A Storm A-Brewin'

When I got up this morning I looked at the license plate on the truck next to me and it was from Washington! That's the first one I have seen in weeks. I started up a little conversation and asked them if Washington still existed.

"It did a week ago," they said.

Whew, what a relief. It's been so long since I saw someone from my home state that I was starting to get a little worried. The talk didn't last long, but it was nice to have a conversation with someone with the same accent.

While leaving International Falls the landscape started to get boring pretty quickly. I knew this was going to happen, but it is always a bit of a surprise when the hills disappear and the only thing to look at is the weather:

And it got worse from there. What trees there were started to disappear, and soon the only thing around was farmland. I am sorry to say that those clouds were the only thing I saw today that was really interesting. Even the farmland was extra bare because they had just harvested the barley, and the only activity in the fields was cleaning up the stubble from the harvest. The roads were string straight, and I could see for at least ten miles in all directions at all times. It was a long day.

I pulled into Devil's Lake, ND just in time for the 8 o'clock meeting. It was the first candlelight meeting of the trip, and we talked about our 'design for living' and how it works. There were also some newer folks there, and I always like to hear how it feels to be new. I never want to actually feel that again, so remembering is good. Thanks, Saturday Night Group!

After the meeting I went out for a bite to eat with a few people from the meeting. It was really great to spend some time with family outside of the rooms just talking about life stuff. Thanks, Bill, Pete, Mark, and Pete's wife. (Sorry I forgot your name…) I had a wonderful time!

Homeland Security?

I woke up this morning in my tent and I was freezing, so I bundled up and went back to sleep to let the day warm up a bit. When I woke up again it was 10 o'clock and still quite chilly. It turns out that it got down to about 40 degrees here last night! That's quite the improvement over the 80's and 90's I have been battling at night. It's so much easier to get warmer than it is to get colder.

As I woke up with some coffee I started looking for a meeting for the day. The closest one to the west was about 6 hours away in Dryden, so I started to look at other options. Part of me wanted to get back into the States where things would be more familiar, and a little faster for getting across the plains. That part of the ride was going to be boring either way, and the States are a little more populated through there, so that makes me feel a little better about it. So I started looking for meetings in the States, but there wasn't anything in the area I was headed into. Then I remembered that there was a noon meeting at the Welcome Group here in Thunder Bay. It would be a bit of a scramble to get there, but I could do it.

I walked in a little late but I made it. The discussion centered around humility, and there are few things more entertaining than all of us sitting around talking about how humble we are… In any case, it was a wonderful meeting and there were even some familiar faces from the night before!

After the meeting I got to talking with Sean and we decided to go get some lunch together before I left town. It was a real treat to hang out with Sean. There is something really magical that happens when two of us sit down and start talking, and I really enjoy being able to tell some sort of deep secrets to a near stranger and be able to laugh about it. Thanks, Sean. You are a great spirit. Keep up the good work.

After lunch I headed west and just into the ride I found another one of those tranquil little spots on some water.

The water was lapping up on the shore, the wind was whispering through the aspens, and I could hear almost nothing else. I felt like no one was around for miles, and it was just me and the Universe. Fantastic!

When I got back on the road again I was keenly aware for the first time that I was headed home. For much of the trip I have been chasing my shadow into the east in the afternoons, but today I was headed straight into the western sun, and I began to feel anxious to get back home to my friends, and especially to Mandy. It's good to be pointed toward home.

Riding along Highway 11 I started to get a sense for what it would be like to ride through the prairies in Canada; I went stretches of almost 100 miles without going through a town, and I was accompanied by more ravens than people. I was grateful, however, to have them as my guardians for the day.

Once I got into Fort Frances I was getting a little tired, so I stopped at a grocery store for some snacks. When I got back out to the bike I got to chat with Eric, the first person I had actually talked to since lunch with Sean. Eric is a local guy who has been involved in the paper mill industry in one way or another for white some time. Trouble is, that in recent years about 70% of Ontario's paper mills have been shut down, leaving Eric "waiting for his next calling." It was nice to talk to someone who did not have agitation in his voice because he was out of work. Instead he seemed to be perfectly happy and of the belief that it was the way it was supposed to be, and that's OK. Thanks for the reminder, Eric!

Crossing back into the states involved far more questioning and concern than going the other way. Somehow this seems a litle backward to me. The customs agent was quite disturbed by the fact that I didn't know where I was going for the night, and also took some time to thoroughly inspect the apples in my cooler, for what, I still don't know. It's strange to me that a U.S. citizen has more trouble getting into their country than out of it. I guess homeland security is about protecting us from ourselves…or something like that…