June 24, 2014
On the road alone, the restraints of social acceptability become less imposing from wearing the same two outfits all summer to talking to yourself for some company and so on. I have starting singing myself through the difficult bits. It’s nothing elaborate but little mantras to get me through whatever’s oppressing me. Still a little flustered about my wayward rest day, I sang myself out of The Soo. I was feeling pretty good when I heard what sounded like my back tire catching on something. Checking whether the rims were hitting the brakes or if a spoke had snapped, everything looked copacetic until I noticed the huge nail sticking out of my tire! It must have been perfectly aligned in a pavement crack to catch my tire at all. With my pliers, I was able to dislodge the nail as it would not budge otherwise. The tire seemed to remain fully inflated and I couldn’t hear air coming out so I kept going. The protective strip inside the tire for preventing punctures had finally come through for me. The hilarity of it all is that this huge nail did no damage other then putting a hole in my tire while a few days back I had a lot of trouble with a little piece if needle about a millimeter wide and maybe three centimeters long. I got a flat coming into Terrace Bay but for the life of me could figure out why. It was on the side of the tube, which is odd, but there was nothing in my tire and I couldn’t find a puncture. I reluctantly put a new inner tube in which lasted a good day before the same flat. This time I found this minute needle almost parallel with the tire wall. It goes to show that on occasion, contrary to the parable, the splinter is more of a problem than the spike.

Further down the highway, the road conditions got really terrible and then the construction crews preparing to resurface the road, which is really nice but doesn’t do me any good today. Cycling on the rough surface where they had stripped the top layer of pavement off, I was worried I might lose a screw or two where the racks are mounted to the bike. I lost one earlier. But it seemed everything remained as it should be and I didn’t notice till I got through the construction to the next town that my phone was missing. The holder was empty and the charging cable dangled pathetically empty. All I could think was ‘oh no,’ ‘oh no, where’s my phone?!’ I went back slowly checking the 3 or 5 km of construction since I last recalled seeing the phone but to no avail. The final pass was no more fruitful. I stopped at a motel/restaurant to ask if they would let me onto their network and see if I could locate the phone with the Find My iPhone app. The phone couldn’t be located so it must have been smashed by one of the many transport trucks or eaten by the highway shredder. The waitress was very sympathetic and texted a friend who worked in the construction crew to see if they had come across it or let her know if they found it.

Nothing to be done, I moved on discombobulated and anxious. I use the phone to keep track of how far I’ve gone and as a clock, which are dispensable but useful on the difficult days, but I also use it to navigate around larger urban areas where it’s almost indispensable. Less tangibly it’s a lifeline should I run into trouble or simply need to chat with someone because I’m bored or lonely. Were there such a thing as a rip cord to end this trip, I might have been tempted to pull it. I’m a little disconcerted by how attached I’m to that little piece of metal. So I started plotting how I could replace the phone and started singing. I did after all still have my iPad so with wifi could get any information I needed and there are always people to ask for directions. I happened to lose the phone in Amish country so not a bad place to reflection on technology in our lives, on this trip.

Once I got to camp, my iPad had a message that the phone had been found. The location seems to be at the restaurant I stopped in. I wasn’t able to get a hold of the waitress and the other staff wasn’t aware of a phone being returned. I’ll try again in the morning and probably spend my day cycling back there. What a miracle if I were to get it back again!

Road Report: ~157km
The road out of Sault Ste Marie is fine and if you take the 17B with light traffic. Once the double lanes end, it’s terrible until Bruce Mines but that’s currently being repaired so could be better in the future. The terrain flattens out and the towns are closer together.