Landed in Ithaca

After almost 5 weeks on the go, covering 1303 miles, we've finally arrived in Ithaca, our home for the next 4 months.

Our final leg began in Stratford, on the Avon River of course, which naturally drains into the Thames River, which logically flows through London, which then proceeds to . . . Lake Erie! These Ontario cities and rivers were named by homesick Brits who settled this part of Canada in the mid-1800s. In the late 1800's a Stratford citizen rallied the citizenry to create a Shakespeare garden in a town park, i.e. a garden containing every plant and flower mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. With a name like Stratford and a Shakespeare Garden on the premises, another visionary citizen rallied the town to create a small Shakespeare play festival in 1953, and things have not been the same since.

The Stratford Festival is no longer limited to Will, and in fact we saw three plays here, two by others: an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. Our first play was A Comedy of Errors, which we saw Friday night on half-priced rush tickets when we decided that we still had a little energy left after arriving in town at 3:30 in the afternoon. The play is fairly outrageous to begin with, and Stratford pulled out all the stops to put it on as a broad farce, with excellent results. Now they did push the limits here and there, and we are fairly confident that Antipholus did not say "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto" to Dromio in Will Shakespeare's time, but hey, it fit the mood, so why not?

All three plays were terrific productions, each casting a strong mood, each very different. Mockingbird was remarkable for the performance of 11-year-old Abigail Winter-Culliford as Scout, a role that required her to be onstage for almost the entire performance, and to memorize more lines than most adult actors get. And she did not merely occupy the space onstage, she occupied the role. She's from Vancouver BC, and we hope we can see her again some day in that neck of the woods once we return to Seattle. The Oscar Wilde play was nonetheless our favorite, given the clever plot and even cleverer dialogue. We also stayed off the bike for 2 whole days, so we refreshed the body as well as the mind.

While in Stratford, the wind finally adjusted itself to assist us, and we left town with a tail wind for what turned out to be the longest day of the trip, 69 miles. Ian, our B&B host in Stratford is an avid cyclist himself, riding every day at the age of 74 despite heart surgery last year, and he found us a terrific route on low-traffic roads and even accompanied us for the first 3 miles out of town! The fact that it was Labour Day meant that the truck traffic was extremely light, and the largely shoulderless roads tolerable. A second days' journey from Stratford and we were in Niagara-On-The-Lake, a wonderful community 20 miles down the Niagara River from the Falls. N-O-T-L is a quaint, well-to-do community that hosted two major battles in the War of 1812.

In the Depression the Canadian government put men to work re-creating Fort George to look like it did in that era, and we had a great tour of the fort from a woman who exemplified the rarely-realized ideal of Canadian bilingualism as she explained everything in alternating segments of English and French and answered questions from the group in both languages, smoothly. Modern NOTL is more focussed, however, on the wine industry, and we passed half-a-dozen wineries going in and out of town, and passed within a few miles of another two dozen had we chosen to wander. We stayed at one of roughly three dozen B&Bs and walked past a number of high-end (and pricey) restaurants before stopping for a reasonably-priced nouveau Thai sort of place that served arguably the best meal of the trip.

The ride from Niagara-On-The-Lake to Niagara Falls was another highlight of the trip. A bike trail took us on smooth, car-free asphalt for the first 15 miles and put us on a reasonably low-traffic street the remaining five miles to the Falls. The route was never far from the Niagara River, and numerous times the scenery opened to spectacular vistas to our left of the Niagara River and Gorge, culminating of course with a view from the Canadian side of the American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls and Horseshoe Falls, dropping all that Great Lakes water we had ridden by for the prior three weeks over a 170' precipice. We returned on foot after dinner and were treated to the light show, as powerful beacons on the Canadian side light up the falls in varying colors. What a treat!

The next day was yet another one of those days that keeps us biking. Once more, a tail wind. Once more, great bike trails alternating with roads that had wide shoulders, low traffic or both. Once more, great scenery, but this time of idyllic river and canal rather than dramatic rock canyons and waterfalls. We amused the border crossing guards when their computer selected us by random drawing for a complete search -- they had never had a bicycle hit the border crossing jackpot before, and they settled for a few questions about bringing in agricultural products before sending us on our way (we answered that we had eaten any and all that had come our way). A few miles out of Niagara Falls NY and we hit the western end of the Erie Canal in Tonawanda, and were immediately rewarded with a bike trail along the canal.

The Erie Canal was completed in 1825 and was truly the first superhighway in America. It moved not only goods at a fraction of their prior freightage, but also people -- more people moved out West on the Erie Canal than moved into America through famed Ellis Island. It had major rebuilds in the 1850's to make way for yet larger boats, and in the early 1900's when it converted from mule-power to motor power for the vessels using it. Today it has a very small amount of commercial use, but is maintained (beautifully) by New York State as a tourist draw, both for boaters on the water and for hikers and cyclists using the old towpaths alongside it.

For most of three days, we followed the canal. The very western part of the canal today is a channelized section of Tonawanda Creek, and never had a towpath since the 1918 rebuild. Bike trails filled the gap, sometimes right on the Creek but sometimes in nearby woods. At Lockport we came to Locks 34 and 35, the final ones before Lake Erie. Originally two sets of five small locks raised boats to the west on one flight or lowered them eastbound on the other. They now provide a flow-through for water to keep the canal water level up below the locks. Today two locks do the job of moving boats 49 feet up the Niagara Escarpment (note the lowered boom on the sailboat in Lock 34, to let the boat get under the many low bridges). From Lockport the original towpath has been smoothed out for cyclists, and it stretches now almost 100 miles to and through Rochester to Newark NY, and further extensions are being worked on still.

While the packed limestone surface was a little slower than a highway, maybe 1-2 mph at any given power output, the old towpath put us right next to the canal and past various historic buildings and canal structures, such as the lift bridges that have stairways so that pedestrians can still cross the canal when the bridge is in the "up" position, or the viaduct that carries the canal past the town of Gasport, part of which is in the photo.

