Lakeside living in the summer- who doesn’t love that?

OK, back to the adventure in its proper order.
Contrary to what the name might suggest to those of you with the sense of humor of a thirteen year old (including me), warmshowers.org is not an “organ”-ization dedicated to casual acquaintances sharing bathing experiences in the wee hours of the night but is, in fact, an international hospitality network exclusively for people like myself who prefer to travel the globe by bicycle. Although the network is extensive, there are geographical gaps in coverage so I decided to broaden my horizons a little and try out couchsurfing.com, another network open to all kinds of travelers.

Having left the comfort of Thunder Bay I found myself pedaling west through what I thought would be the last stretch of Canadian wilderness on highway 11. My first couchsurfing host turned out to be a cool cat named Matt in Fort Frances, Ontario bordering the US just across the Rainy River. I couldn’t have asked for a better ambassador to welcome me to the couchsurfing network. Completely out of character, I arrived earlier than our prearranged time and found that Matt was still out fishing on the lake. The wait was well worth it as there is nothing like being greeted with a meal of fresh pickerel and bourbon nips (there may have been some gin involved also). Matt’s place is less than a hundred meters from Rainy Lake so the next day we took a paddle out to explore a few inlets and cast the line out a bit. Go to Canada- catch a fish, that’s rule, right? My pathetic catch was no trophy to write home about but it was a rite of passage, nonetheless, landing my first pickerel in the Great White North.

View from the dock at Matt’s

It turns out that Matt and I have chewed a lot of the same dirt in our travels through Southeast Asia so I was more than happy to share the last of my road spices cooking up a batch of Malaysian style curry for dinner on my last evening by the lake. Upon hitting the road the following day I took Matt’s advice to “pop over and back” to the US side to resupply my groceries at a discount food market and I now believe that’s when the first day of the rest of my life began…or maybe the first day of the best of my life- that story is still unfolding and I ask the patience of my readers to allow me to relate it in good time.

The US border town just opposite Fort Frances is International Falls, Minnesota. I will apologize in advance to the good people of the county seat of Koochiching County for what I am about to say. I freely confess that warmshowers is a terrible name for a hospitality network but at least a warm shower is actually something one can look forward to when utilizing its resources; however, International Falls is, by no stretch of imagination, the nexus of cultural diversity one might expect from a township of that moniker.

…but I’m getting ahead of myself…

Back in the USA but oddly not as great as it usually is coming home

Tanya and I are still stuck at the border being detained, searched, and interrogated while the real threats to our nation’s security are freely crossing the border in their rented cars with Canadian plates; at this point the bounty of International Falls is but a dream just beyond my grasp.

Fast forward two and a half hours later with my soul (and my stomach) aching from the kind of malnutrition afforded by fast food and empty promises, night falling and no place to sleep, I decide to do what I always do- put one pedal in front of the other and move on to greener pastures. Now I’m so rattled from my border crossing experience that I decide to stay in my own country (at least I thought it was mine) for a while and see what great things Minnesota has in store for me. The sun had set and I was heading west along the river toward Baudette when I started singing a different, more upbeat tune and got back on track to thanking God, Matt, and even those douche bags at the border for detaining me and thereby altering my trajectory indirectly. The waxing gibbous moon in a gentle southern arc lit my ride from twilight ’til about 3:30 in the morning. As the moon set it got all huge and stirred a memory of my mother holding me as a child and pointing to that big-ass moon, my heart pounding and my little mind trying to wrap itself around the phenomenon. The skies cleared and filled with stars. I rode past innumerable white tailed deer and experienced seeing a head-on point meteor for the first time in my life.

That day the rising sun brought with it a vision of brighter days to come and continues to make good on its promise. The world didn’t stop growing for the last year; I just failed to notice it but I’m growing again and letting go is feeling less like saying goodbye and more like saying, “I hear you, Betty.”

This blog entry is totally out of sequence but the story needs telling now. When it rains, it pours. It has been a week of dealing with one mechanical issue after another. Replaced my front derailleur in Missoula. Suffered a bad tire rip and subsequent on-road repair fiasco on the Montana side of the Lolo Pass. After I successfully trashed my backup tube the sun was setting and I was ready to have a cider and just declare myself the clear loser in this battle. Enter stage left Heather and Jodee, two intrepid sisters of generous and understanding spirit who were riding their bikes to the west coast from Boston. I gladly accepted the invitation to crash in their cabin for the night so I got a good night’s rest in preparation to deal with the situation in the morning. In the end, that little clam bake cost me a return visit to Missoula for replacement tire and 2 more tubes. Thank you Kaleb, Emily, Ashley and Travis for your vehicle support in dealing with those issues; thanks Bob, Emily, and Locke at Free Cycles Missoula for all your assistance and thank you Brennan and Jordan for welcoming me into your new digs on short notice.

