Montreal --> Portsmouth

I got a late start leaving Montreal. This is typical. I, and I think most people, get a slow start leaving a place after forming a miniature life while there. Departure is expected but still a veer from routine. Actually, though, it was three weeks later than I originally planned, and another day beyond that revisioned plan. Perhaps as a consequence, as I write this my right leg is falling asleep in my sleeping bag. I'm tucked away in my tent up a hill from downtown Montpelier, Vermont. I'm wild camping, two nights in a row now because it was pouring rain all day today. It is nearly the end of October after all. That's how things go.

I'm going to tell you the story of how I moved from Montreal to here, a wooded knoll, where I've set up my two doored home. It's fair to say I'm also a bit late to the adventure blog party.  In person I am an open book and will tell you everything in too much detail. With regard to sharing in mass over the internet I maintain my propensity for details but I am reticent towards doing it at all. Whether or not this is read by anyone the possibility fills me with something like dread. My stories are by definition told from my perspective which I know is limited by virtue of being only mine.  I make lots of decisions, some good, many fine and some not so much. Mostly it's just me who puts them in these categories. Sharing all that with you, anonymous reader, makes we want to shrink into the wall behind me. That's why I'm doing this. I'm not doing it because I think the world needs another bike touring adventure blog or because I think I'm going to say anything particularly original. I'm doing it because I'm wondering if that fear is holding me back from something, somehow. I don't usually back down from a challenge, or scare away from normatively scary things like bicycling alone around Mexico. My comfort zone is fairly non-traditional but I think, nevertheless, I might grow by stepping out of it.  So here goes.

I tried to telepathically communicate with the Quebec weather patterns to talk them out of raining hard the Thursday I had  to leave my Airbnb.  It was already booked the next few days.  It didn't work. Instead a flash flood warning was issued for the region. In general, I dislike fixed dates but in the context of bike touring they're directly impractical.

Fortunately, I could stay with a new friend who I already had dinner plans with for my last night. In a debatably over complicated sequence of events, I left most of my things at the airbnb, my friend and I went for poutine -because somehow I'd yet to partake in that tradition, and then in the early morning, before my former host went to work at 7:15 am, I returned for my things. Steep apartment staircases, rain and a vague notion that maybe I could trick myself into getting an early start resulted in the decision to not take everything with me from the beginning. The trick was unsuccessful. I returned, bike loaded, to my friend's place for breakfast. The morning slid into early afternoon; it seemed we had a lot more to talk about than our brief encounter allowed. This is a pattern that swells in my heart and brain regarding my lifestyle; moving around I meet so many wonderful people who I want to spend so much time with but the motion that brought us together often forces us to cut that time short.

So it was a record late start. I was racing the sun on an overloaded bike after months of city cycling. Beautiful fall leaves encircled the bike path and even the grass fields glittered with a fluttering mosaic of golden and green shades. I lamented rushing (as much as I could physically rush) instead of fully reveling in it. However, I had already basked in the perspective of someone I found kind and intelligent that morning.

Meanwhile, I was applying mostly hopeful thinking to a situation on my bike beyond the heavy bike suitcase I had strapped to the back.  That, theoretically, I could muscle through. The situation was with my front rack and it is not easily described with words. The bottom line is that it was only joined to my front fork at two of the three places specified for in its design. This is because the threads of one of those eyelets were stripped.

Struggles with my front rack started when I decided to carry things on the front of my bike. I trace many of those issues to me being cheap, being stubborn and/or woefully dedicated to optimistic denial. Traveling alone, means all of my decisions are mine alone. Total autonomy is at once one of the greatest joys and one of the most difficult aspects of traveling solo.

It begins back in Guadalajara, where I constructed a pannier out of a plastic laundry detergent bin at the Casa Ciclista. There is a certain confidence required to pursue a DIY project that requires you to believe you don't need an R&D department, or whatever is being constantly marketed at you to resolve your need(s). At the time, I possessed said confidence in spades. It is empowering to create something from repurposed materials, construct it locally and yes, significantly, more frugally. That it is waterproof, easy to clean out (great for food storage!) and doubles as a stool are all strong points in favor of the DIY laundry detergent pannier!

The day I left Guadalajara, another place I called home for lengthy period of time, I also left late. Then, actually, I turned around after my new pannier bounced off three times in the first five miles. My friends at the Casa Ciclista talked me into staying a couple more days. There were some kinks to work out with its hooks. I left again and covered some ground, passing through Guanajuato, Querétaro, Metepec and finally Taxco, Guerrero. There, on the final ascent into Taxco, I noticed a piece of my front rack, on the side with the laundry bin pannier, had broken.

