Brian Lucas I should update my blog more often than once a decade…

Summer 1998 Bicycle Trip Part I: Winnipeg to Toronto

June 19 Winnipeg - Steinbach

The day before I was to leave on my trip, I got a flat tire, my first of the year. Not a good omen, I feared. But I loaded up -- way, way up -- and hit the road. It took me a long time to pack, re-pack, and re-re-pack, and I didn't leave until the afternoon. I stopped for groceries near home, and when I parked, someone asked me where I was from and where I was going to. She was disappointed when I told her I lived a few blocks away.

It was 3:00 pm by the time I left the grocery store. My trip out of the city was very slow, I kept stopping to adjust my load. The sky was fairly clear when I left the house, but it began to pour rain as I reached the edge of the city. I quickly donned my rain suit. I hit a pothole and nearly lost control and crashed into traffic. Although I had made a few loaded training rides earlier in the summer, I had never really put the full load on the bike at once before, and I was carrying more than I should have been. The bike was more heavily loaded than it ever had been before and I wasn't used to handling it.

One-third of the way to Steinbach, my left knee began to hurt. I adjusted the cleat on my new clipless pedals -- a tiny change in alignment, multiplied by thousands of strokes of the pedal, can make your knee rather sore.

The weather cleared up, setting the pattern that I would see for the next two weeks: short, heavy cloudbursts.

When I arrived at Steinbach (from the north), I thought I'd go to a campground that my guidebook said was 1.5 km south of town. I never did find it, though, and had to double back and stay at the campground north of town.

The Steinbach campground was a good place. They charged me $5, and although there were no trees or other shelter of any kind, the washroom and shower facilities were excellent. Supper was pasta and tomato sauce, some hummous mix, half a tomato, and cheese.

I worried about my knees a little bit. I had a hard time walking when I got off the bike (that was something I was to get used to -- after spending hours pedaling, it takes a while to readjust to a walking motion!) and my knees are more sore than I expected them to be. However, I felt very good about having arrived at my first destination, all of 56 km from home, and everything generally felt right. I already knew this was where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be doing.

June 20 Steinbach - Vassar

I thought about getting a "powered by CBC" bumper sticker. I listened to my walkman radio all the way here, and found it to be very good company for riding. My home station is fading, though, so I'll have to switch to a new one tomorrow. Knees still bothersome but less so than yesterday.

The mosquitoes here in the Vassar campground are terrible. If I keep pacing back and forth, they're not so bad, but whenever I stop, they attack. I wore my complete Goretex rain suit to wad them off -- anything thinner and they bit right through it. And Muskol. Evil, poisonous stuff, Muskol, but it works.

Camping was free in the municipal park, but there were no facilities except a water tap and an outhouse. Roughing it but free; I enjoyed that, despite the mosquitoes. This is obviously the place where people come to drink on weekend nights; don't pitch the tent next to the firepits with the broken beer bottles.

June 21 Vassar - Baudette

Got up good and early today, and with a fabulous tailwind I arrived in Warroad, Minnesota, by 11:30 am. Cruised at over 30 km/h for much of the way from Vassar.

"Clips" are those straps that go over your feet on some kinds of pedals. Clipless pedals have sockets on them that match sockets in the soles of special shoes you buy, and attach your feet quite firmly to the pedals. They ensure that your feet are held in the optimum position for pedaling, and allow you to pull up as well as push down on the pedals. They are a must for serious cyclists. However, they take some getting used to because when you stop riding, you cannot just lift your feet from the pedals and put them on the ground; you have to twist your feet sideways to release them from the sockets. This movement takes some practice before it becomes instinctive.

The fellow who sold them to me -- I bought mine for the first time shortly before leaving on this trip -- warned me that no matter how often you practice it, everyone fails to do this properly once, and falls down in an embarassing situation. It might not happen right away, but it will happen. Of course, he was right. For me, it happened about two weeks into this trip.

