Category Archives: The Great Adventure

Goodnight Irene

Posted on by
5

The title of today’s post is certainly a tired trope, so maybe it is time for it to be retired, but the damage caused by Irene is still being acutely felt, even if coverage of it has begun to wane. Earlier this year, we had our own little Irene, when a nameless windstorm toppled our large fir-tree, along with a half-dozen of our near neighbor’s trees too. It took us three months to repair our damage and one neighbor is only now completing her repairs, some six months after the storm. I expect that our timelines will appear brief when compared to the eventual post-Irene cleanup and repair. After all, New Orleans is still dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, even now.

Living in Saint Louis, we primarily experience tornadoes instead of hurricanes, but even so, the occasional beaten down remnant of a gulf shore hurricane makes it this far inland. A few years ago one such hurricane, hit town and disrupted the Tour of Missouri bicycling race. By the time a hurricane reaches this far north, it is usually moving pretty fast, this was certainly true of Irene, by the time it hit New England.

In 1982, Anne and I had our “Great Adventure”. We took six months off and bicycled around the USA. In early June of ’82 we were in Rhode Island. We had just visited my Aunt Merce and Uncle John and then the seashore resort town of Newport, when a sea storm moved in and sat on Little Rhody for the better part of four days. It took us those four days to eventually escape this tiny state. The remainder of this post is composed from excerpts from Anne’s log that chronicled our days of rain, in early June of 1982.

The day before this story starts, was a play day in Newport, RI, home to many wealthy people. The weather was sunny and warm. We enjoyed bowls of the world-famous clam chowder at the Black Pearl. The next morning this episode dawned ominously cloudy; the fore-tellers of the approaching storm were already above us.

Our first obstacle was not natural though, but manmade. It was the large suspension bridge that connects Newport Island to the western mainland. The approaches to the bridge warned off all us bicyclists, but we didn’t really have another choice. That is until a kind woman with a pickup truck stopped and gave us a lift. Anne rode with her in the cab and I sat in the bed with the bikes. She explained that the authorities were very serious about enforcing this bridge’s bicycle prohibition. Cyclists that had ignored the warnings and had ridden across this obviously dangerous bridge were summarily turned around and forced to ride back from where they had come. That will teach them a lesson! The rain started that afternoon.

Anne and I frequently disagreed on the subject of motels. I was always for them and Anne was the budgetary restraining force. After all, we were always carrying our own little no-tell-motel. Probably the nadir of this little episode can be best summarized by the following diary excerpt.

Well it’s rainy when we start out and it stays so all day. Although, it slacks off occasionally, it’s still pretty miserable. We’ve come about three-quarters of the way around in a circle, back to Providence. Hopefully, tomorrow we’ll leave “Little Rhody”, for other sunnier pastures.

We eventually made it to Massachusetts, by way of Connecticut. I’m still not sure of that navigation, but I suspect that it was my own. It continued to rain in the Bay Colony, but the worst was behind us. We rode through puddles that caused us to lift our feet off the pedals to keep them dry. I saw a much more extreme version of this maneuver in the Irene news. We also got severely splashed by bus #13. This little episodic adventure is in no way comparable to the depredations of Irene. Simply, this is the closest connection that our life experiences have produced to that catastrophe.

Shoreline West Bicycle Tour

Posted on by
1

This August, Anne and I will participate in the 25th Annual Shoreline West Bicycle Tour. This nine-day, 500+ mile bike tour, travels up the Lake Michigan shoreline. It begins in New Buffalo, just north of the Indiana state line and nine days later ends in Mackinac City. Each day will include mileages between 50 and 70 miles. This will be an epic ride for us. I haven’t ridden anything as long since RAGBRAI in 2002, and Anne has not ridden anything this long since 1982, when we rode the big bicycle trip around the country. In 1982, we rode from the Cabin on Lake Superior to Ann Arbor, a distance of 434 miles. That ride took seven days. Along with the picture with this post, the following journal entries were all from 1982. We were so much younger then.

Wednesday, 7/14/82, The Cabin to Foley Creek Campground, We woke up to Duke coming over for freezer jam. We get up and say goodbye to the early birds, then eat and finish cleaning the Cabin. A last look at the beach and we’re off. We mail a card from Dafter, then pickup Old US-2. Lunch in Rudyard is shortened by ominous looking clouds to the north. Fortunately [really now?], we head into a headwind, so we don’t catch the rain. We stop at the Foley Creek Campground for water and decided to stay. It is a tad close to the highway, and has no showers, but otherwise is nice. We rode 44 miles.

