07/13/09 - Hmmm, okay, I said in my last post that if the conditions were like that everyday, I wouldn’t want to stop touring when I got to Michigan. Well, if the conditions were always like they were on Saturday night, I’d ride directly to the nearest Greyhound station buy a ticket to Freeland, MI and leave my bike leaning against a lamp post. Saturday night was a little grim. It started about 3:00 in the afternoon when a cold front rolled through the greater Old Forge area and brought with it a horrendous thunderstorm. I’m a little gun shy after my close call the other day, but we soldiered on until we found a campground at Eighth Lake State Park. By this time we were pretty chilled and the rain was just coming down in buckets. The thunder was pretty much continuous and some of the lightning was pretty close, but that didn’t bother me much because I was pretty sure I was going to die of exposure. We couldn’t set up the tent because it would have been full of water before we got it up. We sat on the picnic table convulsing for a while and decided to make some tea. The act of setting up the stove to make tea soaked nearly everything we had. The tea was nice, it allowed some feeling to creep back into our fingers for a little while. We decided to take showers but we didn’t know what to put on for clothing because we have very limited clothing with us and we didn’t want to get everything wet. I have to thank the state of New York for the ample hot water supply at that campground, it may have saved our lives. The showers had these timer gizmos on them that were supposed to limit your shower time to 5 minutes. We each ran the timer three times. After showering and putting our wet rain gear back on, the rain tapered off and we were able to set the tent up and get our sleeping bags into them without soaking them. We made more tea and survival started to seem like a reasonable possibility. The rain held off until after we finished making dinner, which was merciful, and we fell asleep around 9:00 only to be thumped awake at 1:00 by another round of violent thunderstorms. All told, the area got over two inches of rain that night. And tonight, Monday, we’ve nearly gotten all of our stuff dried out. Not bad.
Now, I don’t want anyone to think that we’re complaining. Truthfully, I wouldn’t mind if it was just a little bit warmer, but you know. Sunday was my birthday and I can’t recall ever being cold on my Birthday before, but whatever. Actually, hypothermia concerns aside, we are having a ball and meeting a lot of really nice, interesting people. In fact, this will probably come as a surprise, but we have not encountered one discourteous driver since the start of this trip. I’m starting to think that maybe all of the people that are trying to kill me in Rutland know me or something. We have had really nice weather for riding everyday except that last hour or so on Saturday. Yesterday, the 12th, we managed close to 75 miles of riding in the sun. It being my birthday, Marc wanted to celebrate with a beer when we got to camp. We rolled into the town of Osceola, which appeared to consist of one bar, around 4:00. Marc announced that he was going to go into the bar to try and buy a couple of beers, since the map said the campground was only 2.5 miles out of town. There were a lot of Harley Davidson motorcycles outside the bar. I thought, “better him than me.” The last thing I wanted to do was go into a Harley bar wearing lycra shorts, but I do like beer. He was in there for quite a while and I was starting to get nervous when one of the well lubricated patrons came out and said “what are you doing out here, it’s your birthday, get in here.” I reluctantly went in and found Marc getting along famously with the Sunday afternoon crowd. And he had a six pack of Molson and two shots of tequila in front of them. Every person in the place wished me a happy birthday and we each had a shot of tequila, loaded up the beers and rode off toward the campground. The map neglected to mention that the campground was 2.5 miles straight up. It was probably the steepest climb of the whole trip. But we made it, tequila burning a little in our bellies the whole way. Then we each drank three beers and stumbled around until dinner. The “campground” was an interesting place, and it was owned by an even more interesting gentleman by the name of Joe. Joe had carved himself out an empire in Osceola and you can believe me when I say that carving out a dirt farm in Osceola would be an impressive feat. Joe opened up his restaurant to us and made us coffee in the morning. He was one of the most hospitable people I’ve ever run across. He said some beautiful things too, like: “Did you two sleep in that tent right there? That little tent there? I’m sorry, but you bikers are retards. First off, you rode here on a bike. Secondly, you sleep in the smallest tents I’ve ever seen. There’s something wrong with you guys.” We took a photo of ourselves in Front of Joe’s restaurant that we’re going to send to him when we get done. I bet he’ll put it up on the wall.
Craziest thing that happened today? I went into a Super Walmart with my spandex on and did some grocery shopping. Marc took a photo of me. Only photo in existence of me at Walmart. We covered some good miles today pretty efficiently, despite the fact that we had a 30 mph headwind most of the day. We are out of the mountains now so we should be able to make some progress. It worked out that the best place to stop today was at about 60 miles, so we knocked off early and took care of some housekeeping issues, like emptying the water out of our panniers. Before the start of the trip I joked with Marc that I had enough room in my bags so I was going to fill one with brine and salt down a beef brisket for later in the trip. Marc’s bags kind of looked like he tried it. I haven’t been able to update the blog or make many phone calls on this trip due to a lack of necessary infrastructure. We have been in the sticks. How about this for a statistic: 250 or so miles and not one McDonalds. Not one. I’m thinking things might get a little easier now that we seem to be in an inhabited part of the state. I saw a Dunkin Donuts with free wifi today, so that is a good thing. Okay, gotta hit the showers and cook up some food. We have the entire top of our picnic table covered with food that we are sick of carrying, so we’re going to try and eat it all in the next 12 hours or so. Wish us luck. One more thing, we had sardines in mustard sauce for lunch yesterday. Not something I would typically eat on the bike, but it worked out fine. Who knew? It was a little messy though
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