After the Mickelson, I continued my trek eastward out of the Black Hills and across southern South Dakota and into the very northeast corner of Nebraska. Winding alongside the mighty Missouri River, roughly following the path of Lewis & Clark in the opposite direction, driving along the Outlaw Trail Scenic Byway Highway 12, into the heartland of the US. Yet another corner of the American landscape that is vast, beautiful and very lightly traveled. I consider myself lucky to have experienced even just a tiny bit of it during this adventure.

After a night at a friend's cabin in Crofton on the Missouri River at a point that is so wide the locals call it a lake, my path crossed into Iowa with its endless fields of corn dotted now with huge wind turbines. Since high school I have been a proponent of renewable energy and the huge wind fields of Iowa and their potential to change the energy landscape reinforce my belief in the potential of wind and solar. I could not help reminiscing about my RAGBRAI (the Register’s Annual Great Ride Across Iowa - an epic annual cycling event that started in 1973 and just completed its 51st iteration this summer) experience of July 2014, cycling from the Missouri to the Mississippi across the great state in the company of my friend Joe from Detroit.

After riding together often in Phoenix after my move there in 2012, Joe invited me to join the club he was instrumental in founding, the Chicago Urban Bicycle Society or CUBS - a part of the RAGBRAI legend for decades - for the 2014 edition of the event. On the 2014 ride, Joe marked his 24th consecutive completion of the storied event. RAGBRAI is a special event that every cyclist should experience at least once from my experience riding it with Joe and the CUBS that year. The CUBS are just one of a large number of cycling clubs formed specifically to ride and fundraise during RAGBRAI which has a very special feel, like a country fair that is rolling from town to town across the state.

Moreover, it is yet another example among many of how cycling and meeting other cyclists on the bike have enriched my adult life. Shortly after moving to Phoenix for a new job, I caught a glimpse of Joe returning home from a ride a few doors down on a Specialized road bike in full kit. I simply walked over and introduced myself by starting a conversation about cycling, knowing that we shared that common interest. That led to a ride together, then another and within a few outings I had someone to ride with even though I had moved there only weeks before and knew no one outside of my job!

That is the power of the bike and the cyclist community that I have experienced so many times, and have come to rely on for meeting new and interesting people leading to many unexpected and memorable adventures: RAGBRAI 2014 among many, many others too numerous to list here, but key to my having the opportunity to ride much of this country in the company of great people. Believe in the power of the bicycle and cycling to greatly expand your network of friends and opportunities for experiences, as well as increasing your VO2 Max!

The miles flew by a bit faster on this traverse across the state however, and I crossed the Mississippi southeast of Davenport and into Illinois. I made a brief stop in Valparaiso, Indiana, just outside of the Chicagoland area to catch up with some friends that I had not seen in 30 years. That is another element of these adventures, having the opportunity to see folks and reconnect with them is something that likely would not happen otherwise. It was great catching up with Francis and Lisa. Francis is a fellow adventurer on two wheels, and it was good sharing a story or two of trails ridden and memorable experiences on the road.

As I have alluded earlier, I have been very lucky to have established and cultivated friendships, some on the bike and otherwise across the US and beyond. Especially in this phase of life, having that network to reach out to, and of course to have reach out to me, when passing by or through is a real privilege, one that I treasure. On this particular trip that network of friends on which I can rely turned out to be invaluable beyond measure, as I will outline in future posts.

After the overnight in Valparaiso I headed further north through Michigan toward Detroit and the Ambassador Bridge to Canada. One of the key objectives of this trip east was a stop on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie which I had wanted to visit for sometime. My mother's parents, my maternal grandparents both immigrated to the US from Canada in the late 1920s, immediately after my grandfather completed medical school at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. My grandmother grew up near London in a very small agricultural community on the shore of the Great Lake Erie, and her upbringing and ancestors have been of particular interest to me for as long as I can remember.