Our first night along the canal was spent in an 1831 brick home that is now the Canal Country Inn B&B, to the right of Jeff in the photo. We walked along the towpath a mile into town for dinner at a restaurant called the Old Basket Factory that was once, in fact, a basket factory serving local farmers shipping produce on the canal.

On Saturday September 8, we reached the final reserved lodgings, Van Cleef Homestead B&B, built in 1825 by the founder of Seneca Falls. One more day to go! Then we checked the weather forecast -- 90% chance of rain, 1-2" expected. Well, we had stayed overnight twice before in Seneca Falls and fallen in the love with this charming town, and the B&B had no one booked for our room for the next night, so we pulled out our novels and had a quiet day of reading, with one trip out using the B&B's guest umbrellas. Through 1-2" of rain, in fact.

Our delay paid off. Our new "final day" was splendid, in the low 70's with a tailwind and on roads with wide shoulders all the way to Ithaca. Not only that, but they rose hundreds of feet on a ridge above Lake Cayuga, giving us vistas far across the Finger Lakes. What a way to arrive!

There was only one cloud on our arrival, and it has taken a few days to pass -- our grandaughter Elise was still in the throes of a bad virus, and not a very happy camper. But little Issei, our 6-week-old grandson, has been all we could want in a grandchild, and we're getting quite used to him and he to us in the three days since we arrived. We're looking forward to spending lots of time with the grandchildren and their mom and dad, Lisa and Ray, in the coming 4 months.

We're delighted with the apartment we sublet, sight unseen, from John Blake, a Cornell Law student who is studying in London this fall. Actually Lisa, Louise's daughter, checked it out for us last spring, and we met John this summer when he came to work in Seattle, of all places, for the summer! It's a neat, clean, attractive place with a garden view we will have difficulty leaving in 4 months. We'll put up a photo or two in our next entry.

Thank you for following our travels on this blog. We will update it maybe once a month with some photos of our family here and of the Finger Lakes region we expect to visit by bike on weekends, until we get on the road again in January, in Florida, for a trip up the East Coast.

We'd love to know who's reading our blog, how you've enjoyed it, what suggestions you have, and any news of your own you'd care to share with us (which we will NOT put in the blog!) Please email us at redtandem@yahoo.com!

From an Island of Calm to an Island of Culture

We've just now done a 10-day journey from Mackinac Island, a peaceful isle of horses and bicycles surrounded by Lake Huron, to Stratford Ontario, perhaps not the Olympus of theater in Canada but a mighty mount nonetheless, surrounded by seemingly endless miles of farmland. In our next entry we'll say a bit about Stratford and the Shakespeare (actually Shakespeare Plus these days) Festival. This is about getting here.

As promised last time, we've now got a map of our route from Milwaukee WI to Ithaca NY. And as you can see from the map, we spent the entire time to Mackinac Island following the shore of Lake Michigan. In planning the trip, we wondered why there were many, many more B&Bs, inns and motels along the shore of Lake Michigan than along the shore of Lake Huron, which this leg has mostly taken. The answer is simple -- it's fairly boring on this side of the lower peninsula.

Lake Huron is in many ways like Lake Michigan -- identical elevation above sea level, same temperature, even a tad bigger -- but location is everthing, as they say. The Lake Huron shore of Michigan's lower peninsula is on the leeward side of lake weather, and thus lacks the sand dunes and hills that make the western shore dramatic. It also is largely a straight or gently curving shore, unlike the Lake Michigan side with numerous bays and peninsulas that make for interesting boating and that provide picturesque sites for summer homes. This lighthouse at Presque Isle was one of the few scenic spots, and it gives us a chance to show you all what our fully-loaded bike looks like with the new Ortlieb panniers that were a retirement present to Jeff from his office.

It also has far fewer towns. Leaving the ferry from Mackinac Island to Mackinaw City, we went 60 miles our first day, passing through only one town. Only occasionally did the road get close enough to Lake Huron to see the lake. The up side was that the road was incredibly flat and blessed with a wide shoulder and little traffic. Rogers City, that first destination, has the world's largest open-pit limestone quarry. Not exactly a big tourist draw, but there was an overlook on our route so we stopped to take this photo. That's an enormous truck in the upper right hand corner of the photo, a few miles from our vantage point. The most interesting thing about the quarry is where the limestone goes. The quarry is owned by U.S. Steel because they use most of its output in making steel. No, steel is not made from limestone, but a few hundred pounds of it are added to every ton of molten steel to remove impurities from the iron ore. A brochure we found in Rogers City informed us of many other things this limestone goes into, from fertilizer to the toothpaste you may have used today.

A few days later, we were in a community a bit above the "thumb" of Michigan when we saw an item in a local paper describing the demographics of the county we were in. The median household income, the article said, was about $25,000. This stunned us. That's not much above the poverty level, we thought, and another newspaper article a few days later confirmed this (poverty level for a family of 4 is now defined as $20,400, and the median household income for the nation is over $48,000). But the roads here were in excellent condition, something we bicyclists pay an inordinate amount of attention to, well paved and well-swept. The houses were not large or fancy in this area, but not ramshackle either. The next day, while still in that county, we decided to skip the cafes and have our first picnic lunch, using the compact butane stove and titanium pot we'd been carrying for the first time. We went to a quite large supermarket and started looking for something healthy to cook. We thought we'd cut up a sausage and add it to soup, but there was nothing that was less than 80% fat -- literally! We looked for ground beef, and the leanest to be found was 19% fat, not the 7% that every grocery in Seattle routinely carries. We asked a grocery employee, and she said that low-fat doesn't sell there, cheap sells there. Their customers, she said, don't care what's in the food as long as it's inexpensive. We ended up buying cooked chicken in the deli section and a can of soup so we could say we used the stove, but the main thing we got out of lunch was an interesting lesson in how economics shape entire communities.

