I think that's the problem. There's a disconnect between what SSH is
doing and what you want rsync to do. The SSH part of the command is
trying to connect you to a folder called mike_laptop_home at the root
level of the client PC and rsync then tries to write there rather than
to the USB drive.

I have to say that, while I use both rsync and SSH, I've never actually
tried to use rsync over SSH, so I'm not 100% certain, but from what I
can see, you need to specify the path you want to sync to in the SSH
connection, rather than relying on paths set in rsync.conf.

So your command should be something along the lines of

sudo rsync -azvv -e ssh --exclude 'mike/.gvfs' /home
mike@...:/full/path/to/rsync/to

If you're want to get the USB drive to always mount at a given point and
with the same permissions, then I'm afraid that fstab is not the way to
go - fstab is really meant for fixed rather than removable drives. At
this point, you have two ways to go. The simplest is to just give the
disk a label and it will always mount at /media/label - but from my own
experience, I can say that getting the permissions right is more of a
black art than a science.

The second way is more complex, but much more flexible and that's to use
udev. There's an excellent tutorial at
http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html but you need to be aware
that in one respect, Ubuntu does things slightly differently - where the
tutorial talks about using the udevinfo command to get the devices
attributes, Ubuntu uses the newer udevadm command. Just use the command

udevadm info --name=/dev/sdc --attribute-walk

to get your devices attributes (substituting /dev/sdc as appropriate for
your device).