Back on Bicycles

"Let's Ride!" said the hipster bicycle-themed temporary tattoo I presented to Ben Friday morning, his 27th birthday, as well as the morning we arrived in Bellingham, WA. The 3 day ferry ride from Juneau proved to be a most excellent way to travel. We staked out our homestead on the partially covered solarium top deck, spreading out our sleeping bags on lawn chairs amongst all the other travelers. I spent the 3 days on the ferry taking naps, watching the texture of the water and mountains change, and people watching sometimes actually talking with fellow travelers, other times just wondering about them.

 Contained public traveling is interesting in that everyone is more or less going to and from the same places, but everyone is on a different journey. Some people were leaving a summer job with heavy pockets and dirty fingernails, others were moving away from their beloved homeland, some were just getting out of Alaska for a couple months of sun before the long winter, while others were bright-eyed tourists, cheering at porpoises and whales breaching off the stern of the boat. And then there's Ben and me.

We're just begun our second velocipedal adventure. Was it just too much fun last time, when we biked across the northern states all the way to New York City? Did we discover that it's just the best way to get to know a place, its landscape, and its random diners? Did we forget just how grueling and sweaty those steep hill climbs and 100 degree days could get? YES!! The answer is yes. So, because we are equal parts eager, adventurous, crazy, and couldn't really think of anything better to do this fall, we are back on bicycles.

This time around we're biking from Bellingham, WA all the way to New Orleans, LA by way of Los Angeles, CA. We're planning on taking our time, visiting people, and exploring the beautiful corners of this country from the West Coast to the Southwest to the South. Thus far we have biked about 40 miles, from the Bellingham ferry terminal to the Anacortes ferry terminal. We spent Friday and Saturday night out at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, with my endlessly wonderful friends, Meagan and Lincoln Gable. We slept on their sailboat, cruised around the harbors, hiked on Orcas Island, and swam in a lake. Friday Harbor is basically the cutest town I have ever seen, and it was rather difficult to convince ourselves not to stay amongst the coffee shops, farmer's market, marina cafes, and bicycle friendly roads of San Juan Island. But, alas, the road is calling.

Now we are in La Conner, WA, spending time with Billie and Lauren, Ben's aunt and uncle. They're wonderful hosts and it's also difficult to not let myself just curl up in a cat-nap ball on the sunbaked porch, eating fresh tomatoes and peas and whatever other wonderful treasures their garden holds. But. Must. Keep. Biking. Next destination: Seattle. Although it might take us a couple days to get there. Please follow along! Here's to more (relatively) easy revolutions. Cheers!

El Fin

The End!! As I'm sure most of you lovely readers are already aware, Ben and I have made it to our destination of New York City. We rolled straight into Manhattan (by way of a bicycle super-highway, the Hudson Greenway), on the sunny afternoon of October 1st. Just north of the city we ran into some other bicycle tourists, Ryan and Lisa, a lovely couple who were just then completing a bicycle saga that spanned 2.5 years and 4 continents. Our adventure was not nearly so expansive, but we were still damn proud of ourselves. Over the past 68 days (for Ben, I was along for 56 of them), we only took 4 days off (+2 for Ben), covered about 3,800 miles coast to coast (of which I pedaled about 3,200), biked through 7 states (+2 more for Ben), as well as Ontario. Of the 59 nights we were together, we stayed in official campgrounds for 9 nights, people's houses 24 nights, non-official camp spots 22 nights, and paid for exactly 1 hotel (after a particularly miserable rainy day coming into Hudson, New York.

To say the very least, it was a truly amazing trip. I was taking a pretty big leap of faith by agreeing to bike across the country with Ben, a boy I knew I liked a whole lot but had only been dating for 3 months. We got along famously, probably owing to Ben's ridiculously calm and content demeanor. I tend to be a bit more fiery, so I suffered a few minor breakdowns. All of them were completely reasonable however, and were always directed more at frustration at the physically/emotionally/mentally challenging situations more than my impossibly sweet long-haired companion.