Bay City is at the inside of the thumb, and a blog we read last year from some Canadian bicyclists who circumnavigated Lake Huron described coming into Bay City as something of a nightmare of truck traffic, strip malls and disappearing road shoulders. Jeff studied the maps extra hard, and thought he had a good alternative, and it was one of those special days that you remember for a long time. Granted, a rare tail wind helped, but the road he had selected was flat and nearly traffic-free, through pleasant farm country until we got close to Bay City. From that point, there appeared on the map to be a way along the shore of Lake Huron, but the resolution of the map wasn't good enough to see if the road was continuous or a series of dead-end roads. As it turned out, there were two dead-ends, but in each case friendly neighbors told us how to find footpaths around a garage of a certain color or shape, where we could jump to the next road and continue on. The second "secret passage" brought us into a wildlife preserve and onto a beautiful rail trail that brought us right into Bay City.

Bay City is an unlikely place to go sightseeing, but they've done a remarkable job of beautifying the shore of the Saginaw River, and the next day we had a delightful ride along a biking/walking path that follows and at one point seen in the photo takes you right over the river on a wooden testle. Along the way was the site of a long-gone shipyard that chose to close rather than switch from building wooden ships to metal. Some of the wood vessels they had built rested at their docks after the boats had joined the shipyard in retirement, then fire swept through and burned the shipyard to the ground and the boats to the water line. To this day the ghostly remainder of the boats' skeletons can be seen. A nearby sign gave the name and date for each skeleton, from the 1880's to about 1905 for the most recent of the ghosts.

We had wondered what Frankenmuth would be like. It is widely known as a quaint town with German roots, and from the web seemed to be a place a lot of tourists went to. With the help of another cyclist from Bay City, we found an idyllic route down roads where we saw no cars in either direction for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and checked it out. It was fairly underwhelming. It's authentically German, all right, named by German missionaries from Franconia ("Frankenmuth" means "courage of the Franconians") who intended to turn the local Chippewa into good Lutherans. The tourist guides are discretely quiet about the level of success they did or didn't have. In the early 1900's a restaurant founded in the 1880's began to get a name for itself by serving all-you-can-eat chicken dinners, and folks from nearby cities like Flint (20 miles away) and even Detroit (85 miles out) who were getting more prosperous building these new-fangled devices for Henry Ford would drive to Frankenmuth and enjoy a good meal. In the 1950's the restaurant decided to play up the German theme and added some Bavarian (not Franconian, interestingly enough) decor, and a few other places followed suite. Now the tourist buses bring in hordes, and the main focus of the trip appears to be lunch and/or dinner in town. Frankly (pardon the pun), there's not much else to see except for the usual assortment of kitschy gift shops and sweet shops, in this case with various German or ersatz-German themes. Ironically, there was only one restaurant that served sauerbraten, which Jeff insisted on since he knew this was his only chance to find this on a menu on this trip. Louise was very pleased with her German smoked pork, and both agreed that the sauerkraut and blaukraut (sweet and sour red cabbage, also known as rotkohl) were outstanding.

Two days of riding still more quiet roads through the Michigan farmland brought us a hundred and five miles to the St. Clair River, which drains Lake Huron into Lake St. Clair, sometimes called the "sixth Great Lake," which then drains to Lake Erie. On our side, Michigan; on the other, Ontario Canada. The St. Clair looked like a lake, calm water just rustled on top by wind and chop, until you stopped to watch the ferry go back and forth from Marine City MI to Sombra ON, pointed 30 or 40 degrees upstream in order to proceed straight across against the current carrying the waters of three Great Lakes on their way to the remaining two. Great ships passed by silently all day and all night, perhaps some to or from the limestone quarry in Rogers City, or the great iron ore fields above Duluth, or the grain elevators of Chicago.

Our destination was the Heather House B&B in Marine City, and it was one of our best stopovers. As the photo shows, it is a gorgeous Victorian home, with a large front porch and a separate second-story porch for each of the five guest rooms. There was a round library/sitting room in that turret, a half-story above the second floor, where we unwound from the riding and checked out some of their books. Louise liked the first two chapters of Nicholas Evans' "The Loop" that she read there so much that she wrote down the title and, amazingly enough, found it in a second-hand bookshop that same evening on the way to dinner.

But good B&Bs are more than just beautiful houses. Our host was Barb, who is running the place now that her parents have retired from founding and operating it for 18 years. Sometimes it's the hosts, sometimes the other guests, sometimes both that make for a great experience. Barb more than made up for the absence of other guests with her warm welcome, her much-appreciated offer to use the washer/dryer, and a great breakfast the next day. The main course was a wonderful quiche lorraine, but we took this shot before it arrived to show off the beautiful period silverware, china and linens she put out for us. She's finishing up coursework to become an elementary school teacher and the B&B is on the market. We certainly hope she finds special people to continue on with this special place.

Alas, that breakfast, the ferry boat crossing and the pleasant welcome by Canadian Customs were the last good moments of that day. We had spent the evening before watching not only the boats in the St. Clair but also a terrific light and sound display as thunderstorms moved through Marine City just after we returned from dinner. While they brought the temperature down from the mid-80's to the low-70's, they also brought a north wind, at the very moment when our southward-trending route turned to a zig-zag course alternating between straight north and straight east. And no light breeze was this -- it was a steady 15 to 20 mph blow, with occasional higher gusts, and we struggled. Not only when going north, as you can well imagine, but also going east, as Jeff would have to clench the handlebars to keep the bike straight against the cross wind. The physical and mental strain was the greatest we'd had to this point.

Adding to the misery was the fact that Ontario saves money on its roads by not bothering with paved shoulders. As long as no one was coming the other way, vehicles passing us were very good about giving us a wide berth, cars and trucks both. And cars coming up behind us were very nice about slowing to let oncoming traffic clear before passing. These were not overly busy roads. But every now and then we could see a truck coming up behind us, cars or trucks approaching, do the math, and see that everyone was going to be right where we were in 15 or 20 seconds. As carefully as we could, we'd hit the brakes down to 8 mph or so and coast off into the soft shoulder, hoping we'd stay upright while coming to a complete stop out of the way. We always did, but it was not a pleasant exercise, and it was one we went through well over a dozen times that day.

