Cycling the Ports of Elgin County - Episode 47

Susanne faces the challenge of bicycling over 100 km from her home along the north shore of Lake Erie to visit all four ports in Elgin County. It's a test of will and a little tailwind wouldn't hurt. Find out where Manfred will be waiting for her. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Happy to Be Canadian Podcast. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, a writer who lives in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Each week I share an original, very short story that will have you laughing and reflecting on the simple moments of our lives. Now, on to today's episode. Happy to be Canadian, episode 47. I biked Elgin County. As I pedaled up what I hoped to be my last big hill of the day, my thigh muscles started to pulse. You know that pre-ache phase of a Charlie horse when you don't know if you can wish the pain away or if the muscle will snap. I was over 95 kilometers into a hundred kilometer plus ride through the four ports of Elgin County on a late fall afternoon. Manfred had just watched me climb past the midpoint of this slope and had driven on to our appointed end of the road where he would pick me up. All the ports were behind me, and I just had to make this last hill, and then the gentle ride along a tree-edged blacktop road to the county line. As my thigh muscle tightened, I prayed to the cycling gods to let me make it to level ground. With each push of the pedal, my leg threatened to break me. As I glided onto the gravel shoulder at the top of the hill, the pain still a menacing phantom. I pulled a plastic bottle from my bike's frame and I gulped water like a camel. I unscrewed a recycled pill bottle and sucked out the dill pickle juice. I ate dates and almonds and gummy bears like a horse with its head in the feed bag. Trying to replace electrolytes, proteins, sugars, and whatever vitamins would patch up my muscles and sustain me to the end of my ride. Still straddling my bike, I looked at my ride queue sheet that said I had to pedal only 6.9 kilometers to finish my challenge. In the spring, I set a goal to bicycle Essex, Chatham Kent, and Elgin counties that year. Sadly, I just hadn't got it together. I made the goal, I made the maps, I just didn't make the time. So here I was in the last week of October, and it was now or never, for 2023 at least. With the weather looking quite fine and the wind forecast to be from the southwest, I decided to ride most of the length of Elgin County from my home through the four ports that nestle along the north shore of Lake Erie. It was a hundred-kilometer ride. The previous year I'd completed four rides of this length, and now for some unfathomable reason, I think it might have been a horrendous chest cold in July. I had only ridden 100 kilometers once on June 21st. So, with my riding dreams deflating about as regularly as my no-leak tires, that's another dilemma. I threw out all my excuses and got ready to ride. I was disappointed on Thursday to wake up to a rainy morning and postpone my ride to Friday, as I was giving myself six hours to ride the route. I woke up early on Friday morning to have a pre-ride breakfast at least two hours before I hit the road. As the dawn began to break, the rain arrived. It drizzled and poured and spit until about 9 a.m. I began to think I might have to delay again. Then the sun arrived and a 23-kilometer tailwind. I was ready and on the road by 10:30. Most times I ride gravel roads, but this time I added in more paved portions to increase my speed. I wound my way down to the Port Glasgow Marina, which was my most westerly port, just a few kilometers from home. This is where I realized what I already knew to be true. Each port would be at the bottom of a hill on the edge of a creek that had been carved into the valley over centuries. This is what makes Elgin County a beautiful, treed, and challenging southwestern Ontario location for cycling. At the beginning of my ride, I stopped often to take pictures of the stunning fall colors, but soon realized that I needed to hustle onwards. The highlights of the ride were the shimmering maples near Port Stanley, the combining of corn at the top of the lake cliffs near Port Bruce, the architecture of homes that reflect the prosperous days of settlements, and the effort that Elgin County is putting towards cycling in the municipality. At the end, what I loved most was seeing Manford sitting in the truck that was backed into a farmfield laneway just a hundred meters from the county line. He wouldn't let me stop there and encouraged me to go right to the end of the road, where I was proud to stroke this ride off my cycling goal for the year. The next best thing was my post-ride dinner at Izzy's Schooner in Port Burwell, a plain Jane country diner in a small village at the bottom of the hill near a creek flowing into Lake Erie. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Happy to Be Canadian. If you would like to receive an email each Saturday morning that features new short stories and more, you can sign up on my website, www.crazy8barn.com. If you would like to meet me in person and discover another way that we tell our rural stories, please join me at a Barn Quilt Painting Workshop at our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra, Ontario, along the North Shore of Lake Erie. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Crazy8 Barn. If you are an Apple Podcast listener and enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate it if you could leave me a favorable review. And that lets Apple know that Happy to Be Canadian is a valuable podcast and it shares it with other potential listeners. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, and I'm Happy to Be Canadian.