Thursday, 28 May 2009
Baltimore, MD to Grand Portage, MN
No Riding.
The plan was to fly from Baltimore to Duluth, drive 3 hours to
the Canadian border, and then ride 8 miles back to Grand Portage. The
plan proved to be a bit ambitious.
The first part went well. Our flight left Baltimore on time--the
airport wasn't even crowded. Both Linda and Mr. Balint were given free
upgrades to first class. I, naturally, sat in Economy Plus...and I had
to pay for the Plus. Still, it was a good flight.
Waiting at BWI
Then we had a couple hours sitting around in Chicago. Lunch. The bottom
did not fall out of my iced tea glass this time. But that's because it
was plastic...and there was a dead fly in it. Was the fly fresh? Or was
it dead when it fell in? I'm likely to eat a bug or two on this ride,
but I wasn't expecting to drink any!
We boarded our flight to Duluth on time, but then we sat there in
sweltering heat for a half hour before we took off. There was a
mechanic running around, but we were never told anything. The flight
was short and the pilot made up for the delay in the air. We were only
about five minutes late.
We have a Hyundai Santa Fe rental, which we drove to Twin Port
Cyclery--where we had sent our bikes a couple weeks ago. I asked them
to unpack and rebuild my bike, and told them not to install the front
rack and fender--because nobody knows how to do it right--it confuses
me sometimes. But they had installed it anyway, and they did it all
wrong. So I rolled the bike outside and reinstalled everything. This,
however, did not cause a delay...because Mr. Balint was struggling to
get the front rack installed on his bike.
He has JT's bike and JT's front rack. Mr. Balint somehow lost the
mounting hardware for the rack, so the guys at the bike shop were
running around trying to find the appropriate spacers. Eventually the
got the rack installed using ridiculously wide spacers. The rack looked
like wings.
During all this, Linda called JT and left a message. After we loaded
the bikes and the car and were on our way north, he called back. The
mounting hardware is in a pocket within a pocket in one of Balint's
bags. Later he found them. The whole incident was really not surprising.
The Santa Fe turned out to be smaller than we expected, and we had to
work to jam all the gear in there.
But we got it all in there.
And then we jammed Mr. Balint in there.
It was 7pm by the time we got to Grand Portage. We decided not to ride
today, and start at the border tomorrow. There might be some excitement
regarding lodging for tomorrow. The place we looked at on the way north
is booked solid tomorrow. So we'll have to resolve that by tomorrow
night.