Somehow or other, we convinced ourselves to bike 40 miles like this, until we reached a point on the route where any vehicle going by was very likely going to go the remaining 15 miles to our destination down that same road. It wasn't just the wind, the truck traffic on this road was distinctly heavier and we really did want to live to bike another day. We pulled over and watched for pickup trucks, sticking out our thumbs every time one approached. Two stopped but had their flatbeds filled, which we couldn't see as they approached. We thanked them profusely and said we'd wait, sooner or later we'd get help. And, sure enough, we did, in the form of Murray.

Murray was headed to a point just past the motel where we had a reservation, and said he could take us the whole way if we didn't mind stopping for 15 minutes at his house en route. No problem at all! He drove a few miles and pulled off the road and back a few hundred yards to what appeared to be a beautifully maintained 19th century brick Italianate Gothic home, where Murray introduced us to his wife Denise. Denise gave us a tour of their home, which is in fact only 10 years old, but done entirely in late 19th century style, down to the intricate oak woodwork, 19th-century floral wallpaper designs in several rooms, Victorian furniture, and interesting ceilings, some textured in wet plaster with intricate swirling designs, the kitchen ceiling wallpapered with a textured white paper that looked exactly like an old pressed-tin covering.

Our ride and visit with Murray and Denise helped calm both mind and body, but we both had a restless sleep, filled with tension from the day before. The next day we had ten more miles to go on that busy road before we could get onto quieter country roads. The cafe attached to the motel did not open until 8. We decided we could not wait until then, as the traffic and the wind (predicted to be out of the north though a little softer at 10-12 mph) would have picked up too much. We got up before the sun did, had a Zone Bar and a few almonds for "breakfast," and were on the road just after sunrise at 7 am. By the time we'd done the 10 miles with only 3 trucks having gone by, none requiring us to go off the road and stop, we knew we could survive the day. Our spirits brightened, our muscles relaxed, and we pedalled on. It was our longest day at 66 miles, and there was another stretch of 10 miles on a semi-busy shoulderless road with occasional trucks, but the wind was not as troublesome, there were occasional narrow shoulders, and we knew that there was an end to this little period in purgatory, with Stratford as the payoff at the end of the day.

Well, we're now in pleasant Stratford, but our stay here and the three plays we stopped to see here at the Festival will have to await our next blog. May the wind be at your back, as the weatherman says it will be for us the day we leave.

A Car-Free Island in Time

We had a windy time of it getting here, but we're now at Mackinac Island, a few miles east of the Mackinac Bridge, longest in the Western Hemisphere. We had a 62-mile ride going NNE along the Lk. Michigan shore, facing a 15-25 mph NW wind. Fortunately a lot of the small roads we took had trees and/or bluffs to the west of the road, giving us some shelter, but it was a HARD day. The wind provided some dramatic waves in Charlevoix, our destination, as the photo shows. The town looks like it was the model for Lionel's little plastic town parts, quaint houses, Victorian store fronts and all. A local architect built a number of stone houses that folks come to see (from the outside -- they're all private homes), and we had a nice walk past quite a few of them. The one pictured here is probably the cutest one we saw, and is known locally as "The Mushroom House" for its shape.

Our next day was short and easy and almost all on a bike trail through Petoskey, which has an even larger, quainter business district, one that has survived the building of a Walmart on the outskirts of town. Third and last day northward to Mackinac was on a road called the "Tunnel of Trees," and that it was. It was a fairly narrow road for a state highway, with trees growing right up to the shoulderless asphalt, but the traffic was almost non-existent except for motorcycle clubs out for their Sunday rides, and bicyclists. Lunch was at Legs Inn, founded a century ago by a Polish immigrant who liked the area and the people of the Ottowa tribe nearby. We had a great Polish lunch with sausage on rye bread, stuffed cabbage, pierogies and dumplings. Polish students work in the summer, augmenting the locals who keep it running through the winter. We could see four lighthouses from our table on the veranda, one reportedly in bad shape as it was used for target practice by Army bombers training for combat in WW II.

Mackinac Island has been a dream destination for us for decades. NO CARS!!! Just bikers, hikers, and LOTS of horses -- about 600 in summer. At night from our B&B we hear hoof beats instead of car engines. It's not any quieter, but it's a lot more conducive to sleep. You also don't get diesel smoke in your face during the day as vehicles pass you, but you do get some pretty strong "biofuel" aromas from the horses, particularly in the downtown area where they stand, waiting for customers to haul.

The island has a state highway all along the shore, exactly 8 miles long and totally level. For 6 of those miles it looks exactly like a bike trail with a yellow stripe down the middle. It's a little wider, not by much, near town, but there it shares use with horse-drawn wagons, horse-drawn delivery trucks, horse-drawn garbage haulers (they put your trash container on a flat-bed wagon and empty it elsewhere, then return the empty), and LOTS of walkers and cyclists. As you cross the street, you also have to watch for more than the traffic because the roadway has, uh, 'texture.'

The town clusters around ferry docks for three boat lines that charge identical fares and have virtually identical schedules, all running boats every 30 minutes from 7 am 'til early evening. One street is fudge shop, restaurant, fudge shop, gift shop, fudge shop, old wood hotel, restaurant, fudge shop, book store, fudge shop . . . for about four blocks. Did we mention the Island is famous for fudge? We got a free sample in one from a student from Poland, who was very surprised to hear about Legs Inn, and positively salivating when we described our lunch there. Besides Poles, we've encountered quite a number of Jamaicans working summer jobs here and elsewhere in this part of Michigan, and were told there are also quite a few Filipinos and Chileans in the summer work force. Wonder how the Michigan congressional delegation voted on immigration reform this past year . . . This community would come to a grinding halt without 'guest workers,' it's pretty clear.