Thursday, 7/15/82, Foley Creek Campground to Mackinac City KOA, A tourist day, we take the ferry from St. Ignace to Mackinac Island and play on the Island all day. First we shop and Mark discovers why tourists are called “Fudgies”. Then we ride over the island, by Skull Cave, battlefield, etc. to British Landing. We ride back around the east side of the island and then do the Fort. We ride to the Grand Hotel, but the admission charges deter us. Pizza before the ferry ride across the strait fills us. Good thing, since we have to backtrack five miles from Wilderness State Park. We got 24 miles.

Friday, 7/16/82, Mackinac City to Petoskey State Park, We think it is raining out, so we stay in the tent until eight, but it is mostly wind. It waits until we are on the road to rain. It pours when we get to Bliss and the lady in the store is not very friendly. Some hills right after Bliss. Sun comes out at Cross Village, so we have lunch on the beach there. The road from Cross Village to Good Hart and most of the way to Harbor Spring is great! It is full of shaded low traffic views of the lake. A couple of good hills too, but that’s the breaks. We take a long break in Harbor. We rode 48 miles. [We’ll repeat in reverse this day’s ride.]

Saturday, 7/17/82, Petoskey State Park to Otsego State Park, Well we finally found someone who gets up later than us! We have breakfast in the park in Petoskey, and then hit the Grain Train for natural munchies, pasta and bulgur. We follow the railroad as far as possible, which saves some hills. We get caught in a thunderstorm, but take shelter at some very nice people’s house. They treated us to lunch, which included their own smoked bear meat. The sun comes out in the PM and gets hot again. Stop for long break at a roadside park, and then catch a parade in Gaylord. We get lucky at the state park and get a no-show’s site, the last one, guacamole for dinner, and then the beach, 53 miles.

Sunday, 7/18/82, Otsego State Park to Harrison, We set the alarm, but it is pouring rain, so we wait until eight, to get up. It is still raining when we leave. It begins to slack off when we reach Frederic. We stop at a Laundromat in Grayling and dry the tent, sheet sack, shoes, socks, etc. Leaving Grayling, we run into the military reserve plus the National Guard, so we don’t eat lunch until Higgins Lake. Ice cream sundaes at Big Boy in Houghton Lake tide us over until camp, which has vacancies, salad for supper, then to bed, 75 miles.

Monday, 7/19/82, Harrison to St. Charles, We set the alarm and get on the road early. Good riding in the morning and not too hot. We feel good, lots of nice pastoral scenery. Coleman seems like a nice town. We eat in the cemetery, rather than backtrack from the store to the city park. The afternoon starts to drag at about 2:30. We are both hot and tired and the towns are either non-existent or at least don’t have a store. The last store before St. Charles (about 6 miles out) has a newspaper article about a girl who biked 2,500 miles from Oregon to Saginaw. Mark is jealous. We got 89 miles.

Tuesday, 7/20/82, St. Charles to Ann Arbor, [The journal kind of fails us on this day. As I recall we got up early again and rode hard all day. Our destination was Anne’s parent’s house in Ann Arbor, but we stopped at Anne and Bill’s place, and partied into the night, hence, the lack of a journal entry. They had just gotten back from their honeymoon. We spent a week reconnecting with friends in Ann Arbor, attending the annual summer art fair and eating out. I claimed a century for the day, although Anne begged to differ. We didn’t have bike computers then, but instead relied upon state highway maps.] We got 101 miles.

A little context here, Anne was 28 and I was only 27. 😆 We had been married for two years. We had been on the road for almost four months by this week, more than half of the time on the bike. We had ridden 3,000 miles by this week. We stayed on the bikes until September, when Chet, my boss, finally caught up with me, and called us back to Saint Louis. We ended up with 5,000 miles.

The Trans-Can

Posted on by
4

The Trans-Can or more completely the Trans-Canadian Highway is Canada’s version of their Mother Road.  It runs from sea to shining sea, clear across the lower ten Canadian provinces. This highway is recognizable by its distinctive white-on-green maple leaf route markers.

Almost thirty years ago, Anne and I traversed over 600 miles of it through the Canadian Rocky Mountains and we did it while bicycle camping. OK Sherman, jump into the Way Back machine, it is time for another stroll down memory lane as the Marquis recounts another chapter in that great adventure story, The Great Adventure. [Ed. note: We need to work that title some more.]

This adventure occurred in 1982. Anne and I took six months off from work and bicycled around the country. We traveled through 25+ states and provinces and logged 5,000+ miles on the bikes. We first met the Trans-Can in Ontario, on our drive towards the Cabin. We were only on the highway there for a few days, but it gave us a taste for what to expect later. Back then that Manotoulin Island to the Soo stretch was just two lane highway, with iffy shoulders, but pretty good lines-of-sight. The only bike accident that we saw then was a motorcycle accident, nothing too serious though.

