Miles 4 Melanoma

It was a quick and pleasant 20-mile ride to the border. I was riding with a group that included Molly, Marisa, Colleen, Kira, and Scott. We got to the river, in the town of Marine City, just in time to board the ferry to cross over into Canada. It was a small auto ferry, which took us across the St. Claire River to the town of Sombra in Ontario. I wore the Canadian flag socks that I bought yesterday; after the female border guard waved me through, she said “Nice socks.”

The winds picked up as we crossed the wide-open plains of Ontario. I felt like seeing how much I could push myself, just to get through the wind as soon as I could, so I took off on my own until I got to lunch in the town of Oakdale. I re-joined the group for our final 28 miles (for a total of 71 miles for the day) to get to our destination of West Lorne. As we got on our way, Molly and Marisa were reminiscing about listening to NPR news during the mornings at their home in DC, so we started playing a game where we could see how many NPR personalities we could name, while trying to imitate the voice of the personality as we said their name. I impressed them all by being the only one to remember Snigdha Prakash.

Once we arrived at West Elgin Secondary School in West Lorne, I showered, then loaded my laundry bag onto my bike rack again and headed to the local laundromat with Colleen. I had a small load this time, but wanted to get it out of the way so I wouldn’t have to worry about it over the weekend. While my clothes were drying, I really had a taste for a coffee and donut; there was a Donut Delite shop just around the corner, but there were out of good donuts for the day, so I just got the coffee. When I finished my laundry, I walked around town a bit more to kill time before dinner, but there was not much to see or do.

Dinner was at the school. After riding past cornfields for literally thousands of miles, we finally had some fresh-picked sweet corn on the cob. We had another Molly-organized event afterward, a swap meet. Some of us gathered our spare stuff, or anything that we were willing to barter with, and got together to see what kind of deals we could make. Nobody was interested in my Wal-Mart six-pack cooler. Matt Olson had one of his RAGBRAI jerseys available, so I decided to part with my Polish Post jersey to get it.

Filed under: Coast to Coast 2004 |