The island has a LOT of hotels and B&Bs, none more famous than the Grand Hotel, which was used with other island landmarks in the film "Somewhere In Time." There are many reminders on the island about the movie. The hotel is enormous, as the "world's largest summer hotel" darned well ought to be, and a walk down the "world's largest front porch" takes a while, as you can see!

We've also enjoyed hiking around the island looking at the many stunning summer "cottages" built by wealthy Midwesterners in the 19th century, competing in size and architectural quaintness and almost all set off by colorful gardens. There is also a genuine fort on the island that was successfully attacked once with no loss of life. The commander learned of the declaration of the War of 1812 from his British opponent with a much larger force, and chose not to commit himself and his fort to martydom. Smart move, as the diplomats awarded Michigan, and thus the fort, back to the Americans 2 years later.

The weather has been dry except for light rain one morning a week ago. The wind has been strong while we've been on the island, and from the direction we're headed tomorrow. It's supposed to get lighter in speed, but not change direction. Could be another tough 65-miler when we leave. Temperature has been Fall-like, given the wind plus high temperatures only around 70. It could be worse. It gets cold enough here that in some winters (2 out of the past 4, from someone who's spent 4 winters here) Lake Huron freezes from St. Ignace, five miles away, all the way out to Mackinac Island, and locals mark an "ice bridge" with discarded Christmas trees that people drive across by snowmobile. In the "old days," in fact, it was how the island was resupplied in winter.

For those of you trying to keep track of our route, we'll see if we can put up a map next time be blog on. Having come up the west side of Michigan's lower peninsula and jumped to this island between the upper and lower peninsulas, we're now about to ride down the east side of the state, along Lake Huron. In one week we'll enter Ontario from Marine City MI, along the St. Clair River that separates Michigan from Ontario, US from Canada. We expect to see a lot more lakeshore, the world's largest open-pit limestone mine, and a town with a German heritage that appears to be something like Leavenworth WA, except that it really IS German. But also, now, perhaps a bit hokey. We'll let you all know.

We've gotten a few Comments via this blog site from folks we've met along the way and told about our blog. Keep the comments coming! We enjoy hearing that folks are reading about our trip.

Cheers, Louise and Jeff

Le Grand Tour Begins

After a 3-week trip to Japan for Matt's wedding, we're now on the road on our tandem, bound for Ithaca NY.

We had a surprisingly unfrantic 26 hours in Seattle, given all that had to be done and was done. But Steve and Janet Sisson helped us recover from jet lag with a good sleep at their place, and we got our wedding post online and handled all the other Seattle-centric tasks that had to be done with no sense of hurry. Janet gave us a lift to Amtrak via the FedEx store, where our suitcases and backpacks from the Japan trip got sent on to Ithaca, and off we were.

Although the tandem has couplings and can be fit into two suitcases, we used the standard Amtrak method of taking two single-bike cardboard boxes telescoped together to pack our bike, with only a few parts removed to make it fit. Fortunately, we had all those removed parts where we could find them when we hit Milwaukee, so 45 minutes after we stepped off the train, we were biking the half-mile from the station to the lake shore, where we had the first of many lighthouse sightings of this trip. Having spent much of our lives on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, we never realized how many lighthouses are inland on the Great Lakes. One week into the trip and we've seen almost a dozen.

The first three days were north along the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan. We had a 25-miler through the north half of Milwaukee and into the suburbs right after getting the bike reassembled, but it was an easy urban 25 since the nice folks in city govt. had sent us a Milwaukee bike map that showed us bike trails (about half the distance) and quiet streets (almost all the rest) to Cedarburg. As we came into town a lycra-clad fellow on a ride squeezed between work and dinner showed us to the door of the Washington House Inn, a charming 120-year-old hostelry in a beautifully cared-for town that grew up around mills on the Cedar River in the 1850s. Walking through town that evening was like being transported to another, more gracious age.

Day 2 was rainy for the first half of the ride, but the Interurban Bike Trail more than compensated by providing a pleasant route through two more towns and a lot of countryside. It mostly followed an old interurban (long-distance trolley) line, and wherever the right of way could not be used, it took us with clear markings to wide, low-trafficked streets 'til we were back on the original route. Our third and final day in Wisconsin was on a road recommended on the state bicycle map, and it did not disappoint -- it was mostly level with only gentle rollers from time to time, with a decent shoulder for the 4 or 5 times an hour a car passed us. On top of this, it came out to the lake shore mid-way to Manitowoc, our destination, and gave us good views up and down the Lake Michigan shore. As we left Wisconsin on the S.S. Badger for a 4-hour ferry ride across the lake, we decided that eastern Wisconsin was both as beautiful and bike-friendly as western Wisconsin was when we toured a few hundred miles of it 5 years ago.

The ferry goes from Manitowoc WI to Ludington MI, and 1 1/2 hours from the former, all you can see from the boat is a sharp line between water and sky for 360 degrees around the boat, except for what looks like a soft pencil line above the horizon in a small area to the west. 15 minutes later and that is gone as well. In short, Lake Michigan is so wide that the curvature of the earth keeps you from seeing either shore when you are in the center, at least at the minimal height above the water, maybe 25', of our top deck. BTW, the Badger had a sign we decided to adopt, at least for our blog. Thought they might object if we took it down from the wall next to the cabins on the boat, but it expresses our thoughts poignantly.

The Michigan side of the lake, which we have now ridden for several days northward, is quite a bit different than the Wisconsin side, which is most farmland and gentle topography. Here, prevailing westerly winds have created sand dunes and a more irregular coastline, and a lot of the land is covered in forest, predominantly birch, ash, beech and scrub pine. The forest understory is usually low to the ground, so you can see quite a ways in to these forests, though no wildlife has yet come into view. Many of the roads we've found have been narrow and low-trafficked, and riding down them is sometimes like taking a hike in the woods, on wheels.

