Days 58-59: Ann Arbor to Fenton to Sombra (Canada!)

Posted by: Arin

After getting ready in the morning, we headed to a little hole in the wall diner with one of the people from the house. It was rad, they had this thing called hippy hash that was full of feta cheese, vegetables, and tempeh. It was ideal for a vegetarian like me.

Our initial plan was to head into Detroit and take the bridge over to Canada into Windsor, but after we did some research we found that there is no way into Canada on a bike from Detroit. You can't ride over the bridge, you can't take the bus with your bike, and you can't take the ferry over either. We decided to head north to Flint and then east to Port Huron. We knew the blue water bridge was there and we wouldn't be able to ride over it, but we saw that the blue water ferry does take bikes. 

Starting to ride north was not great. The road that we thought we could take north turned out to be a major highway with no bikes allowed, so we improvised a route on the fly using our phone maps. It was hilly! Up and down and up and down. Some of the hills were close to a 20% grade, I even used my smallest 34/36 gear. After a while we pulled into a town called Fenton to get some groceries and eat dinner. We ended up making some sandwiches outside the grocery store and headed up the road. 

I spotted a credit union and decided to get some cash out. It was starting to get dark and there was a church across the street that had a good place to camp out back. We still had a little bit of time so we headed back to an ice cream place we had seen a little earlier to get some ice cream and play mini golf. I got two hole in ones and got two free mini golf passes out of it! We would have preferred a refund, but it was nice to give them away to some random people. 

*side story* I left my ATM card in the ATM and was left moneyless aside from the cash I had gotten out! The bank opened at 9am so I was determined to go in and try to get it back the next day.

The next morning we went into the bank. I explained what had happened and the situation and they showed me my card. The only thing was that they couldn't give it to me until they talked to my bank, which didn't open for another 2.5 hours. I should have saved those mini golf passes... We ended up wasting some time at a little restaurant drinking water and coffee and went back to the bank at noon. I got my card back! How crazy is that? I was stoked.

After we left the bank, I decided to look exactly where the ferry was so we could plan the best route. It turns out the blue water ferry isn't next to the blue water bridge. You know what? It was in Marine City, which is actually closer to Ann Arbor than it is to Fenton. We had spent an entire day and a half getting further away from where we needed to be. We then proceeded to ride 80-85 miles between 1 and 7pm, making it all the way to Marine City.

The ferry was easy to find and we ended up only paying one dollar for both of us to get over because the guy gave us too much change (nice). We were finally in Canada!

We didn't really know what to do or where to go once we got into the country, so we started heading north. After maybe 3-4 miles we came upon a campsite. We were tired and willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to camp there for the night. The only thing was, the campsite cost an unreasonable amount of money. It was 30+ dollars for two people on bikes. As we were leaving we started talking to some people camping there in rv's. They were super nice and let us camp on their site for the night! After we made some dinner we passed out hard.