People ask us if we trained a lot before undertaking such a physically demanding trip. The answer is no, we hardly trained at all. Sure, I took a few long bike rides before heading down to Missoula, but they were along the lines of 20-30 miles, 2-3 hours on my sweet racing road bike in the drizzly cold Alaskan summer. To be fair, there's only so much training one can do for a long-distance bicycle trip when one lives in a place with only 46 miles of road. I had also never ridden my bicycle loaded down with panniers. On the first day of our bicycle trip, we rode 45 miles out of Missoula, Montana. This was more than I had ever ridden in my entire life, and it turned out to be one of our shorter days.

Before starting the bicycle trip, I was quite found of saying things like, "At the end of the day, it's just a bicycle ride!" Well, this proved to be not entirely accurate. I'm pretty sure some of those mountain passes and 102 degree days in South Dakota represented the most physically challenging things I've ever done in my entire life. And I don't know anyone who gets on their bicycle for 6 or 7 hours to relax and enjoy life. So I retract my previous statement. This was not "just a bike ride." It was an insane, 2-month long epic self-powered journey across the northern states in which we encountered many strange and lovely people, places, incredibly sunsets and inhaled the repulsive perfumes of far too much roadkill.

Not everything was fun and games in rainy northern New York...

Quite possibly the best thing about this velocipedal voyage were the people we met along the way. We stayed with many "hosts," which we found through the websites couchsurfing.org and warmshowers.org. We were absolutely floored by the hospitality shown to us by friendly folks who had literally just met us, and whom we were connected to by nothing more than love of bicycles and the desire to help fellow humans in their journeys. We were often given our own bedrooms, incredible home-cooked meals, cold beers, warm showers, and hours of colorful conversation.

 

 And then there were countless people who helped us along the way who had no connection to bike touring or those websites. People whose names I will never know. An adorable elderly couple who picked us up outside of Helena Montana as the sky was darkening and we had just discovered that my front tube had 9 holes in it. An older woman outside sitting at her fruit stand in upstate New York who made us listen to her I-hate-Obama rant and then "donated" a pile of apples and peppers to "our cause." Another couple who picked us up in the pitch darkness somewhere in Ontario just when we were starting to despair and drove us to our host's front door in Owen Sound. There are countless others. 

 

Ben and I have talked endlessly about how our very faith in humanity has been restored by being bicycle tourists. I've thought quite a bit about what quality of being on bicycle makes people particularly receptive to us. I think that people appreciate how vulnerable we are, and how connected we are to our current environment. When you're in a car, you're completely insulated from your surroundings and are for all practical purposes an autonomous self-sufficient being. On a bicycle, however, you are powering yourself through every mile of the landscape, and are painfully aware of factors such as temperature, slope, wind, traffic, animals, people, cities, towns, etc...It's absolutely incredible how people rise to the challenge of giving you what you need, whether it's because they respect what you're doing or find you to be insane and in need of guidance.

I could go on and on. And I think I very well will, but in future blogs. I haven't even mentioned New York City yet, this energetic metropolis we've called "home" for the past few weeks. Or the fact that we're headed to Argentina next (sans bikes) to meet up with our friend Lora and volunteer on organic farms for a few months. I'll also try to relate a few more stories from the bike trip, as I feel there are countless things I never got a chance to mention on here. I thank everyone for taking the time to read about and thus share in this crazy adventure that I am blessed enough to be on. You can reach me at sarahginter@gmail.com. Happy Revolutions, everybody. I wish you all the best.

DC Detour

Whew! I can't believe I haven't had the opportunity to update the blog until today. What have I been doing? Good question. Biking? Eating? Sleeping? Making preparations to engage in those three activities? It's hard to say what occupies my time. Before starting the bike trip, Ben and I thought we'd be dealing with plenty of free time--we each brought several books, journals, and I even considered bringing running shoes--a fact that seems hilarious now. But we somehow manage to fill the days with something other than free time. It's a busy lifestyle, this bicycle touring!

