Day 50: To Port Dover
To Port Dover
( miles and feet of climbing)
After crashing so soundly the previous evening, it was easy to get up and to try to get going. However, the best laid plans are always on the lookout for Murphy’s Law and it seems to take forever to get going. Breakfast was in the cafeteria and today there was a bacon, egg and tomato McMuffin type sandwich for breakfast. Oatmeal was my friend this morning. Gail had misplaced her glasses and they had ended up on the neighboring table on their way to the lost and found bin.
There school had a number of murals on the wall. They ranges from scenes from Lord of the Rings … to Shrek in a Canadian school … images with achievement messages to memorials for students that have died. When asked about the murals, we were told that they were painted over every five or so years (when the students don’t know the previous artist) and a new one was painted over it. The only exceptions to this are the memorial murals.
Once we got going, it was miles and miles of mostly flat roads going through fields. Along the way we saw a wind farm that kept going on and on. There was windmill after windmill and … these were large ones. Most of them were gracefully spinning even though the wind was not that strong. The wind may have just been strong enough to get the windmills turning, but not for generating much electricity.
It was a nice ride but it was getting hot. I made a joke about it being cool enough except when we stopped. While we were riding, we kept the windows on the bike rolled down and that kept us cool.
The Picnic Stop was on the shores of Lake Erie at a public beach. After eating, Gail and I joined others who had gone into the lake. It was cool not cold and the water was difficult to get in over the knees. It was this shallow at the beach. I sat down and made sure I got nice and cool before getting going again. The worst part was getting the sand off my feet before the socks went on. The soles of my feet were sore enough without the extra irritation of sand in my socks … to boot!
We continued to ride and eventually it was time to make an emergency ice cream stop. The route sheet said that ice cream was available in the town and we eventually found out where it was. The ice cream place was air conditioned and when I signed the guest book, I saw that we were only the tail end of a long of CycleAmerica rider that had stopped in on this hot day.
Then it was time to get back on the road again. The route took us through more far land and wooded areas where the roads began to curve instead of being straight east / west or north / south. There were hills too!
There were some pretty steep hills that we needed to get up. I completely misjudged the steepness of one of the hills and I couldn’t make it up standing on the pedals in the gear I had selected. About the time I realized that I was in trouble, it hit a steep section and I needed to quickly step onto the ground to recover. Whew! We hadn’t seen many hills like this in the recent past. The hills out west were rarely this steep and I was better at anticipating them then. These took me by surprise.
After arriving in Port Dover at just past 5:00, we passed a few folks who were walking to dinner at the Grace United Church. It took us a while to get our tent set up and ourselves ready for a trip to dinner.
Dinner was really pretty good and consisted of meat or vegetarian lasagna with salad and bread. For desert there was home made vanilla ice cream with either chocolate of caramel sauce. On the way back to school, we tried to size up the town for an evening out. We were not at the hospitality side of the town, however.
Back at the school was the weekly awards night event. The rider of the week went to Craig from Ontario. There were other recountings of trip events over the last week and real and imagined prizes and thanks were offered. After the review of the next day’s ride, it was time to head out for a bar with others in the group. A group of six of us landed at the Norfolk Tavern. It appears that the other half of the group ended up at a place closer to the beach.
Then it was time to head back to the school and go to bed.