The border crossing was a sleepy little place, with very little traffic. The guard was surprised by me. It was raining again. He asked "why are your pedals half the size of normal ones?" I explained clipless pedals to him. He asked me why I was riding from Winnipeg to Toronto. My holiday! I said. He shook his head. Crazy guy. Ok, have a good trip.

Needing a map of Minnesota, I stopped in at the Warroad tourist information office, which is around the back of the liquor store. It also happens to be closed weekends. I went to the gas station instead. The clerk didn't even look up at me when I approached the till. "Gasoline?" she asked. "No," I laughed.

Good road conditions from Warroad. A narrow shoulder, the kind that gets you into more trouble if you use it than if you don't. A construction detour was annoying but there was new asphalt after the detour, which made up for it. Tailwind almost all the way. Traffic light and polite. The rain was annoying. Every time I stopped to take off my rain gear, another shower hit, but only for a few minutes. I didn't want to spend my whole time dressing and undressing, so I stayed in Goretex the whole day. Already my cycle-glove tan is getting quite noticeable.

A woman stopped me on the road with encouraging words. She was a teacher from Warroad, and had cycled the River Road bike trail from New Orleans. We chatted a few minutes. It was really nice to talk to another cyclist.

At the Baudette tourist information booth, I had a nice chat with the very friendly lady there. She surfed the Internet for me to get a list of NPR radio stations -- it will be good to have something interesting to listen to while in the USA.

The Baudette campground is city-run, the fee is supposedly $3 and collected by the police, but they never came by to collect it from me. Low-grade facilities, but hey, what do you expect for nothing? The municipal campgrounds are a good deal for people like me. One RV was parked here tonight, and I talked with its man. He sympathized with me on the headwind issue, he said loses an extra 1 mpg in a headwind because of the huge frontal area of the RV. The poor guy. He had a satellite dish.

Found a tick on my arm today (not yet dug in), which led to all sorts of twisting and turning in front of the bathroom mirror to try and see if there were any other passengers on inaccessible body parts. Nope. Also turned all my clothes inside-out before putting them on.

Knees a little bit sore, still, although at one point I had a feeling that I had clicked-in and had reached the point of no more worries. 130 km today, which I thought was quite an achievement.

These early nights are strange for me. It's 8:10 and I have essentially nothing to do but go to sleep, even though it's not quite dark. But early to bed, early to rise, makes a lot of sense out here on the bike.

June 22: Baudette - International Falls

Chatted with the RV fellow again this morning. I was up by 6:00, on the road by 8:15. Partly cloudy, wind fair. A few rainy spots but the rain was always light and never lasted more than a few minutes. The road was good, highway 11 has very light traffic.

International Falls seems a fairly generic "small town USA". I suspect the main industry is catering to vacationers going fishing. The urban campground here was $7 and adequate but nothing special.

June 23: International Falls - Orr

Delayed start this morning. I started feeling really insecure about not having checked my email in a long time. I was afraid of losing mail due to an overflowing mailbox. So I went back to Top Ten Video, which is the local hotbed of high technology (video rentals, computer sales and servicing, Internet service provider, and oh yes, a tanning bed) in the hope that I would be able to check my mail from there. Annoying to have to wait until 11:00 when they open.

I haven't been doing much thinking about life, the universe, and everything out on the road, as I thought I would. It's more difficult to think than I expected. My mind sort of goes numb, and I slip into the rhythm of just getting there. I'm also starting to talk to myself more.... I feel strangely alone, both on the bike and in the campgrounds. I chat briefly with the RVers, but we generally have nothing at all in common, so the chats are brief and polite.

It turned out that Top Ten Video didn't have a terminal I could use to check my email, so I cruise onwards, annoyed but at least satisfied that I tried. If I hadn't tried, I'd be thinking about it all the way to the next town.