How my grandmother's family arrived there on the western shore of Lake Erie was a story that was recounted many times as I grew up in close proximity to my grandparents. My grandmother's ancestors arrived in the new world from Ireland many years prior to the Revolutionary War. However, some twenty five years after Great Britain formally recognized the Independence of the United States, my fifth Great-grandfather decided that perhaps the new Republic and renouncing the British Crown in particular was not for him, and he and his young family set out on an adventure of their own to join a loyalist colony that had been established in what was called at the time, Upper Canada. The colony, established by Colonel John Talbot on land granted to him by the Crown in 1800 had as its center the Port Talbot settlement, about one hour’s drive south of London and further west of Port Stanley on the lake shore. Port Talbot and the larger community of mostly Irish settlers that flourished around it was considered one of the most prosperous of the time, attributed in part to the hard-working loyalist settlers that were attracted to it by the promise of a grant of 50 acres of land.

The arrival of my ancestors in Upper Canada though has always been the part of the story that held the most interest for me, no doubt because of the adventure aspect. As the story goes, my fifth great-grandfather John Pearce, born in Rhode Island in 1777 at the outset of the American Revolution, accompanied by his wife and 3 eldest children along with two other families and a hired man for a total of 13 souls in the party, set out from near Erie Pennsylvania on the shore of Lake Erie opposite Upper Canada early in the summer of 1809. All of their belongings and most of the members of the party were loaded into an open boat which they rowed along the eastern shore of the Great Lake toward and eventually past Buffalo New York, keeping close to the shoreline on their way toward Port Talbot on the western shore and the promised land grant for settlers. One member of the party walked along the shore driving their cattle. Each night they would camp along the shore, except for the hired man that slept on the boat that was moored a short distance from shore.

The straight-line distance of that journey from Erie to Buffalo, then onto what was Port Talbot where the Talbot Creek flows into the lake is about 205 miles. Given the route they had to take, their mode of travel and the nature of the lake shoreline, the distance traveled was significantly longer and fraught with challenges considering the terrain and wilderness state of that territory at the time. The journey took over a month.

As the story has been told, on one particularly rough and stormy night the hired man called to the party on shore that the boat was taking on water and was breaking up! The men onshore waded out to the boat, emptied its contents - their only possessions other than the herd animals - into the water. Luckily,any of the items floated and washed up on shore and were collected by the rest of the party. However, with the boat damaged and far from their destination and other people, they had no choice but to pull the boat up onshore and attempt repairs themselves. In the search for materials to use for the repair, the wreckage of a boat was found several miles up the lake shore. The men burned that wreckage to retrieve usable nails to make repairs to their own boat, and their journey to Port Talbot continued. As a last challenge, the party had to portage their boat and belongings up and over Long Point, a substantial peninsula that was deemed easier to go over then around, although such a portage over the so-called Carrying Place presented its own challenges.

Purportedly the first families to arrive from the United States to Colonel Talbot's new Loyalist colony, written accounts of their arrival state that the Colonel himself welcomed them “especially as they had with them their looms and spinning wheels for the manufacture of woolen and linen goods, showing that they meant to hue-out a living for themselves.” As if the journey they had just made to get there didn't speak enough to their self-reliance and sufficiency.

Upon receiving his grant of 50 acres of land on the lake shore, the elder John Pearce established his homestead in the latter part of 1809. Seeing that homestead that still stands today and other relics of that settlement on Lake Erie named Tyrconnell and came to be known as “Little Ireland” was the objective of my visit and a primary stop for this trip. Although it was part of the family lore, within 5 hours drive of my hometown, and directly across Lake Erie from the college I attended in Fredonia NY, I had never visited Tyrconnell. Most of the family had left the area by the late 1960s early in my childhood.

Prior to departing Phoenix I had reserved a campsite in the Rondeau Provincial Park, a bit further down the western lake shore from the village of Tyrconnell. Rondeau is the second oldest Provincial Park in Canada, established in 1894. I was very pleasantly surprised by the park and campground, finding a number of gravel trails to ride on the spit of land that makes up the park. Rondeau has several miles of sandy beach on Lake Erie on one side, and a spectacular bay on the other. Despite my stay falling on the Labour Day holiday weekend with a full campground, I was treated to a particularly peaceful and enjoyable stay. I was struck by the friendliness of my campsite neighbors and had the pleasure joining up with a local cyclist I met on the road for a tour of some of the trails which were very beautiful and fun to ride. Rondeau is a favorite among birders due to its unique habitat that has been preserved.

