Bike Trip Tuesday #3-Wanderlust

As I've mentioned, I grew up in a speck of a place in South East Pennsylvania. Though it was not the famed Lancaster County it was still smack dab in the middle of Pennsylvania Dutch country. My entire extended family on my mom's, except for one uncle and one cousin and his family, lives within 10 miles of each other.

Even though my childhood trips were generally limited to going to the New Jersey shore, which was only 2 hours away, I can remember feeling the pull of far away places very young. I vividly recall at age 5 or so standing in the Atlantic Ocean and looking off to the horizon, asking my mother, 'What's on the other side?' She told me other people were across the ocean. I asked if maybe there was a little girl standing on that side looking over wondering what was on our side of the ocean. Every year we went I can recall standing in the surf, staring off and imagining different people in different places. I am still compelled by my imagination when I stand at the water's edge and feel the sea lap my toes.

One of the things that excited me about the bike trip was getting to go stand on the edge of the Pacific and gaze over it to imagine yet another side of the world. What I don't think I realized is what it would mean to cross the continent and slowly pass through the sea of people that make up the United States. I knew my tiny corner of America. I naively assumed an awful lot of homogeny across the country, after all, we are all Americans, right? It's all one country. I figured it was really only the landscape that was going to change.

That said, I truly didn't even have a grasp at what the landscape changes were going to be like. Yes, I could label all 50 states and place them all on a map. I could carve up the country into all its regions and tell you what major geographical features would be found. However, no amount of book knowledge prepared me to stand at the edge of the Great Lakes and not be able to see across them the way I could not see across the ocean. No labelling of any map readied my eye to take in the vastness of the prairies. No postcard adequately represented the grandeur of the Rockies. No folk song really contained the Mississippi River in its tune. No documentary prepared me to stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and be overwhelmed by it. No geography class ever made me grasp how huge this country is and how divergent her people are. And those were just some of the places I knew about in an abstract way. There were countless other places I had never heard of or had only the slightest knowledge about.

Now that we were all one group we set out together from Central Pennsylvania heading north to New York state and toward Niagara Falls. One of the benefits of having folks in our group from all over the country was having connections to people all over the country too. If one of the group had family or friends we asked if we could camp out in their yard for a night or two. Since I had the surprise of being told I had to beg for sleeping arrangements at churches each night I think I was more happy than everyone else when we came to Olean , NY where Mike's family lived.

We descended upon their lake cottage and had a terrific couple of days relaxing on Cuba Lake. You'd think perhaps the cyclists would not want to touch their bikes for those couple of days but you'd be wrong. We took a little 30 mile round trip jaunt to see some local park. I did pedal on a borrowed bike for those 30 miles and let me tell you, I was glad it was broken up into 15 mile increments and relatively flat. I made it and didn't think I would die or anything but I was kind of tired by the end of it. The rest of the time was spent canoeing (I very skillfully tipped the canoe over dumping Mr. Lime and myself into the cold lake), fishing, and lazing about.

After leaving Olean we headed toward Niagara Falls but made a stop in one of those off the map sorts of places called Rock City. It was the remains of an old sea bed and there were a number of hiking trails through the bottom and along the top. Mr. Lime and I decided to see about climbing up the walls. Yes, we've both always been monkeys. And just in case you thought my ridiculously klutzy ways are a recent development I'll tell you that about 5 seconds after this picture was snapped I fell off. No broken bones though. Hehehehe.

Tune in next week for the next leg of our journey....