Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Jan and I had met the loquacious and witty Barnhills (he a lawyer, she a former math
teacher and a nationally ranked amateur tennis player) earlier this year on our bike tour
of Provence. (Yes, I've spent an inordinate amount of time on a bicycle seat this year.)
They were kicking of a year of celebrating their fortieth anniversary, traveling with
their friends Jerry and Amy Nickles, also of Madison, who were also anticipating my
arrival. For a day and a half, the four of them saw to it that I ate heartily—Elizabeth's
pies!—drank liberally, conversed happily, and slept comfortably. They got me to the bike
store to shore up on fall weather gear (a merino underlayer, warmer gloves, and water-
proof shoe covers) and pointed me toward the road east and out of town. Jerry, a profess-
or of medical physics at the University of Wisconsin, smashes atoms for a living, and he
took me to his lab and showed me his cyclotron. (What's a cross-country bike trip, after
all, without a cyclotron?)
All of this companionship has given a bittersweet flavor to getting back on the road
alone. I've grown to like waking early, sussing out the weather, consulting my various
maps, ritually loading up my bike and rolling out the door of a motel. But leaving a warm
hearth and home to pedal into the morning chill—and it's been damp the last few days,
too—is, well, a little more difficult. It reminds me, of course, that I have an actual home
myself, and an actual life, and they're waiting for me when I return from my quixotic ad-
venture. Several readers have asked me whether the trip has been a joy or an ordeal, and
the answer, obviously, is both, some days more of one, some days more of the other. But
keep in mind that ordeals can be as satisfying as pleasures, and what I was thinking as
the rain began in Racine and I watched the waves of Lake Michigan tumble to the beach
was that barring unforeseen incident, I'm about a month from getting back to New York.
Maybe it was the direction of the surf, hurtling in from the east, or simply the oceanic
dimensions of the lake that made me imagine, well, the ocean. In any case, the closer I
get to home the more I'm beginning to wonder: What will I do when I get there?
Thursday, September 22, Racine, Wisconsin
The last few days I've made a loop. On Sunday, after I had my first glimpse of Lake
Michigan here in Racine, I trundled down to Chicago, where I spent two days relaxing in
a familiar environment—I lived in the city back in the 1990s. I ate well, slept late. I even
spent an evening at the theater—Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park , a Pulitzer Prize winner,
at Steppenwolf, and enjoyed dissecting it over drinks with theatergoing friends.
It was another fine hiatus from my travels—I've been giving myself quite a few breaks
lately, I know—except that I kept thinking ahead and was vexed about how to proceed.
The lake was in my way, and pretty much every way around it struck me as unpalatable,
involving passing through the congested regions in Illinois and Indiana south of Chica-
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