This past week was a little disorienting, as Ben and I took a slight detour to Washington D.C. On an airplane. Some of you may have heard, but I won this National Geographic Traveler/Matador U Travel Writing Contest a few months ago, and the prize was a free trip to Washington D.C. to meet National Geographic editors. I found out the date for the event right before we left on the trip, so Ben and I tried to guesstimate which airport we would be near on September 20th, and we came up with Buffalo, New York. Wonder of all wonders, we actually made it to Buffalo on the evening of the 19th, where we were hosted by my friend Cristin Lambert's Aunt and Uncle, Tricia and Marty Lambert. They were so incredibly kind to take us in, and they did everything they could to make sure we were well taken care of, including driving us to and from the airport. 

We flew into DC the day before the NatGeo event, so we got to spend time with Ben's friend Zeeshan as well as Ben's aunt Cathy, uncle John and cousin Woods. Ben's family took us out for a really wonderful middle eastern dinner in Alexandria, where we were for some reason treated like royalty and the chef himself kept coming out to bring us special, free foods. I now have met nearly all of Ben's extended family, except for his parents. Pretty good for only 6 months of dating! Anyway, we spent that first night at Cathy and John's house and the next morning Cathy and Ben drove me to the subway and pointed me in the direction of the National Geographic Headquarters.

Let me just interrupt this story to say that being thrust into Washington D.C. after spending nearly two months in Rural America/Canada was quite the culture shock. In the airport alone, I was surrounded by more diversity than we've seen in the past 2 months. I stumbled around the streets of DC with my freakish tan lines and the one outfit I brought that isn't padded spandex, weaving my way through hordes of fancy, clean, professional people with places to be.

I finally made it to the National Geographic Headquarters, where I met the three other "Winners" (as we were referred to all day--a title you can get used to, let me tell you). We then spent the next 12 hours  schmoozing in various styles--a "meet and greet" with coffee and snacks and the entire staff of National Geographic Traveler, a tour of the museum, lunch in the staff cafeteria, sitting in on various meetings and presentations about the magazine and travel writing, a meeting with the editor-in-chief, Keith Bellows, a wine and cheese schmooze-fest, dinner at a lovely restaurant, and an evening event where Andrew McCarthy was interviewed about his new travel writing book. I feel like I made some great connections for a potential career in travel writing. The NatGeo Traveler staff were all friendly, creative and surprisingly approachable. Perhaps the best part of the whole event was meeting the Matador U staff, four energetic, fun and encouraging gentlemen who we spent most of the day with. It was a truly eye-opening experience, though exhausting, and I was deliriously happy to have a Mayflower Hotel room to crash in at the end of the day.

We made it safely back to Buffalo on Sunday and kept right on biking that afternoon. It's strange to be back on the bicycles--but even stranger to think that this tour is almost complete! We're now in Syracuse, NewYork, which means we only have about 300 more miles to go...in this moment I'm feeling more sad than ecstatic to be done biking. My body had finally adjusted to this lifestyle so much that I'm actually sore after walking for a day, and I only feel normal when I'm "back in the saddle" as they say. I'm also not quite sure how to stop consuming the insane amount of calories we do on the daily, once we're not burning quite so many. Anyway, all this is to say that we should be rolling in to NYC sometime on Sunday. If you are in the area, come meet us! Happy Revolutions!

Say yah to the U.P.!

After dedicating over a week of our lives to ride bicycles across Wyoming and South Dakota (each), it seemed miraculous that we were able to spend the next week crossing Minnesota and Wisconsin combined. Ben's uncle Dave set us up with a really fantastic route across northern Wisconsin that included about 50 miles on a rails-to-trails bike path called the Gandy Dancer. 

