roadtripping.

A tour of the Niagara Peninsula: proof to the innocent that bicycle camping is actually fun.

continued from page 4

After consulting our map, we took a left turn at the appropriate time and ended up on a back road which took us in a complete circle. We wandered around in the dark wilderness until we found signs of human life: a closed convenience store. Fortunately someone showed drove by and we asked for directions. As it turned out, we were exactly where we were supposed to be: at the foot of the steep climb leading to the falls. It was midnight on day three, and time for escarpment climb number two. The funny thing about these climbs is that they seem endless in the middle, but when you reach the top it seems to have taken no time at all. We rode through the little park, dark and abandoned, looking for any sign of the campsite which our map told us we would find. We couldn't see anything. We could hear the falls. We could also hear music. Greg, being a musician, instantly recognised it as Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and started singing along. Someone quite nearby was having a party. We decided to crash it. Why not? we hadn't really socialised with anyone outside of each other in days, it might be fun. And maybe it was at the campsite. Maybe it was a house party, and the host would let us use the shower! The music was so clear it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred metres away, so we listened for direction and set off.

Wwe ended up in an orchard on a gravel road, which was rough riding with little light and not much energy. We cracked open a bottle of wine and walked for a while, then greg rode off on a fact finding tour. He reached a dead end. He tried another lane (there was a maze of them) and reached a dead end with a big dog. At this point we decided we must be trespassing, so we headed for the main road. We could still here the music, but it seemed to get further away the more we rode towards it. We knew that when we reached the main road we should turn right, but doing that meant going straight downhill. Had all our climbing been in vain? but now this was a quest: we would find the party or die trying.

We couldn't hear much on the main road other than traffic, so headed off right through Vineland. Before long we heard it again, and it seemed to be getting nearer. "It's got to be that next house." But it wasn't. Nor was it the next one. It sounded so close we were sure we would be there in two minutes, but those minutes kept stretching. Periodically we stopped to get our bearings and drink some more wine. but we knew it had to be at the end of this road. Then the road curved left, we followed it and heard a sound that made our hearts sink. traffic. Big traffic. We were back at the QEW! Worse, we were back at Jordan Harbour, the place where we had gotten stuck before! We stood by the chain link fence that separated us from the highway (this was all too familiar) and looked across the water, to the source of the sound. On the other side of the bridge, across the highway, we saw a building lit with purple neon lights. It was a bar. The sound we were following was not a fun-filled party, it was a cheesy small-town bar. But what the hell, we'd come this far, it was half an hour to last call, and we could just make it if we tried.

This, of course, meant a crossing like the one we'd done on our first night out. Except on this side of the highway, instead of walking on bumpy cement, we were on loose gravel that sloped down at a forty-five degree angle and slid out from under my feet. and i had the extra burden of a bottle of wine. Keeping the bikes upright was difficult as we clung to the fence. I kept bashing my shins with my pedals. I was very grouchy, to say the least. But this was a quest. Finally the fence ended and we ran out of land, and again came the tricky and patently unsafe manoeuvre of heaving the bikes over the barrier and onto the highway. The ride along the shoulder was easier this time; we were going with the traffic, and there wasn't as much as it was almost two o'clock. When it was time to hop over the barrier again, we decided to say screw it and took the off-ramp like any other vehicles. This was when we made the joyous discovery. The music was loud, and it wasn't coming from across the highway: It was just a hundred metres away. And it was a house party.

We rode up the driveway and dismounted into what felt like paradise. This was not just a party, it was a party with two live bands in the backyard, a massive sound system, and a huge bonfire (for cooking the fifteen dozen ears of corn). Definitely memorable. We dismounted and my partner grabbed the nearest person and introduced himself.
"Hi, I'm Greg; who's our host?"
"I am. My name's Bob, would you like a beer?"
Yes!

This man has got to be the best host in the world. and the most chronically unimpressed. We told him where we were from, how we had heard the music from fifteen kilometres away, and had ridden a circuitous route to get here. He seemed to accept this as completely normal, and asked if we'd liked to have a shower. I was elated. I grabbed a dress out of Greg's panniers and jumped right in. It was Sunday night, Monday morning even, and this was my first shower since Friday. god it felt good. then it was Greg's turn. While he was showering, a woman came in to use the loo. She was shocked to hear the shower. I told her it was my boyfriend.
"Are you friends of Bob's?"
"No, but he said we could use the shower."
"Oh." She paused. "Bob's like that."
Then I told her the story of why we crashed the party. It turned out she lived in Ball's Falls; in fact, we had ridden right past her house! She thought it was the most hilarious thing she'd ever heard, and set about introducing me to people. Meanwhile, after his shower, Greg found out that the reason the music kept sounding further away the closer we got was because the police came by a couple of times for noise complaints. Go figure.

Perhaps the weirdest moment of the evening was when Bob commented on how much I look like his sister "who lives in Saudi Arabia."
"Whereabouts?"
"Riyaddh."
"What does she do there?"
"She's a nurse."
"At the King Faisal Special Hospital?" I ask. Yup. This guy's sister works at the same hospital as my cousin's husband. On the other side of the (small, small) world.

It was about five when we left; Bob offered to let us set up in his garage, but we didn't want to impose on his incredible hospitality too much, and were looking forward to the privacy of our little tent. Besides, we were mere minutes from Charles Daley park, so we rode back there and set up in almost the same place as on our first night.

continue to page 6

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