Square dancing and bicycling friend Linda Warren (top right) was part of our group of 9 enthusiasts who spent a recent Sunday rolling across Kelley’s Island in Lake Erie. That’s lady friend Sue Brooks (right) who staved-off her ever-present threat of seasickness in the relative comfort of the passenger cabin of our ferry.

AN ENCHANTING DAY—

Even the weather was fairly kind to us that day. While temperatures and humidity were challenging, the forecast storms didn’t pester us seriously until we headed for our evening meal before catching our ferry back to the mainland.

Then the sky snapped and sizzled with a deluge like Niagara while we munched to the beat of island music.

Add us up and we likely were pushing 600 collective years. But, age didn’t matter that day.

Fittingly, our first stop out there was Inscription Rock; a stone tablet of prehistoric Indian pictographs thought to date from between AD 1200 and 1600. Put our ages end-to-end and we could almost remember that span of time.

Our bike ride was a click over 11 miles—a fairly thorough, rolling romp on an island that is only 4 miles square.

And, our usually modest velocity allowed lots of time to savor the island delights as they slid into view, one-by-one.

I rode a wee bit and enjoyed the company of a butterfly whose journey just happened to be in my direction.

The on-shore breeze had that musty-fishy hint of scent that delighted the nautical memories.

We enjoyed Glacial Grooves, another geologic snap-shot from antiquity. We briefly pondered the surf-splashed beach slightly visible through the trees, but, rolled quietly by that noisy scene.

The bowels of the island are visible lots of places where quarries, past and present, have been mined to satiate the world’s limestone markets.

We stopped by the island winery and behaved ourselves—more or less.

With an awareness our magical day was ending, dinner conversation turned to our next outing. I suggested we ramble east to that spot where Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland are nearly co-joined and spend a couple of days hiking three state’s worth of the Appalachian Trail.

My enthusiastic companions quickly began to compare calendars and we tentatively settled on an early fall weekend.

Stay tuned.

Mark Meinzer does an image of Glacial Grooves located on the north end of Kelley’s Island. Deep, rounded cuts were carved in the island’s limestone during a previous ice age when glaciers ground their way through the area. This sample—which is 430 feet long, 35’ wide and 15’ deep--is the largest in North America.