While traveling in Florida, in a chance encounter, my husband was asked
about Lake Michigan. The gentleman wanted to know if Lake Michigan was
a fresh or salty body of water. Could you ride a bike around it in one
day? Could you see the other shore?
These questions surprised us, as
the magnitude and majesty of Lake Michigan are so obvious to us living here in Chicago.
Here are the facts.
Lake Michigan is
the third largest of the Great Lakes (Superior and Huron being larger),
and the sixth largest fresh-water lake in the world.
It's shoreline
is about 1600 miles long, which means it would take a cyclist traveling
at the average clip of 16 miles per hour 100 hours to circumnavigate
it. Allowing eight hours of actual cycling per day (hey, we're talking
an ambitious cyclist here), and no days off, he or she could complete
the trip in 12.5 days.
For the record, the surface area of Lake
Michigan is 22,300 square miles, which makes it a little more than a
third of the size of the state of Florida.
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