This is not a kissing book!

Meaford, ON, CA – Utopia, ON, CA

Staying on the Princess Bride theme, do you remember in the beginning when Peter Falk’s grandfather character tries to convince the not-feeling-well Fred Savage character to let him read the story?

“Is this another kissing book?” asks Fred’s character.

Well, the grandfather’s answer – all about adventure, swordsmanship, vengaence, etc. – is kind of how our day went today.

Masked villains in the night. Tragedy. Giant fish. Vagabonds. Zombies. Romance. Death. Near calamity. Heroes. True love. And utopia!

Like Peter Falk’s grandfather character we’ll skip the kissing part – that’s none of your business anyway . . . 🙂

So our story starts out in the deepest, darkest part of the night. I’m awakened by a commotion outside the tent. Overcoming my fear (this is one of the hero parts of the story) I grab my light and head out to confront whatever demon lurks outside.

After struggling into my crocs, I wobble out of the tent, shine the light at the source of the noise, and see two beady eyes staring back at me through a dark mask – looking like Batman after some episode where he has turned evil.

“Get out! Scat!” I yell – bravely!

I’m not sure what happened next, I think the vile creature gave me the finger – and then casually ambled back into the woods.

I survey the scene. Diana’s bike has been knocked over and her front pack is open – the front packs have a magnetic close so it is pretty clear that our thief in the night has been in the pack. I close it up and bring it back to the tent for safekeeping for the night.

The full extent of the tragedy is not clear until morning, when I tell Diana about how I bravely drove off this dastardly fellow and saved her pack, her bike, and probably our very lives. Once she learns what has happened she audits the contents of her bag (note that this is the tragic part coming up) only to realize that the greedy creature has made off with her emergency peanut butter sandwich. Now, this might not sound that tragic to you – but Diana has carried that emergency sandwich some 900 miles – from our start in Hayward – only to have it eaten with impudence by some ungrateful creature of the Ontario night.

Ungrateful? Well, yeah. He/she/it had the audacity to eat the sandwich, and then leave the plastic bag for us to clean up in the morning. Apparently Ontario’s villains have never been taught common courtesy. I mean it is one thing to steal someone’s peanut butter sandwich that they have been saving for half a continent. It is something else entirely to steal it, eat it, and then leave the baggie for your victim to clean up.

Some people!

Well, yes, it was a terrible tragedy. But there was no time to mourn. We had to push on.

Before we know it we are passing over a stream – literally Pretty Creek – when we see someone landing a giant fish. We run to observe, and meet Dalton – wearing his Death Row Records shirt. Dalton is a font of information.

These fish – and there are literally dozens of giant fish swimming around and occasionally jumping in Pretty Creek – are salmon, up to spawn. Dalton explains that the salmon are not native – and they were undoubtedly introduced by some dummy on the States side. They only bite on salmon roe – and the only way you can get salmon roe is by catching a “cow” salmon and then harvesting the roe. Dalton has a whole container of salmon roe – all obtained by catching such a cow – and he explains that you can’t preserve the roe with ordinary salt. You need to use kosher salt.

Dalton also explains that you can’t eat this fish because they are literally falling apart. They just come up the creek to spawn and then they die because there is not enough oxygen in the streams to support them. Occasionally you can catch a silver salmon – one that has not started to die yet – and those you can keep and eat, but you don’t catch those too often.

These fish that we can see are actually doing pretty well – but Dalton sees them on many occasions with fins that have rotted off, and eyes that have fallen out. He explains that these fish are technically still alive but they’re really dead. They’re zombies!

I’m not sure we saw any zombie fish, but there were a number of completely dead (that is, not revivable by Miracle Max) fish in various states of decay in the river.

It was quite the scene!

But eventually we head off. A few kilometers (see how Canadian we are now?) down the road Diana suddenly says we need to stop so that she can find her shirt. She’s searching around and says that maybe she forgot the shirt back at Pretty Zombie Creek. At this point I’m thinking that we should just forget about the shirt – I mean we’re almost done with the trip and we can always get a new shirt. Who really wants to bike back 2 miles and then bike back to where we already bikes to? This trip is long enough already . . . But I haven’t articulated this yet, because she hasn’t yet said that she wants to go back.

It was at this point that Diana realizes that she also left her purse thing – complete with all of her credit cards, her id, her passport, and the other 143 things that women seem to conjure from their purse things when pressed.