I got back on the road early Friday evening and then the fun really started. The icing on the cake turned out to be shearing off the machine bolt that attaches my right front pannier rack to the fork. Another night camped off the side of the road in grizzly bear country with no dinner in my best effort not to attract the company of uninvited, 600 pound, furry guests. On Saturday morning I found myself descending the Idaho side of the Lolo Pass riding in the rain, one-handed while carrying one of my front panniers in my lap at times and slung over my left shoulder at others. To my good fortune, a fire fighting pilot named Matt gave me and Tanya a ride to the next sizeable town, Lewiston, Idaho where I had planned to assess the situation.

I informed a couple of my facebook peeps of my situation and the friend of a friend network was activated. Within two hours I had assistance coming from two directions via North Dakota / Washington state connections (thanks, Stephanie and Stacy) and through my boy, Hans’ extensive bicycle network across the country. I’m hanging out in Burger King nursing off the WiFi udder, sheltered from the rain when Scott shows up with a truck to haul me and my gear off to warmer surroundings. We’re trying to figure out exactly what our connection is to one another and it turns out that I’m at the receiving end of some kind of four degrees of separation bike miracle. Scott has a bike shop and we pop in where he proceeds to drill and extract the metallic problem child from my fork and voila- Tanya is ship shape once again! Upon meeting Scott’s son, Everett, I told him how his father had helped with and he responds, “yeah, my dad is totally sweet.” You had to be there but the inflection in the word “sweet” was not the way one would describe that boy next door that all of the girls like but no one would actually date; it was “sweet” the way a bitchin’ Camaro turns heads at an auto show. Once again the Universe comes through with perfect timing and I’m back on the road heading for Portland with at least two new friends I need to see on the road to thank in person.

Scott, bike mechanic / heroic father

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Sleeping Robear with “Sleeping Giant” in background

People who have toured with me understand that I prefer to sleep outdoors and as far away from humans as possible. “What about wild animals?” one might ask, to which I say that the only “wild” animals of which I’m generally afraid are the savages that dump sodas on my tent while I’m sleeping and throw Slurpees and Frosties at me from their speeding vehicles while passing me at dangerously close distances. Metamorphosis has been a recurring theme with this undertaking and it seems I may be undergoing a growth change in the direction of giving humans another chance. It all started in “Canada’s gateway to the west,” Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Allow me to back up a little to my northern crossing of Ontario and its accompanying isolation and albeit beautiful, but physically challenging terrain and environment. The whole time I’m riding “over the top” on highway 11 I’m thinking, “just a little farther to the first town on the other side (Longlac) and I’ll be back in civilization with clear drinking water and a place to replenish my dwindling grocery supply. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Here is a little advice to American travelers who intend on visiting northern Ontario (all three of you- ha ha). Your bank card won’t work. Canada uses a different system to process debit card transactions and in many remote areas the businesses have no means to process credit card purchases. It’s still about 180 miles to Thunder Bay when I’m figuring this out so a “real” city is starting to look more and more like an oasis to me. It actually is funny in retrospect but you can imagine that at the time I didn’t appreciate the irony of the fact that my bank is Toronto Dominion, my card has the word “DEBIT” printed across the front, and it still doesn’t work. My readers should also excuse me from not having agreed with the grocery store cashier’s assessment of the situation, which was, “hmmm…that’s funny.” Yeah, consternation and starvation at the same time- that’s hilarious! At my next camping stop, a little rest area outside Macleod, an ornery, 200-pound adolescent (and wicked retah-ded) black bear kept me up for two hours while he tried in vain to pry open a permanently mounted, bear-proof garbage recepticle. Maybe it was better after all that I was running low on food.

Three black bears and three days later I made it to the fabled bay of thunder and found myself comfortably settled in at my host Annie’s house and chit-chatting with another cyclist named Marie while dinner was being prepared. Annie cooked up an absolutely amazing and visually appealing meal of which I couldn’t partake (because it was a pasta dish) but I got some other food in me belly and had a great time hanging out that first evening… and the second… and the third. We even accosted a random Japanese cycling tourer at Tim Horton’s and convinced him he had to join us at Annie’s home for wayward travelers. I was having a blast in town and it seemed completely natural when I basically moved in next door with Annie’s neighbor, Gary, with whom I had already become friends.

Gary and Big George

I ended up spending a week in Thunder Bay, cooking, hanging with my new peeps, eating ice cream, partying with Ojibwe natives, and learning about everything from exploring Nepal to timber framing houses in the wilderness of Ontario. On one day I spoke French with a girl from the Francophone Association of Northwestern Ontario and the next day I spent an afternoon working on a mobile soup kitchen for the Salvation Army. I was having the time of my life but all that sleeping indoors and drinking beverages colder than ambient temperature was making me soft; I figured I had to either get back on the road or get a job and an apartment. It wasn’t a happy parting but I did ride away from the experience with renewed enthusiasm for commingling with my fellow homo sapiens while traveling.

…don’t get me wrong- I still love hanging with wild critters!