Arriving at the Atlantic!

The Droid showed we were 30 miles away from the Atlantic Ocean and Portland Maine on our final morning.  Our log showed that the final day would bring us up to almost exactly 4,000 miles for the trip. Kate grimaced in pain as we made early our start, her fingers freezing in the icy wind. It has been colder these days, even with the recent rainstorm aside, though in truth here in the first days of October cold has remarkably not been much of a factor. But the seasons are changing: the colors of the trees, of course; the pages flipping off the calendar; and the endless flocks of geese with beaks pointed south, butts pointed north. We pedaled through rolling hills reminiscent of Corvallis Oregon for 20 miles, and then pedaled into the outskirts of Portland. A bike shop owner waved us down and pointed us to a bike path route into town. We pedaled along the waterfront of the Old Port, delaying the end of our trip with the all important breakfast stop at Becky’s Cafe, then pedaled over to the East End. While Portland is surrounded by barrier islands, from the East End we could see a clear water path out to the wide Atlantic. We found a beach to roll our bikes out to the surf. Rosemary, a Portland nurse, was passing by and kindly snapped our “we-made-it-to-the-Atlantic!” photo. Both of us stood with our feet and tires in the water. Rosemary took a dozen photos to be sure we had one that would work. Her enthusiasm and excitement for the completion of our trip helped ground us, as did that of a group of nearby girls who shouted congratulations. Kate and I pedaled around the corner to a place where we were alone, then stopped and hugged. In that moment, like every day, we both felt such gratitude for being alive, much less for the good health to take on a long bike tour. Holding each other, Kate whispered, “We did it, dude” in a way that came out sounding both enchanted and matter of fact, all at once. I thought back to Kate’s statement as we pedaled away from the Pacific three months earlier. She had looked back at the crashing waves and said quite simply, “We’ll see you on the other side.” And now, here we were.

Faces Across America, Part II

Just as with the first half of our ride across America, we continued to be enchanted by people we met along the way. And we continued our project of capturing photos of the Faces of America (that means North America, since we pedaled through Ontario!). The smiles on the photos reflect the goodness of the people we met; their positive vibes propelled us forward each day. Here are some of their stories, focusing on folks not highlighted elsewhere in the blog: * A biker with partially paralyzed legs who was nonetheless pedaling across America * A woman who has led 8 tours with her husband across America, plus has pedaled the perimeter of the Lower 48! * An uncle and aunt who we love dearly. Uncle Roy passed away during our trip and we thought of he and Louise and the Johnsons often. When we visited them in Fargo on our way through, Roy asked us what had been our favorite part of the trip. As we come to a close perhaps the favorite memory will be of visiting with Roy and Louise and having Uncle Roy make us laugh one last time. * A 65-ish biker who just had both knees replaced and was using biking as his rehabilitation. He had already lost 30#s and was planning a tour around Lake Erie next year to celebrate a return to fitness. * Two Canadian bikers who, along with us, were the only cyclists out on the road during the torrential downpours resulting from tropical storm Nicole hitting New England. * A biker from Oswego, NY who guided us to a bike shop to replace Scott’s broken spoke, not to mention the kind bike shop owner who did the work on the spot and charged next to nothing. * A happy couple from Annapolis who gave us a tour of their tricked-out camper van, and tried to convince us to convert from a tent to a van. * A Wisconsin couple riding a fancy tandem to New York after having pedaling RAGBRAI earlier this summer. * A 20+ year old rider who pedaled across the country at 100 miles per day...on a daily budget of only $10! * A ~70 year old couple who were pedaling (and inspiring us!!) by riding cross country at 40 miles per day. *Parents who treated us like royalty, whether if as hosts, by phone, or email, or sending a care package with 48,000 calories!

