It wasn’t the first time Tom had left something behind. Usually it was his wallet. Not that Tom’s a disorganized guy. Quite the contrary; he’s a firm believer in the adage ‘everything in its rightful place’. The problem was that the rightful place occasionally got left behind. Like his wallet. It always went into the main pocket of his belly bag – you know those little packs that you strap around your waist. Then he’d leave the belly bag in the store. Or at the restaurant.
The first time he did this was the worst. We were 3, or was it 4 days into our cycling trip from Cleveland to Boston. I have a brother there and Tom a daughter. What better place to ride given 11 days’ time? And 11 days was exactly what we had. Tom’s wife is understanding. Very understanding. And what she understood was that Tom’s family reunion was taking place 2 weeks to the day after we left. And that Tom had better be home several days early to put the house in order. And so it was 11 days. Tom had a ticket back on Amtrak the next afternoon.
How long was the distance? His computer showed 840 miles when we finished but back on day 3 or 4 we really didn’t know. It didn’t do any good to just measure the distance on our route. We wouldn’t follow the route. Not that we didn’t mean to. We earnestly meant to follow the route. But somehow we’d get a bit lost. Not really lost. Not lost like we might starve before we found our way out. More like ‘displaced’. We were just a bit displaced from our route. Just displaced enough to cause a gnawing anxiety in the pit of our stomachs but not enough to verbalize it. So there it sat, like a bad meal, until we got found again.
There was another reason we couldn’t just measure the distance along the route. We’d had to backtrack. Like, for a lost wallet. You remember the wallet, don’t you? On day 3 or 4?
Well, we were in the vicinity of Ellacottville, New York in the southern tier of the Finger Lakes. Some of you might have heard of the town. If you did it’s because of the skiing. Holiday Valley is there. So was the biggest hill of our trip, and that includes our rides through the states of Vermont and New Hampshire as well.
It didn’t look like that big a hill at first. It just went up a ways and then curved out of sight. No big deal. We’d been cycling the Chagrin and Cuyahoga Valleys for years. Upon reaching that curve, however, it was apparent that there was more to the hill than first met the eye. There was, in fact, a further climb and then another curve. And then another. And another. A normal Chagrin Valley climb takes me about 7-8 minutes. Maybe 10 with loaded touring gear. Did I mention that we were on a loaded tour? Tent, sleeping bags, stove, the works. Well I didn’t arrive at the top of this hill for half an hour. That’s a long climb. It was also a steep one. And it wasn’t made any easier by my pig-headed notion of doing it in my middle chain ring. I don’t know why I do this. I approach the hill thinking, ‘it’s okay, if I can’t make it in the middle chain ring I can always shift down to the granny’. That’s what I say. But half-way up the hill my ego takes over. And it becomes a challenge, pitting that ego against my increasingly desperate breathing and the lactic acid building relentlessly in my legs. And I don’t dare shift into the granny. It’s me against the hill. This time it was very close.
Gasping for breath at the top, slumped over the handlebars, I waited for Tom. I hadn’t even thought to look for him in the rearview mirror, I was just too focused on the hill. Five minutes later, the sweat having dried, my breathing having returned to normal I remembered our pact: ‘Don’t leave each other behind; if in doubt ride back until we meet up’. This has a noble sound to it. You know – One for all and All for one. But on a more prosaic level it just made practical sense; Tom’s got the tent poles and fly, I’ve got the tent. Tom’s got tonight’s food. I’ve got the stove. You get the idea.
Back down the hill I rode expecting to see him at every turn. Desperate to see him at every turn. The further I went, the further up that dreaded hill I’d have to climb. First there was annoyance: ‘WHERE is he?’, then anger: ‘where the *&!#* IS he?’, then alarm: ‘WHERE IS HE?’. It took considerably less time to descend the hill than climb it. But it was a long ride on level terrain half way back to the last town until Tom suddenly appeared around a bend in the road, looking sheepish: ‘I left my wallet back at the lunch stop’ was all he could lamely offer.
It was shortly thereafter, as I struggled to climb that miserable hill outside Ellacottville, this time firmly in my granny gear, ego be damned, that I realized that what Tom left behind was not his problem, but our problem, and I resolved to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind again.
Which brings us back to the present, at least the present of this story. We’re in Vermont now, Bennington to be exact. We’ve come most of the way and tackled most of the hills and we’re feeling pretty good about ourselves.
We were in Bennington seeking our second breakfast of the day. We always had 2 breakfasts: one at the campsite, usually coffee or hot chocolate and oatmeal, and then a later breakfast in a local diner. We had found the local diner in Bennington. But so had all the tourists. (We were NOT tourists. Nope. We were cyclists. Don’t you ever forget that). All the tables were taken and a line had formed out the door. By luck we spotted 2 free stools at the counter and figured if we could stand a bike seat for 10 hours we’d survive the stools. Midway through the pancakes I spotted Tom admiring his coffee mug. Cyclists on tour often exhibit bizarre behavior, but this piqued my interest. ‘What’s so special about that mug?’ I inquired. It was, after all, just a plain cream-colored mug with a handle, the kind you’d been drinking coffee from in every cheap diner across the land and never looked at twice. But Tom proceeded to tell me about a favorite pair of coffee mugs he had bought long ago and how one had slid off the trunk of his car and smashed. He had been looking for a replacement ever since. I gradually began to realize that that far-off look in Tom’s eye when we’d spend a winter’s evening talking about cycling trips was not about great roads, distant lands and exotic cultures but the opportunity to find a replacement for that mug. ‘It’s just like the one I broke’, he smiled at no one in particular, nodding his head knowingly, fingering the mug lovingly and staring distantly out into space. Tom’s life was apparently near fulfillment.