We eventually rejoined the Trans-Can in Calgary, Alberta. We rode that last few miles of the great northern plains in to a mountain pass that led us to Banff. In Banff we met Hugh and Scott again, two cyclists that had accompanied us on the run into the Soo. They had taken a more direct route westward than we had, but had been held up at a KOA in North Dakota for two weeks, because the Canadian customs suspected that they might work illegally in Canada. They were right to suspect this, because that is exactly what they were doing in Banff, cleaning hotel rooms. Our downtown Banff photo has a special effect in it. Our dish detergent leaked onto the film canister and discolored part of the film.

Well we got lots of rain today. When we got to Banff we start looking for hotels that are a) cheap and b) have vacancies. Finally get a room at the King Eddy (as the locals say). No bathroom or TV, but nice otherwise. We get settled (i.e. draping our wet stuff hither and yon), then go shopping in Banff. All these gorgeous mountains and everyone (including us) are in the stores! How is it that I like the shopping, but Mark spends the money? I’ll never know!

Two weeks later we were in the Frasier Valley and crossing back into the US of A. I won’t belabor the many logging trucks on a winding two lane road. Instead, I’ll hit the highlights, Lake Louise, grizzly bear scat (oh yeah, you can tell the difference), the continental divide (only 4K+ feet), Yoho, Salmon Arms, Kicking Horse Pass and many others. By this time, I even started to put on weight, but I was eating about four ice cream cones a day, double scoop of course. You know, I’d like to go back. About ten years ago, we drove backwards the Manatoulin to the Soo route and I was amazed with myself with the hills that we had traversed. I even recalled some of them. I can only wonder what memories would be evoked by a return to the Trans-Can.

Next Time, We’ll Look at the Falls

Posted on by
Reply

It is a slow news day here in RegenAxe land, so this post reaches back into time, back to 1982, back to our great bicycling adventure.  In 1982, Anne and I packed up all our cares and woes, drove to Texas, left the car with my brother and started a six-month bicycling odyssey.  The subject of this post is just one day out of this adventure, the 18th of June.

To set the stage, by this point it had been almost three months, since we had set out and of those three months, we had been on the bike for almost two.  We rode hard, but we also played hard too.  The previous day we had biked through Rochester, NY.  While eventually, this city would play a much larger role later in our lives, on that day its only mention is, “Rochester isn’t very far in the morning.  It is nice to go through while we’re still fresh, lots of construction though.  The headwind is tough after Rochester, seems like we’re hardly making any progress.”  From such an inauspicious introduction, it was unforseen that we would give this city four of our friends (Bob, Chris, Nink & Alice), one of our sons and much of our treasure (to the UofR).

On our trip, we brought a 35mm camera along, hence the pictures with this post, but we also kept a journal.  In this case we mainly means Anne, she kept the journal that is now the basis for this post, but to echo that old Shake n Bake commercial, “And I helped!”  Maybe if I helped more back then than I did with the journal, Anne might be more willing to help more now with this blog.  What do you say, Dear?  😉

Anyway, on the evening of the 17th we camped on the shores of Lake Ontario.  We spoke with another biker who had come from Thunder Bay, ON and was almost to his destination, Syracuse, NY.  He was a big guy and he told us of all the broken bike frames that he had had.  On the following morning, we set off for Niagara.  Here is Anne’s commentary:

We get an early start, because we want to get to Niagara, with plenty of time to explore.  We stop in Wilson at 10:30 [AM], just in time to catch-all of the high school kids mobbing the stores.  We press on and get some strawberries for “le pique-nique” [picnic].  When we get to Niagara [Canada], we get our room, cash money [traveler’s checks] and start sightseeing.  We cross the border three times in one day, ride the Maid of the Mist, walk our feet off, visit the Indian Center and eat in a Japanese restaurant before collapsing into bed!

On the 18th, we only rode 45 miles, but the previous day we had ridden 65 miles and the day after we rode 70 miles.  By this time in our trip, all our lollygagging around the falls aside, we were racing to the Soo and Cousin Anne and Mr. Bill’s 4th of July weekend wedding.  The next day, after we had plunged into southern Ontario, we met some new friends, three women bikers, Sarah Davis, Barbara Neal and Janet Bayer, but theirs is a story for another post.

Our day at Niagara Falls was a special day.  It pretty much marked the halfway point of our great adventure, both in time and in mileage.  We had ridden 2,500 miles together already and we still had another 2,500 more to go.  Beyond those miles we had years yet to travel and hopefully years more yet in the saddle together.  It would be challenge for any cyclist to repeat our feat of that day and cross the border as blithely as we did way back then.  Though I doubt anyone could ever still do so for just 10¢ a throw.  It’s the little things that you treasure, like one slim dime.