** click to enlarge **

New England: Of Mountains and Rain (VT/NH)

We contemplated buying Vermont maple syrup the boatmen were selling on the way across Lake Champlain but decided against it. Good decision as my pancakes came with *real* maple syrup all the way across VT and NH—hooray! (But in the interest of full disclosure—America’s best pancakes are in the Midwest, not New England….) Not far into Vermont we walked through a cemetery that boasted folks born in the mid-1700’s, that had a gravestone for a son that died in the Civil War, and more. If we didn’t know it before, we surely recognized that we had arrived at one of our country’s historic cores, at least since European settlement. We pedaled into Middlebury, where we stayed with a friend, Tom Munschauer, who we’d met in Utila, Honduras several years back. Tom, a veterinarian, was with two friends—Doug and Debbie—so we all got reacquainted at the Town Hall Theater where Doug is the Executive Director. Tom, Debbie, and Doug were surprised to see us show up in their home town on bicycles. Doug jokingly commented that back in Utila when he said, “’Do come to Middlebury to see us’, we didn’t really mean it!” Also in Utila the three told us about the amazing community spirit that was building around the renovation of the dilapidated Town Hall, a past great venue for theater and music. Now a couple years later we got to see the outcome of Doug’s vision and funding leadership, plus the support of community like Debbie (we’re guessing that there were a LOT of shared events and work, though she works at Middlebury College) and Tom (he has a stained glass window named after him and is the Board President). We got some insight as to Doug’s sales success: he asked if we might want donate to the project in return for having our name enshrined on a toilet as a sponsor. While honored, we declined. He never did say where they would place the plaque on the toilet! << If you want to see an amazing 5 min video of the total renovation of Middlebury’s Town Hall, check at www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TohJz8xz08. >> Tom showed us around the very cool Middlebury College campus, including a look at their state-of-the-art combustion facility they hope to fuel with locally grown biomass (mostly willows) to power the campus, all part of the College’s goal of becoming carbon-neutral. Tom also showed us his own master creation: an animal clinic that employs more than a dozen people. We told him he is his own stimulus package! Tom fed us two nights in a row with vegetables fresh out of the garden at the vet clinic: amazing tomatoes, basil, roasted potatoes, and butternut squash that proved delicious (all this after him going swimming for two hours at 5 AM each morning—talk about making us feel lazy!). Thank God for New England and real vegetables and—during our pedaling days—the opportunity to hit produce stands at many of the small farms. We took leave from Tom and pedaled up the first of the big New England hills we had been hearing about through the bikers’ grapevine. One seasoned biker said that many coast-to-coasters call the VT and New Hampshire hills (crossing of the Green and White Mountains) the hardest of their trips. Big yes, hard yes, but in truth nothing as sustained or difficult as the four climbs on our route in the state of Washington. So yes we sweated a bit in VT and NH, but a couple of other issues held prominence: (1) VT had a lot of traffic with some scary no-shoulder roads; (2) NH tried to kill us with inches of rain off of Tropical Storm Nicole (an ecologist friend observed, “Weird how those tropical storms are ending up in New England these days!”); (3) the colors, on the days we could see them, remained beyond description. The rain caught us for two days hard and ended up pushing back the end of our trip thus rendering us unable to visit friends we’d hoped to see. We rode only 36 and 26 miles in back to back days and on both days arrived so drenched that we couldn’t have been wetter if we’d have pedaled our bikes into a swimming pool. Thankfully the temps stayed in the 60s. It poured for ~36 hours, 19” was forecast somewhere in NH, schools were closed, rivers were in flood. A couple of times we pedaled across rivers where I wanted to yell to Kate, “If the bridge breaks apart keep pedaling for the other side so we get across!” She said her thoughts were identical. The rain led to beauty, including Kate pedaling beside a startling water fall in the White Mountains, and the two of us hurtling down the road, no cars about, next to the raging, take no prisoners, absolute torrent of the Lost River into North Woodstock. It was one of the most surreal moments I can ever recall, soaked to the skin, huge boiling river beside us almost at the level of the road, river and road dropping precipitously as if tangled in a dance, down, down, down we went, raindrops blocking my vision, Kate ahead and me hoping she wouldn't miss a corner and plunge into the maelstrom beside us, and then…and then finally town and level ground and peace and the promise of a warm shower. The sunshine returned as we climbed over New Hampshire’s Kancamagus Pass on our second-to-last day. We marveled at the colors and listened at the pullouts while the leaf peepers—out in hordes on this best color viewing Saturday of the year—spoke excitedly to each other and snapped endless photos. It would be our last big mileage day, some 72 miles. Part way along the way, we passed out of the NH’s White Mountains and into Maine.

