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September 13 Tuesday Bicycle touring from Rondeau Provincial Park Ontario to Springfield Ontario Todd talked to us as we left the Rondeau Park entrance. He is some hyped about this cycle touring thing. He told us he called his mom in Kitchener last night to tell her about us. Then he phoned the library and they told him about some books they have. He says he wants to go and buy a bike, so he can come bicycle touring with us. Although, he admits he doesn't know if he can get his bike to look like ours. I think to myself he may not want his to look like our bikes. Vagabonds of the twentieth century. There was a roadside picnic area where we stopped pedalling long enough to eat breakfast. Biting flies are out again. Waves on Lake Erie are rolling up against the shoreline. It is so hazy it looks like smoke. Todd assured us it is from the Carolinian vegetation transpiring. It is very humid and already has hit 29º C. The wind is slightly behind us. With hard cranking on our fully loaded bicycles, we are pushing 25 kph average. A few small rolling hills appear. We are cycling east towards Toronto. Just before St Thomas there is a steep downhill that we cycle down. We are whizzing down, all caution thrown to the wind, when I zoom around a corner, look up, and see a bright red stoplight signally us to stop right at the very bottom of the dip. From the drops of my handlebars, I squeeze my brakes on hard and hope that Sharon sees the light in time. I manage to rein my bike to a halt just at the edge of the intersection. That's the trouble with loaded touring bicycles -- they don't stop on a dime. There are tree leaves obscuring the light and I didn't see any warning sign that there was a traffic light ahead. Sharon said she didn't see the light until I started to brake. The sudden hard braking has made her bike start making ticking noises again. Her brakes were squealing. I think mine were close to smoking. We climbed the other side in our bicycle's lowest gears and passed a statue of Jumbo the elephant. We stopped at an Esso and met the owner Dan who offered us a free Coke. He says that his brother bikes from Toronto to come and visit him. One time they all biked to Rondeau Park and went camping with a canoe. He had pictures of their bikes, loaded with panniers, lying in the bottom of the canoe. Pretty cool. The things one can do in the name of bicycle touring. Next stop was in the paper-thin one street town of Springfield. We went into a General Store to pick up cheese and ham to put in our pasta. They didn't have either. I bought a blue Freezie instead. Bicycle tourists have to be adaptable. A woman came into the store and said, "I've been talking to your partner outside." She invited us to her house for supper and overnight. We pedal our little loaded touring bicycles after her car as fast as our little legs can twiddle. Doesn't she know that we don't have engines on our bikes? Soon, we were eating roast beef dinner at Sherry's, along with her three daughters, Pam 15, Melanie 13, and Alana 11. Sherry's husband, Bud, works for Ford. He usually doesn't get home until 8:30 PM. As the token man of the family, I was selected to slice the roast beef. It was lean and rare. "Just the way Bud likes it," Sherry tells us. As Sharon went to get her stuff of her bike to have a shower, she ran into Bud as he was coming in the back door. They bumped into one another in the dark and he said Sharon scared him. I told Bud that she scares me too, especially in the dark. We just happened to hit the night of the women's "stitch-n-bitch" session. Six of Sherry's very talented craft-oriented friends came over. When they found out I was a school teacher, the topic of choice became remodeling the educational system. Anyway, the Tim-bits were good. Shelley McVittie, one of the attendees, is a well-known local painter of old buildings and the scenes of Alymer, Ontario, a little town south of here. |
