Yup. Still Alive.

Ontario tried, but it didn't kill us. By "tried to kill us," I mean "threw us in front of speeding trucks." Literally. Ontario's homicidal tendencies towards cyclists could very well have gotten the better of us at any time, so you can go ahead and call us lucky or blessed or whatever else fits into your world view for having survived. We survived the province with absolutely no shoulders on its highways, highways that are populated almost exclusively by caravans of speeding semi-trailers, and highways to which there are no alternatives. There's just the one route, the Trans-Canada, so if things get dangerously busy or rough or generally begins to resemble a giant steaming loaf of crap, you gotta just keep going.

So, I guess you could say cycling in Ontario is a lot like life: When life dishes out a big steaming pile of crap, you gotta just be bold, mark out the space you need to keep going, and then inhabit that space with your held held high (and your left hand at the ready to flip the bird to people invading your little survival bubble, delivered along with a complementary daisy chain of obscenities of course).

Seriously, though. Cycling in Ontario is hella dangerous. It's quite simply a tightrope act of keeping your bike upright in a rough, all but non-existent shoulder on a very busy highway with a LOT of truck traffic. If you're planning a cycling tour for anywhere, don't go to Ontario. And if you're planning to cycle across Canada, get yourself a plan for Ontario. We cycled only at certain times of the day, packing it in shortly after 3:00 when the truck traffic really picked up. And, in the middle of it all, we had to throw in the towel and admit temporary defeat. We hit the reputedly worst and most dangerous stretch of highway (the 700 km ride around Lake Superior, from Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie) right at the start of Drunk Driving Fest 2007 the long weekend. In fact, coming into Thunder Bay the traffic was already getting out of control, and I was literally blown off the road three separate times by trucks that came too close to me. Literally a matter of a couple centimetres more and the trucks would have hit me. As much as we hated to do it, we had to admit that our timing was off with the long weekend and it was too dangerous to continue at that point, so we took the Greyhound to Sault Ste. Marie to where there's less truck traffic (most of it takes the northern route that branches off at Nippigon) and to wait out the long weekend in order for traffic to thin out some.

Anyway, there was little to no joy to be had with the cycling part of our day. It was noisy and stressful at best. We did very much enjoy the places we stopped, though. Lakes and rivers and forests and quiet evenings steeped in moonlight. And now we're done! We're in Ottawa and simply have to cross the bridge and we'll be in Quebec. In fact, we've been zig zagging back and forth between Quebec and Ontario for the last couple of days and it's been lovely, lovely riding along the Ottawa River and The Joy is back. Indeed, things are lookin' up!

Some quick housekeeping items, which funnily enough is all I meant this post to be until I heard the pleasing and comforting clack of my own typing (what can I say, writing is home to me): Kieran left the cell phone in a motel in Northern Ontario and it's now on a cellphone version of The Incredible Journey, trying to catch up to us, so we've not been getting any messages or texts y'all may have been sending and we're sorry about that; although it's likely only our parents who have noticed, we've not been able to upload photos since Manitoba, which is becoming something of a gathering crisis at the same time as being annoying, as we don't have another memory card for our camera (nor can we buy one since it's outdated technology or something), so we're sorry about that too for all the people who have boring office jobs for whom we've not been providing sufficient distraction; on a related note, I find I can't blog about various anecdotes and spaces and places without their accompanying photos to jog my memory and, hence, the radio silence these last few weeks. Coming soon, though.

Until then, love to all!