Looking for a campground this evening I stopped at a national park information centre and chatted with the fellow there who told me about his 35-day solo canoe trip in the Boundary Waters area. He lived on rice and oatmeal, fish that he caught, pine needles, and mushrooms. Hard core.

I got depressed again tonight over paying $13 for an unlevel campsite that clearly is a water channel when it rains, and for not having made as much progress as I wanted because I left late. The campsite, Pine Acres near the town of Orr, is way overdeveloped. This is resort country.

The trip already feels long. I'm already straining to reach back for things that happened only a day or two ago. Everything feels like it happened so long ago.

Duluth

The ride into Duluth was a nightmare. I pushed too hard, passing up several opportunities to stop, and ended up riding into town in the dark, after having three flat tires in one day, due to bad road conditions, construction, and my overloaded condition. The next day, I went to a bike store and had an overhaul done, including a new rear wheel. That forced me to wait a few days, killing time.

There wasn't much to see downtown, but a highlight for me was Carlson Used Books on Superior Street. It's a huge used book store, probably the biggest I've ever seen. Well worth a visit if you like browsing through used books.

Canal Park was nice enough, and I really liked the Lake Superior Maritime Visitors' Centre. It's an Army Corps of Engineers museum about shipping on the Great Lakes. Free, and very interesting -- to me, anyway.

There is a former lake ore freighter, now museum ship, the William A. Irvin, near the convention centre. The guided tour is $6.50, I thought it was worthwhile. Admission to the Irvin also gets you into the tugboat next to it, which is a self-guided tour. I found the tug quite interesting too. I am fascinated by ships, possibly because I grew up on the prairies in the middle of North America, which is about as far as you can possibly get on this planet from an ocean.

June 30: Duluth - Brule

Finally hit the road again. Rolled out late (meaning about 11:30 am), and managed only 73 km today. More than 20 km of that was within the Duluth-Superior urban area. It was a little tricky getting onto the sidewalk of the bridge from Duluth to Superior (the southern bridge, don't take the Interstate bridge), I had to lift my bike over the concrete barrier, but once I did it was a nice ride. Riding through Superior was one of those experiences that I had so many times on the trip: looking, it feels like I'm in a very odd place and I must have made a wrong turn somewhere, but if I keep on going I eventually come out where I want to be. The road was good, but traffic heavy, although there was a shoulder part of the way.

I popped my front tire, patched it in a grassy ditch, then blew it again when reinflating. Put on a new tube that I had bought in Duluth.

Camped in Bois Brule State Forest Campground. A very nice campground, minimal facilities but beautiful setting. Lots of people here, including a church youth group of about fifteen people. A kid from the church group came over later. He looked at my bike, and said that he raced Schwinn mountain bikes. He told me that Schwinn was considered to be a really good name these days. He was quite a keener. I'm going to have to get technical!

By the way, Brule is apparently pronounced "brool" by locals (rhymes with "drool"). Those of you who speak French may now roll your eyes and heave a sigh for those poor unilingual Americans. (Bois brulé is French for "burnt wood.")

July 1: Bois Brule - Wakefield

Last night, a woman doing a car-top cycling trip came by. ("Car-top" meaning that she and her partner avoid the endless hours of drudgery by putting their bikes on the roof of the car and skipping over the boring bits.) She asked if I knew how to attach her seat-retaining wire system. We puzzled over it for a while and couldn't figure it out. We chatted for a while. During the night, I dreamed about it, and the next morning, she stopped by again as I was packing and I solved it!  We traded addresses.  (We kept in touch and had what turned into a fascinating and rather intense email correspondence for a long time.  I did see her again, eventually, but sadly it all fizzled out anticlimactically.)

Riding today was pretty easy. Pavement condition was good except for an under-construction area leading into Ashland. Good distance today! Can't find camp fuel in anythingn smaller than a one-gallon container, though, which is way too much to put on the bike. And I discovered "Snackwell's" fruit granola bars, delicious.

