More Tidbits

Kieran is uploading photos RIGHT NOW! We've found a place that accepts our USB cable and it is, of all places, an Internet cafe/karaoke bar, so there's some drunk kids warbling their way through some Usher songs right now, which is pretty hilarious and oddly not annoying (yet). Anyhoo, until the photos are ready, allow me to divulge the minutiae of our lives for your amusement.

The fact that I am a mouth breather is not only unfortunate for me in that it's rather inelegant, it's also inconvenient and unpleasant to be reminded of this bad habit by way of inhaling a sizable number of bugs on any given day. According to my dentist, my mouth breathing has to do with my historical atrocious overbite. Truthfully, I think I only fall back on mouth breathing when I sleep or when I exercise (I guess when I'm breathing deeply, then), so it's not like I'm Napoleon Dynamite or something. Or I hope I'm not. Bugs don't zing into my mouth at high speeds and hit my teeth with a faint thwack to notify me of my gaping maw when I'm, like, buying groceries or something, so perhaps I'm walking around slack jawed half the time without realizing it. When this trip first started, I used to pause to give my mouth a swish with water followed by a dainty spit after a bug flew in, but now I just swallow and keep going. Just goes to show you you can pretty much get used to anything. (Aside: Once when I was jogging, I had a BEE fly into my mouth and start crawling around my tongue and I had to stop dead in the sidewalk with my tongue sticking out and heavy ropes of drool hanging out of the corners of my mouth until the bee decided it was done exploring the surface of my tongue and flew away. For everyone's sake, let's hope that THAT never happens again.)

Speaking of the surprising things that one can become accustomed to, it didn't take long at all for our lives to rearrange themselves into a series of ironic new relativities. Okay, I totally made up that word. What I mean is, things we now accept as Normal Life are pretty darn ironic relative to Actual Normal Life. Here are some examples: On days when we do what we call a "Half Day" (it's become an official term for us), which amounts to doing between 50-75 kilometres or about three or four hours of riding, I find I end up admonishing myself not to get dessert or reminding myself to get salad instead of fries*. I've only had three and a half hours of vigorous exercise, after all, and I don't want to get crazy here. Of course, there was a time not that long ago where if I'd done a three hour workout, I would have heartily patted myself on the back before tying into a piece of cheesecake. "Oh, go on," I'd say smugly while my fork pushed its way through the cool, dense mass of cheese and sugar, "you've earned it."

Along with what we currently both consider to be inconsequential amounts of exercise, there's also the whole "Enh, you can only smell this shirt from four feet away, so it's good for another day" thing, the daily "This knife is dirty; I will wipe it...heeeeerrree on this patch of grass to clean it," and the classic "Ooooh! A grassy camp spot! What unimaginable luxury a night's sleep HERE will be!"

And now, an impromptu reader poll: Do you find this picture creepy?

Notice how the world behind me is all streaming and bent? Notice how there's blurry shapes superimposed over different parts of the shot? Yeah. We took that in the schoolhouse in Delia. The one we thought was haunted (before we knew how the pics turned out).

Anyway, just to prove that I'm not completely hysterical when it comes to sleeping in creepy old buildings, we ended up spending the night in another old one room schoolhouse in Dyment, Ontario and I slept like a log.** I also successfully managed to sleep in the old jail in Ottawa (now the HI hostel), even though it was once featured on "Haunted Canada" and, indeed, there's daily ghost tours with a guide telling a rapt group of people things I would force myself not to hear. Despite my best efforts not to give my avid imagination any more fodder than is naturally provided by a 145 year-old jail (that was closed down due to inhumane conditions), I was unable to avoid learning that the hostel used to have the eighth floor--the floor that used to be death row--open to guests. But too many times guests staying on this floor ran screaming down the stairs in the middle of the night, waking up and terrifying the entire building, because a man holding a bible sat on their bed, so the hostel eventually shut that floor down. This did not happen to us in our cell, thank GODDESS, because I would NOT survive if the ghost of Patrick Whelan sat on my bed.

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*Uh-oh. I think a ripple of anxiety has just gone through all the family members who read this. Believe me, I'm as healthy and strong as an ox right now. I pretty much mean that literally. I think me, my arse, and I could pull a plow up a hill right now.

**That is, AFTER I convinced myself that the fugitive who was on the loose in Ontario was not what was making the creaking noises on the deck. It did take a certain amount of Creak Analysis before I was able to reach that conclusion. Weirdly enough, when we spent the night in Portage du Fort in Quebec, it was just after they'd caught that same fugitive of whom I'd been scared in Dyment, five minutes from where we were staying.

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!

Hello from Thunder Bay, Ontario!

We're in a little Internet gamers' den, which turns out to be not at all conducive to writing because I'm surrounded by teenage boys who are all yelling at each other about who's cheating and you're a cheater and stop cheating you cheater and there's a couple of other kids playing some game that involves learning to play a virtual electric guitar. I'm sure their parents actually PAY them to come here just to get this noise out of the house.

Normally, I have a couple of posts to upload but I've not been writing this week because...WE MADE FRIENDS! Alex and Veronique. Friends who we would hang out with at night and we would talk and they'd say funny things and then we'd say funny things and we'd all laugh and then we'd go to bed and talk about all the funny things our New Friends Alex and Veronique said. We met them at the campground in Ignace when they pulled their bikes into the spot next to ours. They're biking from the Yukon to Quebec.

We have met other bikers on this trip but, uh, they've all been assholes. There seems to be this unspoken element of competition for a lot of people and they ask you questions not because they're interested in you, but because they want to brag about how much faster they are, better their gear choices are, or how clever they are at choosing a superior route. It's always poor Kieran that these dorks will corner while I'm off brushing my teeth somewhere, and either it's against the dorks' Code of Honour for Socially Inept Conversations to try to one-up a female, or a female presence is simply too overwhelming, but my returning to Kieran's side is the only thing that seems to shut these guys up.

Anyway, Our New Friends Alex and Veronique were not like that. They had me at "The headwinds in Saskatchewan were terrible." When they admitted to one day being crushed enough by the wind to give up after thirty kilometres and hitchhike, I all but hugged them. So we had new friends to exchange stories with and compare notes with and to generally hang out with and it's been a long time since we had any company other than our own and I neglected the blog.

So, in lieu of having a proper post, being able to compose a proper post, or having the capacity to upload our pictures to Flickr, I present to you a long overdue map update:

Greetings from Kenora, Ontario!

We made it to cottage country! We are at a lovely campground overlooking The Lake of the Woods, which comes complete with loons calling and a low slung moon. This morning, we dragged our feet and made only half-hearted attempts to pack up the tent before we both conceded that we really wanted to stay here for a day. It's hot and there's beaches. And we loves the hot!

So we languished about the lake all day, soaking in the sun. Nothing feels as much like summer as jumping off the end of a pier into a cool lake on a hot day. And we saw the most amazing thing: A deer picked her way down the rocks to the lake and, without hesitation, slipped into the water and swam across the lake! She was smooth and graceful in the water and glided across rather effortlessly, her big sweet ears moving back and forth the whole time.

We're off to Dryden tomorrow. Today's posts are sans pictures and links because I'm doing this from the phone. I had hoped I would have a chance to talk about the highlights of Saskatchewan (the groovy little town of Craik and the amazing exhibits at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, but I would prefer to do both when I can provide the accompanying photos. So, until the next time we find a proper Internet cafe,I suppose. We've appreciated very much all the positive comments and emails we've received (from around the world!) and wish that we had time to respond. Thank you to all, though, for the words of support and encouragement.