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Introduction: Prologue to a three-thousand mile bicycle journey ...
After my longest and most successful season of training and racing to date, I made my way from Denver International Airport, on August 10th, 2018, to a faraway island, many miles from the mainland, to Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge in Penobscot Bay, Maine, where I spent a few days with old and new friends, including many Atlantic Puffins. My idea for this autumn adventure was to reunite with old friends from my days working as an education intern (1993-1994), a seabird conservation biologist (1995-2001), and graduate student (2000-2005) in the Gulf of Maine and also to add a bit of my latest passion to the trip: some sort of bicycle tour, length and exactly where I would go to be negotiated and perhaps finalized as I sipped coffee, socialized, scanned the land and sea for birds, and otherwise decelerated on Seal Island for a delicious week of living at a casual pace. I want to thank my friend Christina Maranto for encouraging me, inviting me actually, to join her on Seal Island with her 5-yr old son, Chase. Part of the season's research crew, to our surprise, stayed on the island and overlapped with us, it was a pleasure to exist for most of a week on far flung Seal Island in their company.
During the summer of 1992, I was not only attending, I graduated in 1994 with a Bachelors degree in Biology, but also working for North Adams State College (now Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts) as a laborer, cutting grass, spreading paint, and otherwise getting first-hand knowledge of how a few state workers maximized their pay and benefits without doing much as far as work. My co-workers literally had places that they knew they could hide from view and sleep away hours on the clock. And when it came to the real sweaty work, the work that had to be done because it was in full-view of the higher-ups, such as cutting grass all day under a hot sun, my supervisors were quick to allocate those tasks to me. Eventually I would develop a strong disapproval of the fairness and honesty of the environment that I was working in. But in hindsight, I can easily see that my elevated emotional state actually provided a critical motivation that would inspire me to raise my voice and in doing so launch my adult life, a life apart from the loving, supervision of one or both of my parents, a life that continues to unfold today.
During the same summer, I signed-up for a one-credit course, Hiking in the Berkshires. As a child, I was very fond of the outdoors, curious, adventurous, often wandering wide-eyed into swamps and marshes by foot or a combination of foot and bicycle. Behind the department of public works in my hometown of Franklin, Massachusetts, I can easily recall a friend, Charlie Bean, and I innocently swiping nearby scaffolding planks and dropping these, long axis, one board at a time farther and farther out into the cattails ... READ MORE.
During the summer of 1992, I was not only attending, I graduated in 1994 with a Bachelors degree in Biology, but also working for North Adams State College (now Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts) as a laborer, cutting grass, spreading paint, and otherwise getting first-hand knowledge of how a few state workers maximized their pay and benefits without doing much as far as work. My co-workers literally had places that they knew they could hide from view and sleep away hours on the clock. And when it came to the real sweaty work, the work that had to be done because it was in full-view of the higher-ups, such as cutting grass all day under a hot sun, my supervisors were quick to allocate those tasks to me. Eventually I would develop a strong disapproval of the fairness and honesty of the environment that I was working in. But in hindsight, I can easily see that my elevated emotional state actually provided a critical motivation that would inspire me to raise my voice and in doing so launch my adult life, a life apart from the loving, supervision of one or both of my parents, a life that continues to unfold today.
During the same summer, I signed-up for a one-credit course, Hiking in the Berkshires. As a child, I was very fond of the outdoors, curious, adventurous, often wandering wide-eyed into swamps and marshes by foot or a combination of foot and bicycle. Behind the department of public works in my hometown of Franklin, Massachusetts, I can easily recall a friend, Charlie Bean, and I innocently swiping nearby scaffolding planks and dropping these, long axis, one board at a time farther and farther out into the cattails ... READ MORE.
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Chapter 1: A social tour of the mid-Maine coast
From the enviable vantage of the Nash House at the end of Keene Neck Road, I sipped coffee, absorbed sunshine on the front deck overlooking the narrows, and contemplated my commitment. It was the morning of August 20th, 2018, departure day from Bremen township on the Pemaquid Peninsula, part of the middle-coastal region of Maine. What lay ahead ... READ MORE.
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Chapter 2: 63 miles of gravel on Stud Mill Road
One half of my genetic story, involving a great grandfather of French descent, the other was a Scottish immigrant that settled in Kansas, may have included the nearby town of Waterville, Maine. Henri Breton, his wife, and two children certainly immigrated from France to Canada then, within a couple of years or less, migrated to and settled somewhere in northern Maine. That much I know from letter correspondence with my grandfather, Joseph Breton, before he died ... READ MORE.
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Chapter 3: An out-n-back tour of New Brunswick
On a hill high above the St. Croix River, the border between the United States and Canada in this remote corner of Maine and New Brunswick, I stirred from my last phase of light sleep after an evening, no doubt, spent dreaming, in REM, of my adventure on Stud Mill Road the previous day. I was nestled quite comfortably in one of two available beds (for just 40$ per night) in Ray's AirBnB, less than a mile as the crow flies from Saint Stephen, New Brunswick. The GPS record of my ride, captured using Strava's smartphone app, suggests I departed Ray's home at 7:55 am on 27 August, my habit, roughly 8 am, on bicycle tours to date. I often ride until about six post meridian ... READ MORE.
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Chapter 4: The Bay of Fundy to the Atlantic
As much as I try to avoid commitments on my adventures, preferring instead to fly-free whenever possible, occasionally a commitment arises by design or necessity that requires me to be somewhere on a particular day, and perhaps time as well, for a rendezvous with some-one, or some-thing, such as a ferry boat. This tour had more than it's share of commitments, much more than any of my previous explorations by boot, boat, motorcycle, or bicycle. Most involved friends ... READ MORE.
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Chapter 5: Derek of Guysborough, Nova Scotia
Amidst the privileged comforts of Lavi and Saranyan's home in the suburbs of Halifax, I dreamed of unfriendly dogs and remote dirt tracks as Planet Earth peacefully transitioned, in the exceptional loneliness of outer space, into a position in our solar system that signaled a new month on a calendar familiar to you and I and first proposed by the Council of Trent in 1545, when Pope Gregory the XIII served as mankind's primary liaison to God. When I woke it was the 1st of September, 2018, a day closer to an impending autumn but for now the very best, at 44.65 degrees north latitude ... READ MORE.
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Chapter 6: Newfoundland and Labrador by Bike and Thumb
Coming soon ...
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Chapter 7: Blanc-Sablon to Rimouski by Ship
Coming soon ...
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Chapter 8: Quebec City, the heart of Wonderland
Coming soon ...
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Chapter 9: South to Vermont and Massachusetts
Coming soon ...
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Chapter 10: Closing the Great Circle
Coming soon ...
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