What are the permissions of that folder? Does the user you're logging
in as over SSH have permissions to write to that folder?

You say that the folder exists in the default path specified for rsync
(I'm not 100% sure what you mean by that), but you're not specifying it
for rsync in that command, you're specifying it for SSH - SSH is telling
rsync to sync to a directory with absolute path /mike_laptop_home. Is
this really what you're trying to do?

Other than that, I'm not sure and as it's now gone midnight over here
and I'm too tired to think straight, I'm afraid I'm off to bed :-)

I'll have a look at this tomorrow when my head'll (hopefully!) be a bit
clearer :-)