Bicycling Vermont

Posted on by
Reply

In 1982, Anne and I had a great adventure, we took off and bicycled for six months. We traveled all around the country, but only just barely visited Vermont on that trip. I think that we only rode six miles in the state. The preceeding picture was from that day. The following paragraph is the log entry for the day that we passed through Vermont.

Day 48 on the bikes, Day 70 in total, Friday, June 11th, From Williams-town, Massachusetts to Round Lake, New York, fifty-five miles:  A slowish start, Pooh doesn’t feel well, even though Mark drank the wine!  It doesn’t take long to cross into Vermont where Mark puts on another shirt, it’s quite cold today.  Very scenic mountains, but fortunately the road just skirts the bottom of the hills.  We mail packages from North Pownal, then head on to New York.  Definitely less mountains now, although it’s still hilly.  Pizza for dinner in Hoosick Falls.

Fast forward almost thirty years, to last summer, when we first returned to Vermont.  We had planned a bicycling vacation in Quebec, with maybe one or two excursions into Vermont.  We ended up actually logging more miles in Vermont than Quebec.  That was alright though, the countryside  was beautiful, both north and south of the border.

We managed to avoid some if not all of the Green Mountain’s hills, because our guides would sometimes trailer us to the top of a large hill to start the day.  The food was a lot better on this trip than the one years ago.  Even if the log does make that pizza sound pretty good.  In 1982 it was just Anne and I on the road.  This last summer, there were nine Team Kaldis members, plus two guides.

When I woke up on Sunday, it was raining.  Anne woke up with a sore throat.  She must have worked too hard on Saturday.  The rain and drizzle persisted through most of the day.  The sun did mange to peek out at the end of the day, but by then it was too late to go for a ride, at least that is how I felt.  So no bike ride on Sunday, just memories of past great rides. 🙁

Biking Down Memory Lane

Posted on by
1

In 1982 Anne and I embarked on an epic adventure.  Before we had kids, we took off from work for six months (April-September) and biked around the country.  This post pertains to the few days out of this trip, that we spent on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, in the vicinity of Cape Hatteras.  Anne kept a journal of our travels and this provides the text for the rest of this post.  [I still remember my sleepless nights, with the clockwork repetition of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse’s beam sweeping over our tent.]

Day 27 on the bikes, Day 41 in total, Thursday, May, 13th, From Ocracoke to Cape Hatteras, 24 miles for Mark and 32 miles for Anne: 

Another day of sunshine and beaches!  Mark isn’t feeling too well though, poor baby, so I ride into Ocracoke by myself to mail packages and buy groceries.  I also stop at two art shops.  We finally leave the beach at noon and make an easy ride to the ferry.  Except for the last half mile when we see the ferry pulling in!  I stop at the arts and crafts shops on Hatteras, while Mark presses on regardless to the campground.  Nice and windy there which Mark likes.  Kind of a slow night, with book reading the big excitement.

Day 42 in total, Friday, May, 14th, Cape Hatteras, 5 miles for Anne: 

Mark had a high fever last night, so we decided to stay over at least for today.  After breakfast, I go to the beach and look at the North Carolina map and write home.  There is a porpoise in close!  Mark rigs the tarp alone as his hospital bed and spends most of the day there.  I walk the nature trail and mistakenly “rescue” a wild kitten.  At least the kitten got a good meal out of it.  After buying groceries in Buxton, I spend the afternoon stringing shells and thoroughly tangling the yarn.  A cold front blows in just before dinner.  I hope that it doesn’t rain.

Day 43 in total, Saturday, May, 15th, Cape Hatteras, 5 miles for Mark: 

Mark wanted one more day to recuperate.  We go to the beach in the morning and see lots of dead beasties, including the head of a stingray.  I go to the bird walk at ten.  Marcia Lyons is a very good guide.  Mark gets groceries in town, while I’m out nature walking.  After lunch, I take a very cold shower and then play with my shell yarn for a while.  Then we walk down to the lighthouse and back, by way of the beach to see the shipwrecked Altoons (1878).  There’s not much left of it.  Both of us got sunburned today.

Day 28 on the bikes, Day 44 in total, Sunday, May, 16th, From Cape Hatteras to Oregon Inlet, 42 miles: 

We miss out on some breakfast with some people who Mark met, but they leave us some English muffins and bacon.  We break camp slowly, because we’ve spread out over the last three days.  Always some excuse.  We go through Avon, Salvo, Wares and Rodanthe.  We take breaks of varying length in each town.  We eat lunch at the Chicamacomico Rescue Station.  There is a longish stretch through the Pea Island Wildlife Refuge, but it goes quickly.  The Oregon Inlet Bridge is not as bad as we had feared and then there is camp!