Beckoning to the waitress, he inquired as to whether she’d sell him the mug. She went into the kitchen to find out and returned with an apology: ‘the restaurant’s here to sell food, not mugs’, she replied, repeating the owner’s comment. Tom was crestfallen. But only temporarily. I went back to studying my pancakes but noticed out of the corner of my eye Tom finishing his coffee down to the bottom of the mug and wiping it clean with his napkin. Unusual behavior even for such a fastidious fellow, I thought. He then did something even more puzzling. He took out his belly bag, removed his digital camera, placed it on the counter and in its place stowed the mug. I became alarmed. Tom is an honest fellow. As honest as they come. He teaches Sunday school! He played in Little League! Now, under the stress of the trip he had turned into a brigand.
Quietly Tom arose, left a tip, took the check and headed to the front to pay the bill. We alternated days, and it was his day to pay our daily expenses. I looked at the tip; it was for $5, a considerable amount given that the bill was only $10. It was then that I realized that Tom had decided to make off with the mug and leave a big tip to cover it. Only Tom’s habit of leaving things behind tripped him up. He had left his digital camera on the counter.
Used to checking for things like this, I deftly pocketed the camera expecting to surprise him somewhere down the road when a photo opportunity set him reaching for the camera and coming up short. I’d then dangle it by its strap and we’d have a good laugh. Or at least I’d have a good laugh.
But this time Tom realized his error while still paying the bill. With great trepidation he returned to the scene of the crime, hoping against hope that the waitress hadn’t yet cleared the counter and noticed the missing mug. Our plates were still there. But where was the camera? Tom turned to me and asked in a desperate whisper: ‘Did you see my camera?’ This was a golden opportunity granted perhaps once in a lifetime. I was not to let it pass. ‘Tom, I said with a grave voice and grim face, ‘the waitress said when you give back the mug, she’ll give you back the camera’. For just a moment Tom’s face turned white; his eyes doubled in size; his breathing stopped. Then he drew his head back, reached out his hand and said ‘Give me that camera’. And so I did.
As for food, we ate well. Or at least we ate a lot. Tom, a fine cook, would carefully browse the supermarket shelves with the eye of an epicure picking just the right kind of canned vegetables to go with our gourmet Lipton dinner packets. ‘No, no, canned potatoes don’t go with Chicken and Rice ’, he’d admonish, and I’d slink back down the aisle and return the can, head down in disgrace. But that was on day 1 or was it 2? By now we’d hit a supermarket and be out the door in under 5 minutes. Chicken and Rice now went perfectly well with canned potatoes, garbanzo beans, carrots, corn or just about anything else we could find on the shelves. Canned peaches were our standard dessert, heavy syrup and all.
Tom handled the route planning with great aplomb. He used 3 separate sets of maps each showing terrain, towns or overviews in greatest detail. We only really got turned around once. That was on the second day of the trip just after having camped at Pymatuning Lake. At the lovely town of Linesville, Pa. we mistakenly took Rt. 6 back towards Cleveland. We might have wound up at Terminal Tower had it not been for a basic tenet of Euclidian Geometry: parallel lines do not intersect. And yet, as we came to an intersection, our road (or at least the road we thought we were on) did indeed intersect another one parallel to it. Now Tom and I have both taken extensive math courses where we had learned that very important principle. So either we had just revoked a fundamental mathematical law or we were on the wrong road. A brief check of our map proved Euclid correct. We turned on to the right road.
I won’t bore you with the details of the trip: how we met Mark and Andrea H., 2 LEW cyclists on an auto vacation at a campground/hostel in Vermont, when the owner told us there was another Ohio couple camping there. It turns out Andrea had ridden from Cleveland to Vermont along Rt. 6 in Pennsylvania during last year’s very hot summer.
Nor will I mention the photograph I got inside an Amish kitchen whose roadside sign for baked goods for sale enticed us in, and how I feigned interest in photographing the pies in order to get a picture of the old cast-iron stove and sink with a water pump in place of faucets.
I won’t bother you with tales of Tom’s Ten flats (he only got nine, but ten has a better ring to it) and our desperate efforts to find out why and failing that, replacing his thin, light tubes with my beefier one which seemed to solve the problem. (Cycle tourists beware – thin tubes inside large touring tires must creep their way around the edges and eventually wear out in abrasive spots. Use a tube sized to fit your tire. This from the exceedingly non-mechanical Marty’s very short list of technical advice).
About most of our campgrounds, the less said the better. Except for a few places, most were RV parks, really just old farms that found a more lucrative crop in metal campers than in soy beans and corn. The people were quite friendly, but we were baffled as to why anyone would want to spend ‘2 weeks every summer for the last 20 years at this place’ when this place consisted of a handful of trees, a bulldozed pond and dozens of other RVs in close proximity. My apologies to you if you are one of THEM. Do enlighten us.
I’m sure you want to know our daily average distance and to save you the arduous chore of dividing 840 miles by 11 days its: 76.36363636363636363636…miles per day. On average. Your results may vary.
The most important piece of equipment is not: your bike, your panniers, your tent or sleeping bag or cycling shoes or gloves or helmet or sunglasses. It is you. If you want to go touring take anything, any old bike, any old gear, but make sure you’re in good shape. Or go west. As in Westlake, or West Olmstead. Or Toledo. There’s not a hill within miles. Except for the highway overpasses. Those will keep you up nights worrying.
Tom and Marty rode to Boston in mid-July, 2002. They were still speaking to each other when they arrived a week and a half later and are still speaking to each other now….er…Tom, aren’t we?… Tom?
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