I listen to the radio while riding, usually a National Public Radio station if there's one in the area. This morning, the host of the radio show I was listening to spent an hour talking with a person from Canada. In the introduction she made a big production about how Americans don't know much about Canada, and how today was Canada Day which is sort of like the Fourth of July, and so we're going to talk with a Canadian. She talked with a woman who grew up in New York City, then went and spent ten years living in the bush on the Queen Charlotte Islands, far from electricity or telephones, living by hunting and fishing. That's who they found to educate listeners about being a typical Canadian?

Wakefield campground highly recommended. Nice showers. $5 tent sites. Even a lake where people were swimming. Met two retired guys from New York who were motorcycling to Montana. We chatted, and although I said I would go over and visit them later, I never did.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is wide, 500 km. I want to get to Sault Ste. Marie as soon as possible. I'll count on five days, but I did manage 155 km today....

July 2: Wakefield - Van Riper State Park

A good day. Pavement condition good to excellent, narrow shoulder. I stopped at Bruce Crossing, and dropped the bike in the parking lot of the Co-op store. Very embarrassing.

I talked with a really excited guy who was planning to do a one-day 100 mile ride soon. I told him to expect that he probably wouldn't be able to walk for an hour or so afterwards, but otherwise it shouldn't be a problem.

I pushed hard. My rear tire has a slow leak and I have to pump it up each morning. I still need fuel. I'm worried about encountering full campgrounds on the holiday long weekend.

July 3: Van Riper State Park - Munising

Today 129 km but I feel tired. The wind was unfavourable for part of the day, and the pavement from fair to excellent. Fair number of hills. The descents seemed to make up for the climbs, but I still feel more tired than I expected. An uneventful day. Cool, some light drizzle in the morning. Tomorrow may be rough -- I'll be tempted to push straight through to Sault Ste. Marie.

I went shopping in Munising, and when I came out, two kids on bikes said hello. We talked for a while, and I told them what I was doing. They were a little skeptical about why I was doing it and how far I traveled in a day. The kicker was, they asked me, "where's your wife?" I said I wasn't married, and they wanted to know why not. Hm. Does that say something about the town? Or about me?

After doing my grocery shopping, I went to the local tourist information office. When I asked, "what can you tell me about campgrounds around here," the harried-looking woman pulled out a map and started crossing them off. "That one's full, that's full, they're full...." She phoned "Wandering Wheels" and the line is busy. Her co-worker called over "I just phoned Wandering Wheels a few minutes ago, they still had some spots left." I hurried out to try and beat the crowds of RVers that I imagined were racing me to the campground. Well, Wandering Wheels is uphill from town, so any RVs that were racing me had me beat, but I got in. It's a luxury RV park, with heated swimming pool, laundry, and so on. It cost $18, yes eighteen big fat American dollars. I guess on the long weekend they can charge anything they like. I did manage to get completely clean, though, and to wash all my clothes properly for the first time.

For the first time? Yes. I've been following what seemed to me like a very good practice, that was recommended by other cycle-campers, but maybe looks odd to other people. I have two pairs of bike shorts, two T-shirts, and two pairs of socks that I wear when cycling. (I also have a long-sleeved shirt which I wear when it's cooler, and some other clothes I call "street clothes" which I don't wear while riding.) Each night, I wash what I'm wearing, or at least rinse them out. During the day, the wet clothes (shirt, shorts, and socks) are strapped to the outside of my panniers and they dry off flapping in the wind down the highway. So my clothes aren't super-clean, but they're good enough for what I'm doing. Some things, though, like my cool-weather jacket, long pants, and sleeping clothes never get washed though, so they were getting pretty ripe. It was good to do laundry.

July 4: Munising - Soldier Lake National Forest

Slow leak in rear tire, but no blowouts. A variety of pavement from poor to excellent. The "Seney Stretch" (their phrase, not mine) is a long, straight, and level piece of highway alongside railway tracks; everything else was slightly rolling.