One day we stopped at a crossroads to check our map and a woman cycling by stopped to be sure we knew which way to go, then took off. By the time we got going, she was a few blocks' distance in front of us. With great effort, we caught up with her a few miles later, only to fall behind when she cranked it up over 20 mph. We saw her later in the next town, and she admitted to being named Cathy and being 57 years old. She was training for a century (100-miles in 1 day) ride, and it's clear she's going to do just fine.

We've stayed at three very nice B&Bs in Michigan so far, but one deserves special mention, Bear Lake Manor in the very small town of Bear Lake. It was built a little over a century ago for a physician and it is a beautiful building with a large, friendly living room just off the entry and a porch that wraps around two sides of the building, where we had breakfast. The night before, we walked down to Bear Lake itself, and watched the sun set on this 3-mile-wide circular lake, apparently a "kettle lake" formed by the receding glaciers. The hosts were gracious, the dinner in town was delicious, the evening relaxing, the setting beautiful. What more can you ask for?

The last four nights have been spent overnight in two locations, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and Traverse City. A friend Louise made 15 years ago, June Thaden, lives in the latter and came to the former to treat us to some great hikes in the National Lakeshore. We spent Monday exploring the sand dunes, some as much as 460 feet (46 stories, for you city-dwellers!) above Lake Michigan. With the assistance of June's car, we accessed some great trails and had fun catching up with each others' doings. June was president for 3 years in the mid-90's of the League of American Bicyclists, the largest bicycle organization in the U.S., and is a wealth of knowledge about biking, bike touring and bicycle advocacy. She's not a one-sport person, either, and is leaving Saturday for two weeks of backpacking the Appalachian Trail in central Maine. She is one active 75-year-old! As you can see, she's also a tree-hugger. Hopefully we'll stay at least partly as active as June.

June also put us up at her home in Traverse City, the heart of the cherry region. This area grows one-third of the world's cherries! We went to a store that sells only items with cherries or made with cherry wood. Cherry salsa? Got it. Cherry mustard? Got it. On our "rest day" here in Traverse City we took a 40-mile ride up the Mission peninsula, 35 miles of it along the shore of Lake Michigan and 5 miles down the center of the peninsula where cherry orchards stretched along all the roads and off into the distance.

Tomorrow we're off on a 3-day jaunt up to Mackinac (pronounced mack - in - awe) Island, where the state highway circling the island has an enviable record. It's never had an automobile accident. Because automobiles have been banned from the island since state highways were "invented." We're spending three nights there to force ourselves to have a true rest day or two, and hopefully we'll find computer access to tell you more about Mackinaw Island and the route there through the famous "Tunnel of Trees."

A Wedding in Japan

We are happy to report that Jeff's son Matt and Akiko Yuasa were married in a delightful ceremony on August 4.

The wedding festivities proper began two days earlier with an elaborate dinner at a Chinese restaurant for the two families. On the left are Akiko's uncle in the foreground and dad in the back left, both doctors in Tokyo, with Akiko's mom and her sister Etsuyo in between. Etsuyo is a professor at Ohio State, and Akiko's parents and uncle spent 2 years in Boston in the 1970s, so this is a very international family! Also sitting there are Team Red Tandem, Matt and Akiko, and Matt's mom and sister Becky.

The wedding day was a typical Tokyo day for August - about 90 F and 99% humidity. Fortunately, it was almost all indoors, in the so-called Guest House of the Akasaka Prince Hotel. The guest house appears to have been just that at one time, perhaps for one of Japan's noble families in the 19th century (it's only a few blocks from the Imperial Palace). Except that the Guest House now has the 40-story Akasaka Prince Hotel in its backyard, connected to it by indoor passageways.

Akiko wore a western-style wedding dress, and was positively glowing.
The guest house is in an English Tudor style, and the wedding was in a beautiful room with wooden beams showing on the ceiling. Akiko's dad walked her up the aisle and handed her off to Matt, and the minister did the entire ceremony in both Japanese and English, alternating, except for the two hymns, # 312 and # 430, which were in Japanese (perhaps you know them, "Itsu ku shimi fu kaki" and "Imo se o chi giru, ie no uchi"?), and the wedding vows themselves, which were in English. Once you've said "I do" in one language, it sort of sounds like you didn't fully mean it if you have to say it again, even if it is in another language. After the vows, exchange of rings and first kiss, the bride and groom turned to the audience and, with good Japanese etiquette, bowed to their guests (the photo here was them practicing it a few minutes before the ceremony).

After the wedding, Matt and Akiko were ushered outside briefly (in that heat and humidity, you can believe it was kept brief), for the guests to shower them not with rice, like goofy Americans sometimes do, but with flower petals. Because Aki's dress had a long train, a small, quiet woman in a kimono followed her almost everywhere, helping lift the train off the ground whenever Akiko had to change locations. We never heard her voice, but saw many, many smiles from her.

The reception was in a larger room upstairs in the Guest House. The building also houses "Le Trianon," a very elegant French restaurant, and the meal was memorable, the mood set by the first course, "Medaillon de Homard et Coquille St.-Jacques Marinee, Tartare de Saumon Fume au Caviar." Matt's "host father" from his homestay a decade ago in Kobe was there with his family, and gave the opening toast, and various friends and family members of Akiko and Matt stood up at different times to say a few words.

Matt and Akiko had put together a video of photos of them as children at various ages, up through recent photos of the two of them. It was fun to watch them grow up so quickly. Then came the surprise of the evening. Unknown to all but a few co-conspirators, Matt had made a second video, in which he traveled to special places around Tokyo and asked Akiko if she remembered this particular club or that particular park bench. In one memorable scene, Matt stopped to eat a special Japanese dish that Aki likes but that Matt had always declined to eat, or even be within ten feet of -- natto. Natto is made from fermented soy beans, and the words non-connoisseurs usually use to describe it are "nasty," "foul-smelling," and "slimy." (It's an acquired taste, they say, like haggis or luttefisk or American hot dogs). Anyway, the look of less-than-pure-satisfaction on Matt's face, especially as some of the natto dripped from his mouth like uncooked eggs, brought tears of laughter to the guests.

