June 20th

after saying goodbye to Sarah and Aaron and their four cats, one of which lovingly clawed me a few hours before leaving on the bottom of my foot, we set out for the shore of Lake Erie so that we could follow the shoreline all day on Route 6. We stopped at a bike shop called Century Cycles to do some adjustments in a biker-intellectual setting, and they asked if they could take our picture and put it on their blog which is pretty sweet. i forget the blog's website tho hahaha. we got down to the lake and it was a beautiful, windy day along the shoreside. we stopped to go down to the water a couple of different times and went in once, even though there was a High Water Quality Advisory Level hahaha. the water is not very cold at all, it just felt beautiful and i couldn't tell it was gross.
we made it pretty quickly to Vermilion where we were stopping for the night at a warmshowers home. there was another bike tourer staying at their house too; her name is Gretchen and she is retired and doing a long solo ride, which is pretty sweet. the parents of the house are Sam and Susan, a coroner/bike and espresso aficionado and a track coach/former amazing runner who still runs for fun. they took us downtown at night for the fish festival, which attracts 100,000 people with tons of vendors and boat parades and music. we got to see one of the boat parades traveling thru the canals, and there were so many people out it was really cool.
Sam the coroner showed us pictures of people after the accidents that caused their deaths and it was pretty disturbing, it set phil and i off on a long conversation of whether we are living our lives exactly the way we want to, sounds morbid but it is a good thing to think about every once in awhile haha. sam cooked a special dish just for me because im a pain in the arse vegetarian. he is an amazing chef, we are seriously so spoiled on this trip its not even funny. amazing and large meals, super comfortable beds, hot showers every day, sightseeing with the people who know the area... absolutely ridiculous.
today (june 21st) we're headed 75 miles west to toledo and tomorrow we're staying with another WRFI-ite named Pete, and its his birthday tomorrow too! Yippee! He lives about 25 miles north of Detroit, in Rochester. But we were supposed to see another WRFI-ite in Ohio and it looks like that's not gonna work out =0( alas.