Uh Oh!

A calamity.

And this is where the next heroic moment commences. I turn around immediately – no longer giving any thought to leaving behind the shirt – and race back to the creek. Now at this point anyone in the vicinity may have absconded with Diana’s stuff. This could be a really dangerous situation. They might be lurking there with her wallet ready to bash anyone who might try to take it from them. But I am undaunted. I arrive back at the scene, throw my bike down and – selflessly – putting myself in harm’s way, I go back to the spot where Diana was eating lunch while we talked to Dalton. Fortunately, it was still sitting there – calamity averted thanks to someone’s heroic action!

And now I need to interrupt this narrative for a moment. Because I seem to remember – though I can’t quite conjure the thought – that someone recently said something about something called early onset dementia. And I think they talked about how serious it is. I don’t know why I’m thinking this now – I’m just trying to remember . . .

Okay, that out of the way – it is only a few miles later that we meet Russ. Russ rides up on a fully loaded rig. And I mean fully loaded. Russ looks at our bikes and says that we “pack light, like [he] does.”

He tells me is heading down the path to have a few beers, and then he’s going to head back up the path to have a few more beers.

And then he tells us about his bike. Russ tells us that it’s important to have a little weight on the front of the bike – so Russ has his cooler there – although we coudn’t see it exactly because it was, inexplicably, under a blanket. Russ has a large duffel bag strapped to the left side of the bike, a full suitcase on the rack, with more stuff – like a lawn chair – strapped on top of that. On the right side he has a cook stove and his cook kit conveniently stored in another suitcase, which he shows me (see video). They just flip right out conveniently.

And then Russ shows me the thing he is most proud of – his combination kickstand/front-wheel-holder-in-place. You see, he explains, his juiced up kickstand is not enough to hold the bike up because of all the weight of the bike – because the front wheel turns and then the bike falls over. So Russ drilled a hole through his frame so that he can stick a rod through the frame so that the wheel doesn’t turn. Russ has even built a rod-holder onto his front fork, and explains that he lost the first rod, but now has a bungee attached to it so he doesn’t lose it.

Russ is a super nice guy. And I would feel bad for Russ – he says that he sets up his tent along the railroad tracks – except that Russ seems pretty happy with his life.

Russ told us which way to go to get Toronto and explained that he was born someplace along the way.

Last stop along our route today: Glen’s place. Glen has a sign along the backroad that we were on this afternoon that says: “Steaks, pork chops, hamburger, sausage.” We decide to turn down the road to the attached farm and see if we can rustle up some dinner.

We find Russ unloading giant hay bales in a little skid loader. When he realizes that we want to purchase some meet he is out of his skid loader in an instant. Russ is about 80. He’s probably 5’2” tall. He’s lived on this farm for 46 years. Raises beef cattle, a few pigs, a bunch of chickens. We purchase some T-Bone steaks from Russ and he keeps questioning us on how we got there. He’s super happy that his sign along the road worked and actually brought in real customers. And when he learns that we started in Wisconsin and are from Minnesota he is even more happy.

“I have customers from Minnesota!” And he beams!

We ask Glen what the name of the business is.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “Never thought about it.”

“How about Glen’s Farm,” we suggest.

Glen seemed to like that. Made him even happier. Kept asking where we were going and I think he would have liked if we camped on his farm.

But we are headed to our last stop before Toronto. We’ve been using normal campgrounds for quite a while now. There are other options out there – there’s an app called Hipcamp that offers kind of offbeat camping in various situations – like people’s back yards or on their farm or whatever. All across the U.P. and northern Ontario we didn’t find many Hipcamp hosts. The thing is, maybe one in 50,000 people offers a place on Hipcamp. The U.P. and Northern Ontario barely have that many people, in total. So I guess that explains why there is not much Hipcamping up there . . .

Anyway, we found a place this morning. Camp along the river, and even enjoy a sauna. We arrive and two things pop out. First, this Hipcamp is in a town called – wait for it – Utopia! And second, we are the only people here – enjoying the gurgling river and the nice sauna by ourselves. If Utopia is kind of like nirvana I guess it is aptly named.

Well, tomorrow is it. Our last day on the road to Toronto. I guess the gods made us run the gauntlet today, but the fact that we stumbled into Utopia tonight tells me that we’re going to make it . . .

Oh, and true love. That one’s easy. Do you think we could have made it this far if we weren’t in love!