Taxco is this little city built into the side of a mountain. The buildings are white with clay red shingled roofs and old Volkswagen bugs careen through its narrow cobblestone streets. I learned the Spanish word for plum there, ciruela, while purchasing empanadas de ciruelas from a lady selling them in the stacked corridors of the market. The market was multiple stories and I circled its location on the map a couple times deceived by it's small footprint. It was chillier, there in the mountains, and with the cooler temperatures came fresh cream which I poured over the empanadas -a combination I considered reminiscent of blackberry pie and vanilla ice cream.  I took it easy.

In light of my broken rack and prior concerns about the safety of the next section I took a bus to Acapulco to meet a cycling friend. We had an idea that we were going fall in love and continue cycling the Americas together. Within the first day it was clear that wasn't going to happen but we held onto the idea for a few more days anyway.

In the Acapulco of today, a city marred by deserted hotel buildings and a high crime rate, but also lots of bike lanes, I was surprised to learn my rack was made of aluminum. Aluminum welders are hard to find. An auto shop was able fix a plate to the broken part of the rack with some sort of apoxy  -the point is they fixed it! And, actually, that part held. However, a week or so South down the coast in Oaxaca, the rack broke again on the same side. This time, though, a screw snapped and a chunk of it remained inside my front fork. After traipsing around Puerto Escondido in the rain, I ended up in the workshop of a bike mechanic who drilled the screw out. Of course in the process of doing so the threads were also stripped out.

The guy and I parted ways. He continued along the coast and I got a ride in a Blah Blah car to Oaxaca City. (I think he is in Peru now and I'm in Vermont!). I was not in the right emotional state for the climb to the city: Approximately 5000 meters of elevation change stand between the coast of Oaxaca and the city of Oaxaca. So, I took a ride.

In Oaxaca City I went looking for someone to inject some weld into the stripped eyelet and create new threads for the same size screw. I'm not a metal worker but that's roughly what I understood needed to happen. Two afternoons later, I found some auto mechanics who were eager to help me by screwing a slightly larger screw into the the stripped eyelet. I suspected it would be a problem in the future, but that was the future. It was at least working at that moment.

Meanwhile, I wanted to know why this rack was resulting in so many problems. Some internet research later, I determined, the rack I picked up on a whim for $15 at an REI garage sale was the lightweight option. That is why it was made of aluminum and I was definitely pushing it beyond its weight rating.

Many bike tourists have large social media followings and get brands to sponsor them with equipment. As I explained earlier I haven't really gone that route. Nevertheless, I emailed Salsa to see if they could help me with a new rack. I didn't have a social media following to offer in exchange but I told them what I was doing, my story with the rack, that I had most certainly picked up the wrong rack, that I was not using it as intended and that it was definitely my fault that it had broken. If there is one cliche I've learned in the last two years - "It never hurts to ask".

Amazingly, they responded that they appreciated my honesty and would like to send me the heavy duty version of the rack as a replacement. It is both strange and unsurprising to me how great that response and the following coordination of friends and strangers to replace my front rack felt. On one hand [repeated] gear failure is frustrating and defeating. On the other, I felt elation coursing from my chest to the tips of my fingers and toes. I was in Oaxaca City staying with this awesome lady (LaPincheCriz, now touring in South America). A for profit company was graciously mailing the part I needed to a hotel where I had an acquaintance, met through yet another heart warming story. And finally a friend from home also traveling in the region picked it up and delivered it to me in the magical mountains of Oaxaca. Temptations to blunder in frustration with the universe were, in an apparent snap of fingers, replaced by warm and fuzzy gratitude to a collection of people.

The fix, that is, the slightly larger screw gripping some threads, my laundry detergent bin pannier, and the new heavy duty rack from Salsa lasted roughly a month of touring. (Mexico City to Isla Mujeres). However, over a year has passed since it came together in Oaxaca. Fast forward temporally and geographically: I left Montreal the day before. I am about fifteen miles north of the Canada, United States border when I realize my front rack is dangling from one screw. The braze on snapped off, leaving the rack holding on at one of three mounting points.

In that moment I felt eminently foolish and unqualified for the lifestyle I have chosen. How had I followed wishful thinking to catastrophic equipment failure on the side of a remote rural road? Flashes of opportunities to prevent my present situation in the months prior in Boulder and Montreal collided with each other as they attempted a coup de etat on my brain. In the days I've spent writing this story, some self forgiveness has set in. There has been time to think constructively not solely critically.