Ah, but the drama continued. As Matt continued to address Akiko electronically, and as Akiko nervously watched from the dais, Matt sat down in the video and wrote her a letter, addressed it "Urgent - deliver by August 4th," and we watched him drop it in the mailbox. Just then, the video said "You've Got Mail" and a knock was heard on the door to the reception room. One of Matt's friends had slipped out of the reception and come back dressed as a Japanese Postman, and he trotted up to the dais and left the letter to howls of laughs. Matt then read the letter, and there wasn't a dry eye in the room as he told Akiko how happy and proud he was to be marrying her, and would always be.

After the wedding cake was cut by the couple and handed out to the crowd, the emcee announced in Japanese and English that the bride would have one last dance with her father, to Jerome Kern's "Just the Way You Look Tonight," followed by Matt cutting in, and a few other couples joining in the dancing. Incidentally, the astute among you may have noticed that Akiko's hair style is different in the last two pictures. Midway through the reception she left to change it, and some brides actually change their entire outfit, perhaps from a western white wedding dress to a traditional wedding kimono, to symbolize that the husband does not take her "Just the Way You Look Tonight," but in many different ways during the marriage.

Lastly, the two fathers, Dr. Yuasa and Jeff, went to the reception room door and stood beside Matt and Akiko, and each gave a parting thank you to the guests, followed by a bow to the guests by the fathers and the new couple.

Thank you for sharing in our family wedding. It was a tremendous experience, and we look forward to many happy memories with Matt and Akiko.

Thank you also to our friends the Sissons for making their computer available. We're presently in Seattle for all of 26 hours, leaving tomorrow for Milwaukee by Amtrak, followed by a 1300-mile tandem ride through Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario and New York to Ithaca NY, where we will spend the Fall. Please check our website soon for news of the bicycling part of our adventure.

Japan Part 2

We start this blog with a very special announcement: the birth on July 25 of Issei Hudson Kim, our second grandchild, to Lisa and Ray. “Beam,” as he has been officially nicknamed, was more of a steel beam than a moonbeam, at 8 pounds 10 ounces. We expect to say much more about Beam and his delightful sister Hanachan when we arrive in Ithaca in September, and begin a four month stay there to help out with the babysitting and to join many other members of the family in getting to know Cornell. For now, all we have is photos and reports that all are doing well.

The rest of this blog will discuss our 7-day trip via Japan Rail. We had so many extraordinary experiences, we cannot really mention more than a few. Here goes:

The key words for the first two days were “engineering” and “war.” First, the Shinkansen (“new trunk line”), or “Bullet Train” to most non-Japanese. It is extremely fast, and got us from Tokyo to Hiroshima in 9 hours, including a 4-hour stopover in Himeji. It is an entirely new train line built sometimes next to the existing main line down the southeast coastline of Honshu, sometimes as much as a few kilometers away. There is not a grade crossing on the whole line, unlike the rest of Japan, which must have more grade crossings than the rest of the world. It is one of the engineering wonders of the world.

Himeji, our stopover, is another engineering and architectural wonder, but one built in the service of war. Or, more precisely, in defense. The guidebook and signs there were unclear, but it appears it was never seriously attacked, and no wonder. It is an imposing and fearsome castle, considered the finest surviving one in Japan in original condition. Osaka Castle was destroyed with 17th century methods in the early 1600s, and most of the rest were damaged or destroyed by WW II.
And what a wonder Himeji Castle is. It is as impressive as anything the Europeans, or Walt Disney for that matter, ever devised. It was particularly interesting to note how many nasty methods of war that European castles used were independently devised in Japan as well, like little trap doors that you could drop rocks out of, and places to pour boiling water or oil down on unwanted guests. It was also interesting to see how much of the medieval GNP must have been needed to keep a place like this in readiness, for castles don’t protect terribly well unless you have a good number of folks up top with a good supply of rocks, or boiling water, or bows and arrows. We’d also like to know if it was truly the strong physical defenses of Himeji that kept it from attack, or better diplomacy than the folks in Osaka practiced prior to the sacking of their castle.

The end of day one and most of day 2 were in Hiroshima, where engineering and war joined in a ghastly alliance. The city is most interesting, one that will never let what happened on August 6, 1945 be forgotten, but one that is also

determined to not let that awful event keep it from being a great city. It is now a city of over a million, three times its size in the 1940s, and perhaps the most attractive large city we saw. It is built on several islands in the delta of a large river, so has numerous bridges and many walks along the rivers. Out of the near-total destruction of its downtown, it created 100-meter-wide Peace Boulevard and a park at the tip of one of the deltas called Peace Park, near ground zero (or the hypocenter, as it is referred to here).

We both read John Hersey’s moving book Hiroshima, written originally in 1946 and rewritten in 1985 to trace what became of its main characters, real people Hersey got to know who survived, some not well, what happened.

All war is inherently ugly, but there are not monuments to other horrific events like the firebombing of Tokyo or of Dresden, perhaps because there is a particular amazement at the power of this one single bomb, and a recognition that it poses such dangers for the world. The scientists very accurately anticipated the bomb’s concussive power, and it was awesome, destroying almost every structure within a km or two, and almost every wooden structure (meaning virtually every home there in 1945) within 4 or 5 km. The thermal power of the bomb was also well anticipated by its designers, and the Peace Museum has exhibits such as glass bottles fused together in a pharmacy a km away. Together, these knocked down thousands of buildings and started fires that consumed what wasn’t already destroyed, so that the city was largely leveled in a circle about 2.5 mi. in radius from the hypocenter.

