2018 mileage: 2774.9
Today, I celebrated the thirty-second birthday of my son John by doing a ride that I had found about months ago, and looked forward to—BIKE THE BRIDGE—touted for its uniqueness in being the only organized ride in the world tocross an international border. We began in Windsor, Ontario, rode to the Ambassador Bridge and then across it to Detroit, and then turned around and rode back into Windsor. The ride then continued with 9 miles in Windsor before finishing with lunch at the park where we had begun.
The ride started at 9:00 a.m., with the cutoff deadline for picking up our packets at 8:50. Mapquest showed me that it was about a 50-minute drive from our home in Ann Arbor, so I had planned to leave about 7:45. In order to do this, I planned to get out of bed by 6:00 (without an alarm, as always—I've not needed one since my 1993 accident). But, as is always the case, I was unable to sleep in the early morning, and, being awake since 4:55, eventually I gave up trying and allowed myself to climb out of bed just before 5:30.
With this slight amount of extra time, I was able to make some progress on a project which has engaged me this weekend. My friend Stephen Baker introduced me to another Iowa musician, Lynn Swan, who wants a choral anthem she wrote quite some time ago professionally notated, using Finale (the software I use). It is a very nice composition, and I'm enjoying this work, so I was grateful for the opportunity to move it ahead a little more early this morning.
I left our home just before 7:30 (still in the dark), going out to the driveway, where our car was parked, with the rack for the trike on it which i had put on yesterday and left overnight. Turning the car around, and backing it into the driveway so that the rack faced the garage, I opened the garage, loaded the trike onto the rack, double checked to be sure everything was secure, and headed off for Canada.
The trip over went smoothly (although I had forgotten about fare for the bridge, and when the attendant told me it was $5 and I only had 3 singles, I was happy to be able to reach into the compartment where I stash an "emergency 20" 😄), and soon I was pulling up to a parking lot beside Assumption Park, where our packet pickup was. The following picture shows the scene at the park, with the approach to the bridge visible, looming over us. They capped participation at 1000 riders, so it was a manageable event.
I would have to call the ride itself something of a mixed success. In the 'positive column' was the weather—cool (39°), but calm, and the possible rain they had projected held off. I rode the initial, 'glamorous' part of the ride just fine—to the bridge, and then across it to the U.S., and then back across to Canada. I expected the actual climb to the center of the bridge to be more of a challenge than I actually found it to be, in fact—apparently Ann Arbor's hilly nature, though not always fun for me, has served as good training. Following is a picture that a fellow rider took of me on the trike, a couple of minutes before we began, and then a picture of the bridge looming overhead as we lined up to begin.
However, upon returning, as we were waiting for the last of the riders to finish their crossing and arrive, when I went to pause the MapMyRide app, I found that my phone was dead. This may have been partly attributable to the cold, and partly to the lengthy wait we had on the American side, as we could not begin our return trip to Canada until the entire group had made it across. I didn't think that my power should have run out yet—and indeed when I returned to the car a short time later and plugged it in, I found that I still had over a 50% charge left. But just before noticing that my phone was dead, a fellow rider had told me, "Hey, your right tire has a bubble"—and the combination of these two events convinced me to cut the ride short and skip the extra miles in Windsor.
During the ride I received a couple of comments from fellow riders. One woman, noting my navy gloves with the block M on the back, shouted, "Hey—GO BLUE!" (I responded with a spirited first pump.) And another fellow, behind me, said, "Hey there, TerraTrike! How's the climb?" I told him (as best I could), "Fine" ... but he did not attempt to engage me in further conversation. 😏
Anyway, though I think I was shorted slightly by the power problems, the app measured my limited ride at 3.6 miles in about 32 minutes. It was very slow because at no time could I make any kind of good speed, I was so hemmed in.
On the way home, as I drove across the bridge from Canada back into Michigan, I had the odd realization that the last time I had made that same drive in that direction was on the morning of May 22, 1993, just a couple of hours before my world crumbled with my accident. And today, although I do, of course, wish that everything today had gone problem-free, my heart swells with gratitude to God for protecting me from any large problems, and enabling me to get there (and home) safely, and to do the ride at all. And as I neared Ann Arbor, around the time I came to Ypsilanti, a relative heavy, quite steady cold rain began, a rain that I was also grateful to have avoided having to ride in.