Returning to to the bucolic countryside, in the first couple miles leaving Montreal the day before, any velocity over five miles per hour caused my front fork to yo yo side to side. It vibrated like the slack line of someone about to go down. I improved stability by using paracord to join the rack and front fork where the screw no longer could. So again, I retrieved my stash of paracord.  This time I made a loop connecting the front of the rack to the top tube of my frame such that the paracord would pull the rack up while the weight of the pannier would push it down, keeping it relatively level. It worked. Fifty miles later I arrived after dark at my Warm Showers host, Holly's, home. I was exhausted and my legs ached but Holly and her friend were making dinner and I could relax.

In the end I stayed a week with Holly in Burlington which funnily enough is a "sister" city to Boulder, Colorado. The architect who designed the pearl street mall designed church street in Burlington. The similarities are light heartedly jarring. Holly graciously let me stay as long as I needed and was my best friend for that week. Which I really needed because soon, fixing my bike was not my only concern.

In fact, in short order, my bike issues were resolved thanks to the kind folks at Old Spokes Home. They rethreaded the eyelet on my fork by tapping it out to a larger size screw. Of course, I am wary of this solution but it did get me to Portsmouth. They also replaced the star nut in my headset which was totally mangled for some unknown amount of time and helped get my bike computer to work. Still, there was the topic of the braze on. Rob, one of the bike mechanics, offered to weld it that evening at his house. I couldn't believe it. Two days prior, I guessed I'd have to bus to Boston and even then I was doubtful I could get this stuff fixed. And yet that evening, I borrowed Holly's Prius, drove to Rob's home and this incredibly kind and soft spoken guy tried to weld the braze on back to my frame. Unfortunately, the weld didn't hold. But, back at the bike shop the next day we used a crimp on my front fork to replace it.

The only thing was, that same day, when I woke up my left eye was nearly swollen shut. The evening I arrived in Burlington it felt like a zit was coming to a head on my left eyebrow. Over the the next couple days it was redder and more inflamed than zits usually are. And then, suddenly, it was really bad and clearly infected. Looking back now with two normal eyes it doesn't seem so terrifying. At the time, it was decidedly freaky and stressful.

I don't have health insurance in the US. It is very expensive and I travel mostly in countries with public health care that would be "out of network" anyway. Figuring I needed a prescription for antibiotics I called the nearest Urgent Care facility to ask how much an appointment would cost. They refused to give me a range or even a minimum cost. "It all depends on how the doctor codes the visit". I was appalled. Said codes must reference something. I didn't have insurance to complicate the formula. I was existentially outraged at the possibility of writing a blank check to a notoriously expensive and flawed health care system. I called my Mom. I gave my body a day to heal itself.

It didn't. I considered bussing back to Canada where I am also a citizen. Expecting to be dismissed again, I called a different urgent care facility, Clear Choice MD. And actually they did have a concise, transparent price structure. One hundred dollars for the visit and more for particular services but capped at two hundred and fifty dollars. Relieved and content to know what I was getting myself into I went there immediately. The Doctor prescribed antibiotics for the cellutis abscess on my left eyebrow, that was the result, probably at least in part, of stress. A week later my face is back to normal.

I left Montreal one October Friday [afternoon]. I spent the following week, Saturday to Saturday, resolving my bike and health in Burlington, Vermont. I stalled twice to avoid heavy rains because it is fall in the northeast. It took me just under two weeks to arrive in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, six days of which were spent cycling. In some respects this is the story of events that lead up to and transpired between one point on a map and another point on a map. In truth, the plot of this story is woven together by people; heaps more people than I've referenced. Were it not for the Warm Showers community, kind people at bike shops, new friends, and old friends and family I turn to digitally, I wouldn't be able to or want to do this.

There is a palpability to the motion of reality, the sequences of "good" and "bad" events that are always occurring, that I think is accentuated bike touring. To the extent that it is, I think it is also an opportunity reflect on what is worth dwelling on both in the context of traveling and otherwise [economic and societal reproduction]. To my mind, that means focussing not on our inevitability as individuals to act in our own rational self interest but on our capacity to act with compassion collectively instead of transactionally. It means recognizing, that even when everything seems to be broken, the sun still shines or maybe it rains but the fall colors are more vivid for it. Either way, it is a beautiful planet worth stewarding.