The Northern Tier

Joe rode the first twenty miles with us that morning, escorting us out through downtown before we turned north for Ohio. He had dug out the same sun-bleached jersey he’d worn the last time we rode together, as if some part of him thought the ceremony mattered, and maybe it did. He got us clear of the city with only four wrong turns, three fewer than I’d bet on, which felt like a personal triumph even though the wagering had been entirely one-sided. Parting from Joe again stung a little, though not for long, since it would be his turn to visit me next. You collect a lot of friends over the course of a life, and a smaller handful you simply know, without needing to test it, will still be there in twenty years. Joe is one of those.

He had also sorted us a place to stay in Alliance, Ohio, which was just as well after an eighty-mile slog back on the bikes. We rolled up to the house of Bill Morris to find that Joe’s dad had driven down from Cleveland to join us for dinner. Bill and his wife Kate had gone to real trouble on our behalf, inviting round a table’s worth of friends and local cycling enthusiasts for salad, corn on the cob and grilled chicken, and we spent the evening talking bikes, routes and the days still ahead of us, which is always the best way to get advice. Bill had even arranged for a reporter from the local paper to stop by, and the short interview turned into a front-page spot with an inside column in the Alliance Review. Thanks to Bill and Kate for a genuinely special evening, and the warmest of welcomes.

Round on the ends and high in the middle.

Eal talking with some local cyclists and me with Joe’s dad in the background.

Front cover and inside column feature in the Alliance Review.

Bill sent us out of town past the high school and Glamorgan Castle, the two landmarks Alliance is built around, hard to miss even on a bike loaded down with panniers. Our target for the day was Lake Erie, where we would finally pick up the Northern Tier, the cross-country route laid down by Adventure Cycling that runs parallel to the TransAmerica trail I’d ridden two years before. North-eastern Ohio stayed gently rolling for a while before flattening out into corn and soya fields, and we hauled ourselves within sight of the great lake by evening.

Glamorgan Castle.

Lake Erie.

Riding towards Fremont, I found myself wondering whether we would finally start crossing paths with other touring cyclists now that we were on the Northern Tier proper. The weather had settled into a pattern of relentless heat and humidity with no rain in sight, and it was doing real damage across the country that summer, always the first thing any local wanted to talk about. We told them we got more than enough rain back home and were grateful for the sunshine, though it was hard to feel entirely easy about it looking at the parched, cracked fields we passed, and would keep passing, all the way across America’s farming heartland. A good bike path carried us the last stretch into Clyde, where we ate at a place called Lee’s, fried chicken and potatoes and gravy and slaw, all of it exactly as good as it sounds.

Hmm…

Bike path to Fremont.

We took it easy the next morning, only sixty miles standing between us and the campground we’d picked out near Grand Rapids. We stopped at the bike shop in Fremont and got talking with the guys there about the trip, about beer, about the Olympics, and they gave Eal some free Bontrager bar end plugs after he’d lost one and started having trouble with his hands. It turned out to be about as perfect a day’s riding as I could remember, fifteen to twenty miles an hour for hours on end through idyllic farmland under a huge blue sky. We had the campground almost entirely to ourselves, just one RV camper tucked away in the far corner, and though there were no showers the lake looked clean enough to serve the same purpose. We stacked firewood before ducking back into town for cold beers, and I spent the evening going over and over the panels of my Northern Tier maps, glad to be back on an established route where every turn was already worked out for me. Odd, given how far we’d already come, but it almost felt like the crossing was only just beginning.

Another perfect day, they keep stacking up.

I love Adventure Cycling maps.