Sleep, pancakes, no cycling today!

Ahh, a day off again; very nice.

OK, so going back a bit, we spent several days riding along the northern side of Lake Erie. The terrain is generally flat and is pretty with much reduced traffic overall.

First night was spent in a place called Selkirk at a provincial park. Funny story here was that upon arrival I did my usual routines in terms of setting up the tent, arranging gear, etc. My habit is to put my essential stuff (wallet, passports, etc.) next to the tent while setting up and then once the tent is up I move it all inside. Part way through the routine we had dinner, or something, and so that transfer part was interrupted. Towards the end of dinner Karina and Mike reported that some huge animal had come into the campsite and they chased it off. Turns out that the huge animal was a large raccoon and though it was not truly interested in my wallet, it was very interested in the energy bar that shared the same pouch. Being dark-ish at this point in the evening, all we knew was that the animal was gone and that all else was fine. Next morning however, as I looked through everything for my wallet, I came to the conclusion that the thing had been dragged off into the woods by the raccoon. After several minutes of colorful language and searching I did find the pouch (minus the energy bar) about 50 yards down a hillside ravine. The raccoon was kind enough to have unzipped the pouch rather than just tear it to shreds to get at the food.

Speaking of raccoons, they are the winner by far in the URK competition (that being the "unidentifiable road kill" competition). The great part of biking is that you get to hear the birds sing, the streams run and all the stuff you miss in the cars, the downside is that you get animal anatomy 101 as dissected by motorized vehicles; this can be quite a show.

In Canada, we stayed a night with Joe and Michelle at their small campground in Erieau. Beautiful area, super nice people and a really fun stop. Joe is a Captain for ships delivering goods all over including 300 miles off the coast of Greenland. As a career sailor, you can imagine the depth and breadth of the stories. Michelle took Karina off on a several hour excursion in kayaks where they visited a nearby island and got to see a variety of wildlife. The lake can get very rough and there was an impressive storm that came through. Wind, lightening, pelting rain. We set up for dinner in their boathouse BARn, where we were dry and quite content. Later the strom blew past and we sat around the campfire until late in the evening.

Next day we were off to catch the Ferry in Kingsville. The lake was calm, the day sunny and delightful. We stopped over at Peele Island for a few hours where we took time to replace a spoke on Kens rear wheel and Karina got to go swimming several times. The crossing resumed and we got into sandusky about 7:30 PM. You come into the port by sailing up to and past Cedar Point, which is a roller coaster park on steroids! There is one ride we could see where the cars shoot essentially strait up several hundred feet (fast as you can imagine in order to get that mass and weight up that high), then a slight pause (maybe 2 seconds) then the cars tip downward past 90 degrees and plummet towards the ground in freefall. You can hear the screams probably in Canada, we went nowhere near that one. Oh, did I mention that as the cars are doing the death dive that they also spin around two revolutions, nice touch, kind of a bonus.

We spent the night at a KOA in Sandusky. Our neighbor was in the most tweaked out RV ever! I can't even really begin to describe the machine to do it justice, but it was pulling a trailer that contained a Lexus as the scooting around vehicle (which may give some indication of the rest of the rig). The inside of the bus itself had sort of stone covered walls. The cargo holds underneath opened to display a full flat screen TV. Anyhow, top shelf.

The next morning we rode onto Republic, OH (about 40 miles), got there early enough that we could hop back in the car and go back to Cedar Point for the evening. If you do ever go to Cedar Point, take at least a day or two and start with the "death plunge", after that everything else will be within your limits. They do have a variety of rides for the more vomit adverse, which Karina and enjoyed some of those. Had a great ride on "Wildcat", sort of a classic smaller rollercoaster; that was great and was a first for Karina!

I'll write some more tonight. I'll see if I can put on some photos, too.