Tuesday, July 12, 2011

SnR UGRR Tour 2011 ~ July 12 Ride Day 27

We awoke to get on the road. My attempts at blogging in the morning, noon and night are becoming futile as a day goes by and I'm behind again.

Suepinda helped me with the Youth Cyclists' blogs but we're still behind in posting some. I'm not mad at them for not blogging everyday because its a challenging process to recap the day when you're living it! 

After each ride we allow them to just break out and be kids (after taking care of their responsibilities and eating. Of course, eating).  So, of course being into this tour we are seeing a few things that were ambitious on our part and the requests of the cyclists but its all working out organically.

So, as we were heading out for the day after breaking camp we met Ken. We were allowed to sleep in the reception room of our Safe House due to the storm that day. It didn't rain again but we weren't taking any chances.

Ken and his wife lives modestly in Texas and Pennsylvania 6 mths out of the year for each.  Ken's a great guy who gave us a tour of the area and showed us the longest covered bridge in the world that was just a few miles away so we decided to go. After that we saw the lake town of Ashtabula. While moving through town to get to a grocery store because we spent so much of a good time with Ken we stumbled on the Hubbard House. A major component of the Underground Railroad. The Hubbard's owned a lumber and shipping company that would send lumber over to Canada across Lake Erie. Well you can imagine that if he had a boat he used it to smuggle now free people to even freer land over in Canada. Once they were on the boat they were home free or Canada free.

Ken pulled out his atlas again at the grocer and said he'd take us to where he thought they should be on the bikes. It took some time due to the detours but we got there and they weren't there.  They had already moved passed the area. They move fast.

Called Itza and they were just up the road in the town where we make our way east across the lake. We found a nice park by the lake and had lunch.

We left Ohio and moved into Pennsylvania. Took pictures of both signs. Leaving Ohio we really headed into wine country. For one of the rest break stops we pulled into an ice cream stand and were refused service. We should have known something was up when we read the sign to said "STAY OFF CONCRETE BLOCKS" that were placed in front of the building which seemed quite ODD since they were SEAT HIGH. The proprietor of Dairy Oasis, near Erie, PA had a bad experience with a "group" of cyclists sometime in the past. WHATEVER! These are kids not arrogant middle aged ars's .  He didn't want to hear our story or what we're about and his wife just shook her head no in the background. Another individual "cyclist" rode up as we were being denied service and got an ice cream shake. He was dumbfounded to find out what just happened, as were we. So, this makes bad experience number 4 in comparison to our 240 GOOD experiences, so far. A drop in the bucket of useless encounters. Later for them and that.

We moved on down the road to find an even friendlier place in Godfrey Run Farm Market Cider Mill. TJ, the owner's son treated us very kindly. Be sure to stop by their place when in the area!

We ended the day at our great Safe House - Sara's Campground. The last private camping location outside the state park. Its HUGE. We slept on the beach. The Youth Cyclists road to the lake and around the peninsula, a 13m roundtrip, with complete joy. We ate at a delicious burger joint and they all ate heartily.

We ended the night by turning in as early as possible. Except for the boys. They're now on curfew for the next two days. haha.

We had light lake effect rain overnight but other than that it was peaceful.



Spoke 'n Revolutions Youth Cycling UGRR Tour 2011 ~ Visit the nation's National Parks. 
 Let's Move Outside!

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