A hundred and forty-one kilometers and the radio is playing nothing but John Philip Sousa marches. You think I'm kidding, don't you? I'm not. Well, later in the day I did get a country station with Shania Twain singing "I gol' darn gone and done it." I wasn't sure that was an improvement.

I put off my grocery shopping today until I got to the last town before my goal, a town called Strongs. There was no grocery store, just a gas station which was actually more of a bar, although it did have a sign saying "food store" out front and a few shelves of groceries along one wall. And a pool table. The loaf of bread I bought turned out to be completely moldy when I opened it at the campground.

I arrived at Soldier Lake National Forest campground to see a "Park Full" sign scrawled at the campground entrance. I asked anyway, and was directed to an "extra" site which was un-numbered, vacant, without picnic table or fire ring -- but it was free. Makes up for the $18 last night, I guess.

July 5: Soldier Lake National Forest - Sault Ste. Marie

Stopped in Sault Ste. Marie for a couple of nights and hung out. It's a large town whose most notable feature is the St. Lawrence Seaway locks. I went through my luggage, removed some excess weight and mailed it home.

Oh, a minor triumph: after searching the USA for two weeks for small containers of fuel, I walked into a Canadian Tire in Sault Ste. Marie and found the familiar 1-litre bottle ready and waiting for me. Yay!

July 7: Sault Ste. Marie - Sault Ste. Marie

About 35 km outside of town, I stopped to inflate my still-leaking rear tire. And here I was not careful. I dragged the tire across the ground, catching it on something sharp and slashing the tire. I eventually patched it with duct tape. Duct tape can solve any problem. We could solve world hunger with duct tape, if only we could figure out where to put it. So I limped back to SSMarie and bought new tires. Larger ones -- I replaced my 700x23 with 700x26, which reduced my tire problems for the rest of the trip.

So I left again and camped at "Bell's Point" ($15). I've pedaled 86 km and haven't even made it out of town yet.

July 8: Sault Ste. Marie - Sprague

A good day for distance: 161 km. Wind was favourable. A terribly day for road conditions, though. No shoulder much of the way, and lots of big trucks. Dove into the gravel many times to avoid them. I took a rest at Thessalon because I was getting discouraged and scared. I was almost ready to try and find motorized transportation to Espanola. But I met a cyclist coming the other way (Toronto to west coast) and he assured me that the highway gets better. It did, but not much. Tomorrow only 69 frighteningly hellish kilometers to go before I reach the turnoff to highway 6. The other cyclist said you can go half an hour on Manitoulin Island without seeing a car. So tomorrow I ride like hell to Highway 6, then, well, it's 186 km to the ferry dock.

Today while I was having lunch at a roadside picnic area (no water! One of the ways the USA is better than Canada is that the rest stops all have water) and chatted with a man who finally said the line that I've been waiting to hear. (It's from Soul of a New Machine, and when I read it, I thought, that expresses me perfectly, and I hoped someone would say it to me.) I explained what I was doing, where I was going. He asked if I was riding for some special cause. I said no, this is my holiday. He laughed. Fun? "By God, I'd hate to see you work!" That's right, mister, this is what I do for fun.

July 9: Spragge - South Baymouth

Distance today: 187 km. Wild! Spragge to Espanola was hairy, but south from Espanola on Hwy 6 was beautiful riding, winding and hilly, steep climbs and screaming descents. A beautiful area, and the traffic very light. Until Great La Cloche Island, the stepping-stone to Manitoulin. This is low-lying, barely above water level, desolate-looking, with few trees. The wind howls in from across the lake and over the barren islands. Manitoulin Island itself was also no great scenic attraction, at least on the side of the island where I was. The cyclist I met earlier told me that the western part of the island was nicer, and that Gore Bay is worth a side trip. I didn't go, I concentrated single-mindedly on my destination.

Camped for $14 at South Bay Resort. It's a good place, good showers, the tent sites are on the beach which made them a little windy but not bad.