The bike path was phenomenal. Being an old railroad, it passed through the middle of several tiny towns the grade was never even remotely steep. It was incredibly relaxing to not have the anxiety of biking next to 60 mph traffic, it was in the shade, there was no wind....so basically it was a bicycle tourist's paradise. Biking through the small town of Frederick, Wisconsin, we noticed that the old railway depot was still standing, so we stopped to check it out. Apparently the Frederick Historical Society had just concluded their meeting at the old depot, so 3 or 4 interested looking people flocked around Ben and me, asking us all kinds of questions. We talked to them a little about the trail, at which point they gave us a very animated history of Frederick and the surrounding towns, insisted we take a tour of the depot (which they had converted to a pretty decent museum), and gave us a full detailed account of every town we would pass on our way from there out of Wisconsin. It became clear that they weren't going to stop talking any time soon, and we were quickly losing light, so we literally started biking away as they were still shouting after us about Danbury's casino/restaurant which really isn't as expensive as it looks and actually has reallygreatpancakes.....!

We spent one night in a city park in Siren, Wisconsin, another night in Hayward in a random field at a trailhead, then woke up on Ben's birthday and proceeded to bike 80 miles into the U.P. (Michigan's Upper Peninsula). We had a random connection in Ironwood, Michigan--Ben's cousin's friend's wife's parents happened to live there, and so generously agreed to host us. Pat and Chuck and their daughter Ellen took good care of us, fed us plenty of steak and beer and told us all about why they loved living there. According to Chuck, in the 1970s and 1980s there was a big movement towards combining northern Wisconsin and the U.P. to create the 51st state--the state of Superior.

The next morning, Chuck insisted that we not leave Ironwood without seeing a little of what made Ironwood so special. So he took us on a brief but informative tour, showing us the World's Largest Indian (a ginormous fiberglass statue of Hiawatha holding a 3 foot long peace pipe), as well as the Stormy Kromer manufacturing plant (an essential Michigan hat--woolen baseball cap with ear warmers). Ben bought a neon orange Stormy Kromer, claiming that it wasn't fair that hunter's had a monopoly on such an awesome color.

For the past couple of days we've been biking across the U.P. The colors are started to turn, which is a beautiful sight to behold in these mostly deciduous forests. It's significantly colder here than anywhere else we've been, and it's rained most days, making us a little wet and a little homesick. The towns we bike through are a trip. Most of the towns seem to have sprung up over one particular industry, such as mining (iron or copper mostly), timber, smelting, etc. For whatever reason many of these industries had their heyday and packed up and left, leaving behind towns with gaping holes in their economies. The towns are almost eerie...there's still plenty of houses standing, some of them look like they were really nice at one point, but are now slowly decaying. Most of the businesses, cafes, bars, grocery stores--are all for sale. It gives you the feeling of walking through someone's house who has left party decorations hanging for an awkwardly long time after the party's over--streamers and balloons still hanging around collecting dust, waiting for the next party so they can finally feel useful again. Most of the houses have signs in their yards that are wholeheartedly in support of mining, "STOP the whining, START the mining," etc...

We actually decided to take a small detour and check out White Pine, a town that Ben lived in from age 3 to 5 while his father worked in the copper mine up there. It was a pretty similar scene to the towns we had passed through already--wide, hopeful streets, neighborhoods set up like a model suburbia, several churches (one of which was playing creepy hymnal chime music), a sorry looking playground. There was a tiny fire station, but the fire truck had a for-sale sign on it. All the larger looking buildings were deserted. We thought we might buy groceries, but the grocery store had long since been abandoned, as had the laundromat that had taken its place. There were several people around, mowing their lawns and walking their dogs as if it wasn't bizarre that they were living in a ghost town. It's strange to think that Ben could have just as easily grown up there than in our little wet city way up in Alaska.

Last night we made it to Marquette, the cosmopolitan hub of the U.P., as well as the home to Northern Michigan University. A lovely lady named Jessie hosted us from Warm Showers. She made us a pork roast (delicious) and took us out for beers at her favorite neighborhood pub. She gave us a little bit of the environmentalists' perspective on the mining up here and told us about her reasons for loving the U.P. (naked Lake Superior midnights dips, traditional music festivals, brew pubs, a different sensibility....). 