Upstate New York Rocks!

It wasn’t long out of Niagara that one of those racing bikers flashed by us saying, “How youse two doing?” in that familiar, often parodied Bronx accent. As if there could be any doubt we’d arrived in New York, we also soon ate our first pizza-by-the-slice (2 slices and a Coke for $3)—“New York has the best pizza in the world” the man at the roadside joint told us. Our route took us straight across upstate New York. It is not like New York City. Instead, lots of countryside and farms and orchards and small villages (ok, and Rochester but we slipped in and out of there quickly!). We pedaled from Lockport to Palmyra, roughly 90 miles, along a section of the Erie Canal. Built in the early 1800s (and enlarged and upgraded many times thereafter), the canal is credited with making settlement of the Midwest possible since it enabled trade with the population centers of the East. Super, but for us the canal meant days of peaceful, side-by-side pedaling without worrying about traffic. NICE! Off the canal we pushed north to Lake Ontario, thereby completing our visit to all five great lakes. But even off the Erie Canal trail, our New York route proved to be superb, with (most often) wide shoulders on the roads, the novelty of going out for Greek and Italian food, and the nicest waitresses you’d ever want to meet. One, 60-year-old Kathy, told us about her own 200-mile ride for charity from Rochester to Boston. It was her first long ride and one where on a muddy day she flipped over her handlebars! Yet she jumped right back into the saddle. Kathy’s enthusiasm was absolutely infectious and she spoke glowingly about doing another tour. We left her cafe filled with pancakes and renewed zeal! The crop of prevalence along Lake Ontario was apples. Heavily laden trees literally dripped with apples of all color and size, orchard after orchard after orchard! We visited historic towns (e.g., in the War of 1812 the Brits had fired a cannonball through a house we pedaled past in Pultneyville). In Fair Haven we loved finding the Hardware Cafe and General Store, opened by two women who restored the old General Store into a beautiful space to come for coffee, a meal, or music. We spent our last night along Lake Ontario camped on the lake in an empty campground—the season has ended and more and more campgrounds are closed—and watched a beautiful pink sunset with waves gently lapping at the shore below us. We left the lake and pedaled into the Adirondacks. We finally began to pedal some hills, mostly gentle hills yet we realized that we hadn’t pedaled over any real hills since way back by Browning, Montana. There is a lot in the center of North America that is flat! The Adirondacks proved as beautiful as we had always heard. That would have been true period, but just as we arrived the colors, as one local said, “just popped!” Indeed we have seen hints of fall colors since way back in Wisconsin, but we entered the Adirondacks with the colors at ~20% and by two days later they were 90%. OMG! The leaf colors simply overwhelmed the landscape; beautiful reds, oranges, golds, and yellows all combining to deeply contrast with the deep greens of the pines, steel blue of placid lakes, and hard gray of rock outcroppings. Many times we simply stopped with mouth agape. This was simply beyond beautiful, beyond what one could have hoped for, beyond what a photo can depict, beyond imagination! The route took us through vast expanses of beautiful, remote forest, all part of the 6 million acre Adirondack Park. Then down down down to Ticonderoga right at the base of Lake Champlain. From there we rode on a tiny ferry over to Vermont that had been in service since 1759! It seemed fitting to cross water at the border, since we’ve done that at every state or province crossing since exiting Minnesota.

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