These New Englanders are crazy about their history, of course. Every village has a marker about its own Revolutionary General. Yesterday we rode through Dunbarton, the hometown of General John Stark, an admirable man indeed.

But today we passed a memorial to Hannah Dustin. Hannah was carried away by Indians and taken to an island. But with her 10-year-old compatriot, she killed all the Indians, scalped them, and escaped back to home ground.

Don't mess with Hannah Dustin!

Well, Nancy kept insisting on finding those colors, so we just kept heading north and more north until we went into Canada. So our original route is nothing like what we've done. We followed up Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont into Quebec, and now will come back down through Vermont to (hopefully) catch our plane in a week.

They just never stop spoiling us.

As we rode south in Quebec on a gloomy, rainy afternoon, we decided it was time to find a place to camp, and saw a sign pointing to a campground on Lake Memphremagog. So we rode in toward it, but like most campgrounds this time of year, it was abandoned. There were some campers remaining there, but no people. So we rode around looking for a good spot.

But there was somebody there! A late-season fisherman, Pierre, a French-Canadian with nearly no English. But he could say "Hongree?" and offer us the world's best minnestrone. (Turns out he's a chef at a nearby ski area). And he could say "Sleep here?" and point into his spare camper, all set up. And he fed us in the morning his wonderful French toast with Quebec maple syrup.

If you're ever depressed, go for a bike tour.

We're about to forget how to camp.

We made it to Manchester safely, packed up our bikes at the bike store, shipped them off FedEx Ground (hope they get home OK) and then mailed ourselves home today. Made it just fine - My son Mark picked us up at the airport.

Now that we have easy internet access we'll post more articles and pictures in the next day or so.

Well, we're home and settling in to an altered reality. The cat is really lonely and there are lots of things to catch up on.

Miles: We went 691 miles on our big loop, didn't do the loop we planned since we went up into Canada and came back on the Northeast side of Vermont. Our biggest day was a 65-miler, and the shortest a 23-mile day. The average day was about 43 miles.

Route: The actual route is now posted, and you can see that we didn't go west of Vermont's fabulous Northeast Kingdom, but we did go up into Quebec as far as Magog.

Finances: Our financial goal was to live on $40/day ($20/person/day). We rode 17 days. The actual numbers came out to $42/day, but we had many days that were far higher. And all of the very low days were a result of other kind people (family and strangers) taking care of us. So our actual numbers probably weren't real. We probably need to budget at least $30/day/person for North American touring, perhaps more. You can compare the finances to the writeup from our Northwest and Mexico trips. There were many days where we might have spent $20 for a campground had some kind person not taken us in. And although we paid for two nights in B&B's, we had many other comfortable nights with old and new friends. We stayed 10 nights in people's homes. Only 5 of those nights were with relatives!

Weight: We didn't gain any weight and didn't lose any weight. It was pretty cushy riding, low miles and lots of good food.

Bike Maintenance: We should have had our bikes in a little better condition. I should have put a new chain on mine before starting. Nancy needed new derailleur cables - one actually broke near Gorham, New Hampshire. And I had a freehub break into little pieces. I probably couldn't have anticipated or prevented that. Next time: New chains, cables, and housing before starting out.

Cool people: I don't think we could ever expect (or should expect in the future) to run into that many kind people that would be so generous. But it's a treat to see it. We spent 10 nights in people's homes, and five of those were with people we'd never met before, who just invited us in off the street!

Weather: We had fairly good weather. Lots more easy days than hard. I suppose that on some of the 3-4 really rainy days we were wishing for it to stop. It did suddenly get significantly colder the day we hit Colebrook, New Hampshire, and it's nice that we had such easy accomodations after that point (we didn't camp any more after that!)

We are preparing for departure! Leaving Denver June 1, starting the flight north on June 2, and starting the ride south from Inuvik on June 9! My brother Collin and his wife Marisa of Parkwest Air are going to fly us up there in their Cessna! And they're leading a group of 10-12 more planes. We start from Grand Junction, Colorado on June 3.

Below this posting is a map of the first part of our route and here is the same map as a pdf and as a large jpeg - click to see all sizes (with all the detail).

We leave from Inuvik, which is in Northwest Territories, but we cross over the line into the Yukon pretty quickly. We ride down to Dawson City (450 miles on a dirt road with very little services). From Dawson City we go to Whitehorse, then do a little loop to Haines and Skagway in Alaska, then to the south.


You might like the wonderful flash animations on http://www.experienceyukon.ca/, with the "interactive map".

Randy has a regular Specialized Stumpjumper mountain bike with the heavy-duty Old Man Mountain racks and Ortlieb "Classic Roller" panniers. Total weight of the stuff in the bags: between 40 and 60 pounds, depending on how much food and water we're carrying.

For the Dempster Highway section we're planning to carry about seven days' worth of dehydrated food to get to Eagle Plains (which we estimate to be 5 days) and then we'll pick up another 7 days' food from the Eagle Plains Hotel - we'll ship it there in advance. Normally we don't use dehydrated food, because it's expensive, hard to get in most places, and probably not as good for you as real food. However, since the Dempster is 450 miles long with no services, and since it's at the beginning of our trip, we decided to go with the dehydrated stuff from Mountain House which we actually like quite a lot.

Nancy did an enormous amount of research on bear issues for this trip, and of course she's still concerned about it. She found that these Ursack bags were the best combination of weight and value. The only problem we'll have in the treeless north part of the trip is figuring out how to secure them.

We usually carry 3-4 of these Playpus 2-liter bladders. Most of the time they're empty (and light! and compact!). But they when you need them they're there to haul water. We can camp the night, fix dinner and breakfast, and start riding the next morning with about 6 liters of water, although that's pretty tight. When we know we're going to have a "dry camp" at night, we load up with water so we can do it.

We've also ordered a new item from Ortlieb: A 10-liter water bag (with shower fitting!). We'll use it for unfiltered water. It can be used to haul water before it's filtered with our Pur.
(Katadin) Hiker water filter.