lake near Twin Lakes, WI.

Cedar Lake is near Lake Villa, IL. Passenger trains brought Chicagoans to the lake beginning in 1886. The service stopped at some point, and then was revived in 1995. A guy getting ready to fish told me that it's the second cleanest lake in Illinois. I later saw an Illinois state report from several years ago stating that Cedar Lake had a clarity of 12.5 feet. That sounds pretty clear to me.

The Rollins Savanna Forest Preserve at Third Lake, IL is one of many nature preserves in Lake County. Together, these preserves form a green belt. My guess is that this green belt exists because of  a county or multi-county effort to retain areas of largely undeveloped or wild land near urban areas.