For all it's worth, the U.P. appears to be somewhere people love, or hate, or love to not even think about, or think that anyone who lives up here must be insane. I'm not sure what camp I'm in yet. Thankfully we still have 2 or 3 more solid days of biking across this lush, colorful no-man's land to develop our own perspective. Until then...say yah to the U.P., eh!

A CoupleFew Photos

Kate Dehmer and me! And corn!

Welcome to Minnesota!

Huron, South Dakota, and the World's Largest Pheasant

South Dakota Sunset

Mountain Mike and Linda in front of their homestead. Caputa, South Dakota

Ben, Mountain Mike, and Linda, of the previous post's fame

One minor correction...

Oops! I forgot to mention that I somehow made a mistake in one of my previous blog posts. When I talked about the woman we met in Spotted Horse, Wyoming, I called her "Colette" but her name is actually "Coleen." My only explanation for the error is that I had just received my first shower and cold beer in a few days, and must have been slightly intoxicated from the experience.

That was brought to my attention by another fellow bicyclist and blogger, whom I have never met but gave me a shout-out in her blog! Check it out:

www.apoetandaonemanband.wordpress.com

Turtles and Tidbits

Hello everyone! Well, it's been a while since I've had internet access, so I'll do my best to update you on the past week or so's events. We made it across South Dakota! Finally. Good. Lord. That state just goes on and on. Though there were some redeeming factors (Black Hills, the Badlands, Mountain Mike, beautiful sunsets...), I don't feel compelled to pack up my entire life and move myself to South Dakota any time soon. Those that call that state home seem perfectly content that they live there and hardly anybody else does. As one farmer we met put it, "We tell everyone that this is the worst land in the country, so that nobody else comes here..."

After we stayed the night in Pierre, we biked about 65 miles and decided to camp in an teeny-tiny town called Ree Heights. There happened to be a bar there, and apparently about 47 residents inhabiting the smattering of houses gathered around the town's one street. We went inside the bar, only to be met by the curious and hardened faces of about 4 bar patrons and one bartender. They gave us a good long stare, until we exposed that we would be more than happy to try the bar's local specialty, "bloody beer" (homemade bloody mary mix with an ice cold budweiser. They quickly warmed up to us, and we ended up talking for a long while with the 4 old, mostly toothless men and the one bartender, who cackled like a devious fourth grader and told us of all his travels around the West that had eventually led him right back to small-townville, South Dakota. We were fast friends by the end of the night, and the bartender let us pitch our tent right behind the bar.

The next day we biked about 60 miles and made it to Huron, South Dakota, a town of a few thousand whose main claim to fame is that fact that they host the South Dakota state fair (which we missed by two days), as well as the world's largest pheasant (a glorious 3 story tall colorful pheasant replica we hit up on the way out of town). We weren't sure if we were even going to stay in Huron, but our Warm Showers host got back to us just as we were deciding what to do next, so we headed over to his place.

We followed his directions to his apartment building, where we were greeted by a collection of rather derelict, down-on-their-luck looking men, as well as one very clean-cut, very cheerful man who happened to be waving us down. We then met Steven (not his real name), our host, who showed us up to his apartment while explaining that the apartment building was for low-income residents who experienced some sort of mental disabilities. His "apartment" ended up being a tiny room, smaller than my dorm room freshman year of college, in which he had a bed, a closet, a desk and a table full of plants. He also mentioned in an off-hand sort of way that he had found a turtle by the side of the road a week ago and took it in as a pet, but he didn't want to put it in an aquarium so it was just sort of free-floating in the room somewhere.

