After stealth camping last night in a very mosquitoey patch of woods in Michigan and midst the suburban sprawl, I made my way to Lake Saint Clair and the ferry at the Canadian border in Algonac MI. I met an interesting materials scientist on board and we spent the trip discussing niobium and yttrium stabilized zirconia. I can’t say I expected to have that conversation on this trip but you meet all kinds of people when you traveling in slow motion across this country.

At one point, as I was peddling along, I saw a smashed cardboard box with kitchen utensils and small appliances, strewn by the side of the road and all over the road. Thinking somebody might come back at some point and come looking for these, I started gathering up everything and piling them back into the broken box. In fact, when I was just about done, someone did to come back looking for that box. With a hamster cage in the passenger seat of an old beat up Subaru, and his kids wedged between moving boxes filling his backseat, it looked like he had a lot on his mind.

In Ridgetown, after 50 miles on the road, I bought lunch and was just generally faffing about looking for a place to stay when I found a cheap room in someone’s house through Airbnb, sweet!! Booked!! When I plugged the address into Google maps, it said it was another 53 miles away. Crap, it was already 4:30P so how was I going to pull this one off? Without any of other options, off I went. Long story short, if that’s possible at this point, I rolled into St. Thomas and my Airbnb at 8 PM. In the end, everything worked out. No stopping for pictures though.