After a good night's sleep and a couple hours on the trails within the Rondeau park, I broke camp and headed up the Talbot Trail, the road originally established in the earliest days of the settlement and key to its prosperity, to visit the 1809 John Pearce homestead and other sites that remain on or near the original parcels granted upon the arrival of the thirteen original settlers in 1809. One of the last direct descendants to own the family lands on and near the original settlement, John E Pearce, acquired and then donated property to the Province of Ontario for preservation in 1955, and the Province established the John E Pearce Provincial Park in 1957. The small park is located on the lake shore, and includes a cliff that rises 100 feet from the lake shore (unfortunately access to the cliff now fenced off due to erosion/instability). Within the Provincial Park is the Backus House, a brick Georgian style house that was constructed in 1850 and childhood home to my third great-grandmother, born in that year to the couple that built the home on land gifted to them by one of the original thirteen settlers from her original grant. The house now serves as the Backus-Page museum, maintaining period room settings and grounds that reflect the history of the settlement, the original settlers and their descendants. Also nearby is the St Peters Anglican Church, founded in 1827 and the nearby church cemetery with the John Pearce family plot that serves as the final resting place for many generations of my ancestors that lived around Tyrconnell, perched on the cliffs high above the western shore of Lake Erie.

It was a beautiful early autumn day, and of course I rode my bike on my tour of this beautiful area and the homesteads that my ancestors wrested from the wilderness over 200 years ago. As pioneers they faced many challenges and they did not end with their arduous journey to Upper Canada I have found in my research. Very soon after their arrival, the War of 1812 broke out and according to one written account, “their hardships and privations began.” The American army came across the border and went down the Talbot Road in 1813 wreaking havoc on Little Ireland, burning Colonel Talbot's mill. In the next year those forces returned and the Port Talbot settlement was burned to the ground and never rebuilt. The short war included three US invasions of its neighbor to the north, what is Ontario today. Despite the belief by some in the US at the time that the conquest would be relatively easy and the settlers in the British-held territory would gladly become part of the US, each of the invasions was repelled. Canadians I have learned regard the war as a heroic defense against their much larger neighbor, and a formative moment in Canada's emergence as an independent nation. Most Americans in my experience know little of the war of 1812, with the exception of the few that recall that the poem that provided the lyrics of the US National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, was composed after the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore during that short War, in September 1814.

John Pearce was a member of the militia and called upon to defend his country in that conflict alongside the Canadian and British forces. He was a veteran of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, considered one of the bloodiest of the war fought in the summer of 1814 between an invading American army and a British and Canadian army near present day Niagara Falls Ontario. Pearce was a participant in a skirmish in which the horses pulling artillery in his unit were killed before they could be unhitched from the cannons. The artillery pieces were taken by the invading Americans, then retaken by the British and Canadian forces, then taken finally by the Americans in a fierce engagement during the larger battle according to family records. Luckily for me, he survived that battle and continued service in the war that ended essentially in a draw in 1815. He and his wife welcomed a son in 1818, also named John, who is my fourth great-grandfather and my direct descendant to the original settler and Canadian veteran of the War of 1812.

Having the privilege of riding a bicycle on a small part of the land which my ancestors settled, seeing for myself some of what they built and left behind in what became a bountiful center of agriculture and commerce was moving for me. Typically I tend to focus on the here and now, and by no means am of the genealogical sort but this physical reconnection with this branch of my roots added some very memorable moments to this particular adventure.

Unfortunately though as I was leaving Tyrconnell, I received news that my mother, my direct connection to that place, was in severe physical distress. Although she had been ill for sometime, as I left on this adventure she appeared to be doing fine. That was not the case however as I was leaving Tyrconnell. So instead of being able to recount to her the experiences that day in the place we shared a special connection to, I learned instead of her current condition becoming seriously grave. Luckily my wife Maria and son Jacob could be by her side, but obviously that news resulted in me a sense of concern and helplessness that became all consuming as I continued my journey back into the US at Buffalo and toward my intended destination on the southern Maine coast.