 It took us a while to kind of figure out what wasn't being said...was he a client here, or a counseler? was this his entire apartment? were we supposed to sleep in this room with him? Eventually we discovered that the answers to all these questions were "yes," and he also insisted that we bring our bikes into this tiny room because he was a bit wary of his neighbors and there unpredictable behavior. The whole situation had the potential to be incredibly sketchy, although there was something very genuine and normal about Steven's disposition, so we wordlessly decided that we would in fact spend the night with him.

We ended up having a lovely evening with Steven. Turns out he was actually a professional cellist, pianist and organist who had had a difficult time in life recently and came to Huron to sort himself out. He worked as a music teacher, judged 4-H music competitions at the state fair, and played the piano and organ at the local Presbyterian church. We all went out for Mexican food together and then he took us to the church he attended and played us some beautiful hymns. We ended up going to bed fairly early, he in his bed and Ben and I smooshed together, 2 feet away from him on the ground.

All was well until about 3 o'clock in the morning, when I felt a gentle scratching on my cheek. I was still half-asleep so I shrugged it off, but the scratching continued, followed by what felt like a smooth round disc sliding slowly over my face. At this point of course I was well awake, as was Ben who I had started shaking like crazy. We both rolled over in our middle of the night stupor to discover Derodimus the Turtle clinging to the end of my thermarest, making weird gulping sounds and glaring at us with his beady little eyes.

I don't have much experience with turtles (Ben apparently doesn't either), so I wasn't really sure how to go about getting the turtle off my inflatable mattress. I started lifting the mat, hoping the turtle would crawl off, but then I thought he might start digging his claws in like a cat and pop my precious air mattress, so I stopped. Ben lifted the turtle up eventually, but it started flailing around with its creepy prehistoric limbs, so he immediately dropped it again, and the poor turtle landed on its back. We eventually decided to put it in a plastic crate I found in Steven's closet, which we placed on the only piece of open floor, about 2 feet away from our heads. For the rest of the night we heard the gentle scritch-scratch of the turtle moving the crate slowly around in his little piece of open floor. Amazingly, Steven slept through the entire ordeal, and was a little surprised to find his free-roaming turtle in an upside-down crate by our heads in the morning.

A few more Tidbits:

After Huron we had a solid day of biking to Brookings, South Dakota, where we stayed with our CouchSurfing hosts Josie and Ferdinand and their 4 day old baby, Roslyn. I don't think I've ever held any human that new to the world before. We were surprised they even wanted to host us dirty travelers, what with a brand new baby and everything, but they ended up being incredibly hospitable and friendly and even let us hold tiny Roslyn (there's photographic evidence on Ben's Tumblr blog). She mostly just slept and gurgled and made facial expressions freakily similar to Derodimus the Turtle of the previous night's escapades.

The following day we finally made it to Minnesota, and were happy to leave South Dakota behind. We stayed in a local park in Walnut Grove the first night, a tiny town whose main industry is Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prarie tourism. The following night we made it all the way to Mankato, Minnesota, where we were hosted by Eric and Christie and their 10 month old baby Lolo. They made us an amazing meal of salmon and vegetables and told us all about their travels, which included a 14 month tandem bicycle journey all the way from Mankato to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The next day we biked into the Twin Cities, where we were planning on taking 2 days off (our first day not biking in a month!) to hang out with Ben's huge and wonderful extended family. As a bonus, I also got to see my dear friend Kate, my roommate when I studied abroad in India three years ago. We went to the Minnesota State Fair, ate a bunch of fried food and touched some soft baby animals. That afternoon we headed across the state line to Houlton, Wisconsin, to Ben's aunt Michelle and uncle Dave's house. I got to meet a bajillion delightful people all related to Ben, ate delicious food till it hurt, and drank plenty of local beers.

Yesterday we rounded off our "vacation" quite nicely by kayaking down the Apple River with some of Ben's cousins. We ate pizza at his aunt Joanne's house and enjoyed one more night of precious sleep in an actual bed. This morning we're heading off for more adventures in rural America! Wish us luck. It's been a great time thus far.