July 10: South Baymouth - Owen Sound

Got to the ferry early and met cyclists. Wow, did I meet cyclists! A group from the Ontario Cycling Association on an 8-day supported ride, very nice people. A bunch of kids from Michigan with flags and no bike shorts. ("Amateurs," laughed the OCA people.) One OCA guy had a recumbent bike. I think there were 50 bikes on the ferry!

Rode 127 km today, and camped in an RV/seasonal campground called Sunny Valley, 10 km south of Owen Sound. $15. Two bored kids came over and "helped" me unpack my bags.

July 11: Owen Sound - Toronto

When I arrived in Toronto, I was euphoric. I had done it! I'd ridden all the way from Winnipeg to Toronto under my own power, no rides from anyone! I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. The ride into the city was exhilarating. I plunged into the city of noise and people and activity -- and automobile exhaust -- zipping through traffic. It was a thrill to be back. Today while I was having lunch at a roadside picnic area (no water! One of the ways the USA is better than Canada is that the rest stops all have water) and chatted with a man who finally said the line that I've been waiting to hear. (It's from Soul of a New Machine, and when I read it, I thought, that expresses me perfectly, and I hoped someone would say it to me.) I explained what I was doing, where I was going. He asked if I was riding for some special cause. I said no, this is my holiday. He lauostel on Spadina. It's quite a nice hostel, better than HI's Toronto facility actually. It's fairly large, has a good-sized kitchen, a patio, and a common room. There's even a bar inside the hostel, although I personally didn't consider that to be one of the selling points.

The people, though, seemed different from the crowd at HI, and I didn't really like them. On Saturday night, everyone went up to their rooms to do their hair and get dressed, then came down to the hostel bar to pose and look cool. Maybe it was just the contrast with living in campgrounds for three weeks, but wow, they were dressed to kill. It was weird to have a bar scene right in the hostel. And they didn't generally seem like backpacker types. I remember HI hostels as being much less pretentious, everyone was friends and much more honest and real than they were here.

I did meet one girl from Australia who was real, and a fellow from the UK with a wild story. James is 55, and quite the traveler. He used to work for a company in Saudi Arabia, and one of his benefits was a free trip home every four months. But instead of going home, he combined his trips and took a whirlwind round-the-world trip every year for ten years. He had arrived in Toronto by buying a bike in a thrift shop somewhere in Wisconsin, riding 30-40 miles a day to Duluth, walking from Duluth to Thunder Bay through the bush, then taking a bus to Toronto. He's a non-stop talker, and something of a teller of tall tales I think, but if there's any truth to any of it he's got quite a lot of experiences behind him.

Off to see Toronto. I've been here many times, so I didn't want to see many tourist locations. My first stop was Mountain Equipment Co-op. I didn't have room to carry much more, but I always enjoy touring the MEC store. I did end up treating myself to a new pair of cycling gloves, a new water bottle, some tire levers, and liquid soap.

Went to Harbourfront, and rode the bike/rollerblade trail east to Tommy Thompson Park, which is a landfill jutting out into the lake. Makes a good view of the Toronto skyline. There were hordes of rollerbladers!

Returning home, I got stopped in traffic by the crowd spilling out of a bar which was apparently the French soccer fan headquarters, celebrating France's victory in the World Cup.

The next day, I biked out to the airport to pick up my plane tickets only to find that I couldn't pick them up except on the day of the flight. Then joined my father and grandmother, and spent the next few days doing family things.

July 16: Flying from Toronto to Nice

Ok, now I'm really starting to get excited. I spent all morning trying to reduce my baggage weight, without much success. If this were a non-camping trip, I could carry everything in a fairly small backpack. But the fact that I'm camping means I have to carry tent, sleeping bag, Thermarest, cooking equipment. I considered switching to a hostel-only trip, but decided I should keep my camping equipment.

On the plane, I laughed out loud at Bill Bryson's Neither Here nor There. Try to get some sleep....