21.4 mi / 9.5 mph / 1354 ft. climbing
Home: Ken’s House

On our family-visiting extravaganza a year ago, we arrived to Chicago on Amtrak, and then rode the rails to Rett’s Dad’s in New York before returning to Chicago to fly to South America. We rode ourselves to the train on every one of those legs. So it felt strange this time that we didn’t do a ride-to-train at all (or even any ride toward downtown Chicago). For our departure, it was warm enough for a ride to get us all gross before getting on the train, so Dad and Mom were kind enough to take us all to Union Station in their pickup truck and say our farewells from there.

We did, however, ride the 21 uphill (and downhill, and uphill) miles from the Syracuse train station to Rett’s Dad’s house in Skaneateles, and while we had managed a few day rides of similar length in the Chicago area, our bodies loudly protested that we hadn’t done a proper loaded ride in nearly four months. Conveniently, the Finger Lakes region is an ideal place to get ourselves back into biking shape, and our first ride was a good start.

Periods of hot weather, smoky air, and a week-long period when we were joined by Rett’s sister Sophie meant that we didn’t get out on those empty country roads as much as we would have liked, but we still managed to circumnavigate three Finger Lakes (Skaneateles, Owasco, and Otisco), and somehow even found roads that had remained undiscovered in all our previous years of summer riding, some that probably see less than 10 cars a day.

At the house, we dropped into our usual routines of morning work (Ken in the garden/yard/fence-building, me on the bikes or helping on the house, Rett doing strength training), afternoon rest (with Ken and Rett often making music together, me doing genealogy research), and evenings putting together dinner and watching the nightly movie (we ended with a string of Marilyn Monroes films). One big project that Ken was glad to get done, from both a practical and thematic perspective, was getting his winter firewood stacked with help from his daughters. His wood-burning stove is his house’s primary source of heat, so the four cords of wood delivered (perhaps 15,000 lbs.!) burned a lot of human energy in preparation for burning its chemical energy.

After a year of acquiring South American customs, I was curious to see how long it would take to lose them upon our return to the United States. The habit that I assumed would be hardest to break was my practice of building a neat stack of my used, folded toilet paper on the bathroom floor before disposing of it in the trash can (toilet paper is not flushed in the countries we visited). Surprisingly, one absent-minded morning six weeks after returning was the only time I caught myself doing it. I guess the context clues must somehow be strong enough to switch my brain seamlessly back to its much-longer-term habit. Similarly, I haven’t found myself saying “permiso” (instead of “excuse me”) every time I squeeze past someone in a grocery store (though Rett occasionally will respond to someone with “Si”, it seems when it’s a a person asking a question in English with a foreign accent).

The hot weather was the first time we’ve had to deal with genuine heat after many lucky summers in Skaneateles. A single window-unit air conditioner is the house’s only cooling source, so I applied some styrofoam panels and Tyvek shades to the two large skylights in our second-floor sleeping space, and with help from plenty of fans, the four of us in the small house somehow managed the 4-day heat wave without murdering each other.