June 21, 2014

As I cycling along hour after hour, many times I think I should write about this or that. Too often the thought amounts to little more than a one liner or a photo with a tag line. Today was one of those days when various little things occurred but nothing that amounts to a lot so I’ll dig into my treasure trove of ‘topics for northern Ontario’ and continue the A Day In the Life series.

A good portion of my day revolves around food. When I’m not eating, which doesn’t usually take that long, I think about food, which can swallow up hours. For all the time I think about food, I don’t eat a great variety just a great quantity hence the title fressen. In German you make a distinction between the eating/essen a person does and the fressen an animal does for which there is no English equivalent; it suggests great quantities and consumed greedily. To get the best sense for my eating you’d need to use the more vulgar low German fraeten. I think that gets us pretty close to pigging out at the slop trough. And I still lost about 20lb in the first few weeks.

I wake up hungry and thirsty so I start with three packets of oatmeal and a heaping hand of trail mix. I need something to chew for the consistency of the oatmeal makes me gag. If I’m still hungry a peanut butter and jam tortilla sandwich to follow. From there until lunch I’m consuming different iterations of granola bars, bananas, trail mix, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, peanuts. I’m actually quite fond of crunchy peanut butter and raspberry jam the only thing missing is some tea. I also like the BBQ flavored peanuts. For lunch I salivate over and devour whatever the local establisment’s everything burger is, preferably with poutine fries. Snacks over the afternoon are repeats of the morning though lately I’ve been indulging in chocolate milk or nectarines on top of the rest. Of course they’re not inhaled all at the same time but spread out. For supper I’m fond of a Japanese version of Mr Noodle, avocado, some kind of jerky or salami and cheese, hopefully with some kind of dessert. I ate about 30 minutes ago and I’m getting hungry just writing this. Currently, my hankering for food is no less insistent than the mosquitoes in northern Ontario. There were times in my past when I ate because I had to and not because I wanted to so I find this hunger a little startling. Everything smells so good and tastes even better. I’d make a very unreliable food critic at the moment.

The one event from today I would like to share, if poorly for the limitations of words, is the setting sun before me as I write this post. Looking out over Agawa Bay onto Lake Superior, the water is so calm is looks like rippling glass reflecting the play of light and clouds. To my right sunbeams are piercing through gold-lined clouds, directly in front of me is a long thin black outline of an island, and to my left the rippling blue sheet melds into the sky. As the sun dips lower, the hues of the blues, golds, and oranges lighten and darken; I see the fog rise on the cliffs to either side of me. The sun finally dips below the horizon with shimmer pinks streaking out across the water and clouds. Were there a burger in one hand and a cold beer in the other, this would be the perfect finale to the day. As it is, this is near perfection.

Road Report: ~92km

Returning to coastal road, you get a combination of great views and hills. Take the time to stop at Katherine Cove and the Agawa Rock Pictographs. As for the road, it continues to suck like yesterday.