The best estimate is that 70,000 or so died in the first 24 hours. What the scientists had not fully anticipated was the radioactive effect of the bomb. Perhaps half of those first casualties died hours after the bomb when their bodies were overwhelmed by the invisible damage done by the radiation. Another 50,000 or so died 1 to 3 months later, often after their hair first came out in clumps, again as the delayed reaction to unseen damage done by the radiation. Many fetuses who were born in the months after the bomb had deformities, including microcephaly. Youngsters who seemed to have survived and done well for a decade then started having a high rate of cancer, particularly leukemia, such as Sadako, a girl whose unsuccessful attempt to fold 1000 origami cranes to bring good luck in her fight with leukemia was widely publicized. Even today, health issues for the Hibakusha, as A-bomb survivors are known, are the subject of court cases as they fight the government for health coverage (one such case was decided by the Japanese Supreme Court a few days ago, in favor of the Hibakusha).

We had a moving visit to the Peace Museum, but also a nice walk along some of the rivers and some nice meals, and we picked up tourist information about other things to do in the area, and may well return some day to do things that do not bring tears to the eyes.

Our next two days were in Kyoto, the second-most visited city in Japan after Tokyo. It was the capital of Japan for over a thousand years, as well as a major religious center and, until very recently, the center of education as well. What most tourists focus on is the shrines and temples, and on day one we walked 15 miles seeing a ton of them. They are impressive, beautiful, incredibly old. The highlight of the day however was something called “The Philosopher’s Walk,” near the Silver Pavilion. This was a walk along an old, narrow irrigation canal under a canopy of trees, with a forest on one side and homes and tea shops on the side we walked along.

Having been templed-and-shrined out, we sought out something different for day two and found it. We took the train 25 km out of town and walked down to the Hozu River, where we boarded a narrow, flat-bottomed boat with another two dozen folks, none of them foreign tourists like us. The boat was pushed off and started down the swift-flowing river, aided by one fellow pushing us with a long bamboo pole, a second fellow with an oar he used both hands to pull, and a third in the back manning the tiller. Half-way down they switched positions, with the youngest one missing out on the easy tiller job because he is still learning the river. We went through numerous rapids, none overly scary but one rough enough to put a few buckets worth of river water in our boat. The river twisted and turned beneath towering green hills peppered with rock cliffs, and from time to time we would see a train running alongside the river and fifty to a hundred feet up, a locomotive and four open cars painted bright red, called the Romantic Train. Just before the end of our 1 ½ hour trip, a boat similar to ours but with an outboard motor pulled up alongside, latched onto our boat, and offered beer, sake, grilled squid and a treat that Jeff went for, grilled balls of omochi (a very chewy ball of pounded rice cake)on a stick, dipped in a mixture of soy sauce, sugar and corn starch. No redeeming nutritional qualities, but oh, so tasty!

The next day involved an hour’s train ride down to Nara, the capital before Kyoto began its millennial reign. The world’s largest Buddha is there, inside the world’s largest wooden building, as part of the Todaiji temple. He was consecrated in 752, but like so many of us, has needed orthopedic and plastic surgery from time to time, in his case due to fires and earthquakes. His hands and head are noticeably different in color as a result. Perhaps more interesting than Todaiji were the many smaller and less commercialized temples and shrines we walked past in the hills to the east and south, including one that had double rows of stone lanterns alongside the two stone staircases leading to it, back-to-back for a distance of maybe a quarter mile in each direction. We wondered if they ever have a festival when they light all the lanterns. We’d love to have the candle concession for that!

The last part of our trip was a magical walk down the Nakasendo, one of the two ancient “roads” that connect Kyoto and Tokyo. We spent the night in a high-rise hotel in downtown Nagoya and took a morning train to the small city of Nakatsugawa, on the Kiso River. From there we caught a bus to tiny Magome. This town and Tsumago, our destination, were bypassed by the railroad down the Kiso valley in the 19th century and by the highway builders in the 20th, and in the 1960’s began to realize their historical value. The tourists have followed, for good reason – this was old Japan at its finest. The Nakasendo climbs steeply through Magome past dozens of shops preserving 18th and 19th century buildings by selling 21st century doodads and food. It then leaves town and at times you are on the ancient stone path itself, at times on dirt or gravel pathways, at times on small roads that look more like driveways, they are so narrow. We hiked from 1600’ in Magome up to Magome Pass at 2500’ and enjoyed a snack at a teahouse right at the summit, next to the minor highway that shares the pass with the hiking route. On the way down the other side we passed one house with two pools of water with stream water flowing through, one with cucumbers floating in it, the other with fresh tomatoes, and a cutting board nearby holding a sharp knife and a jar of miso. A sign invited passersby to have a snack at 30 yen per cucumber (about 25 cents), 30 yen for a medium sized tomato, or three cherry tomatoes for 10 yen. We had a tasty cucumber-miso-tomato snack, of course.

Tsumago is even older-looking than Magome, an amazing trip back to the Edo period before the modernizing of Japan that began with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. We had a reservation at a ryokan that was marvelous, and the price included not only a spacious room with futon and the sound of a rushing river nearby, but also dinner and breakfast. They even served us something Louise had never encountered in her 25 years in Japan, roasted grasshoppers (crunchy, and very tasty with the marinade they had been dipped in) and a first for Jeff, horse-meat sashimi. Louise let Jeff think it was beef until later, although Jeff is so game about trying new food that he probably would have tried it regardless.

We are now back in Tokyo, having walked another section of Nakasendo from Tsumago down to the train line the next morning, then returned with a short visit en route to Karuizawa, a town in the Japanese Alps that Louise often visited during her years in Japan. We rented bikes, three-speed fat-tired clunkers with front baskets that nonetheless allowed us to see a lot of town in our few hours there. Louise was saddened to see how much it has become like Tokyo, now that the Shinkansen has reduced the trip from a few hours to a 70-minute hop, albeit an expensive one.

Two more days until the wedding, so our next post will be about that.