Alright. I've been on the road a few days now. Things are better than I could have hoped. Inspiration is around every bend in the road! My first night was rough. I got caught in that huge thunderstorm and had to camp out in a thorn bush for the night. Soggy and bloodied but still undeterred I stumbled out of the bush with the first light and got on my bike. Small town after small town went by, each amounting to little more than a general store and a cluster of houses. I crossed the ontario border and into farm country, stopped to talk to the little round rolly-polly country folk and ate fresh produce the whole way. By the end of the day I was in Alexandria, a big town in these parts. I met a 67 year old man who was an environmental fanatic. He had turned his house into a recycling depot and his back yard into a composting system. He pedalled around on his little bike all day collecting recyclables and "dumpster diving" to salvage what other people considered garbage, but which he could make some use of. The whole house was full of salvaged things, the floor had collapsed from the weight of them to the earth below (no basement thank goodness). He had set up a system of step ladders to navigate the collapsed floor with his tiny little 67-year-old footsteps. After several lectures about the environment he took me to the basement of an insurance company that let him cook meals there, and we had a salvaged dinner. (I believe I had spaghetti with a lovely sauce of McDonald's sweet and sour sauce) We made our way back to his house/recycling depot, picking up every scrap of paper along the way and he let me sleep on a salvaged bed and read some salvaged newspapers to go to sleep by. In the morning he showed me the coal cathedral where the bishop used to live and finally let me go after I finally convinced him I would not stay on to steward to take over the local organic agriculture farm. I made a long ride to the town of Kemptville where a gas station let me camp in the little wooded area on their property. After hiding my gear in the bush I decided to explore the local tavern. It appears that in ontario, young people do not go to bars. The clientelle were all over 50, so I tucked myself away in a corner and wrote. The waittress caught my eye and I started a conversation with her. Her name was Lindsey. I half jokingly invited her to a bowl of soup at my lovely gas-station hideaway. To my shock and surprise she accepted, so I waited for her to finish her shift. She drove me back to my site and we had a lovely hot chocolate in the gas station parking lot. After parting ways, I realixed I had not given her any contact information, so I went to bed disappointed. When I woke up in the morning, I decided I would try to find her and invite her to breakfast. I went back to the bar and asked if they knew where she lived. (She had taken me to her house briefly the night before and had invited me to return in the morning, but I could not find it. Damn memory.) The bartender called her for me and she invited me to her place and gave me directions. I got there in no time and she made me an incredible breakfast. We talked and then her mother came home and invited me to stay the night. After a little while I accepted her generous and sincere offer. Well, I tell you, I've never eaten so well in my life! They must have been the most generous people in the world. I suspect they would have given me the entire contents of the house if I could carry it on my bike. Lindsey's father came home, thirsty for a beer to quench the pwerful thirst he'd acquired working in the heat of the local foundry. They smoked pot on the porch and told me about the town as the sun went down. Lindsey went to work again and I followed her, but left the pub soon from boredom. I can't say much for the friday-nightlife in Kemptville, I'm afraid. I went back to Lindsey's house and went to sleep in her bed. In a few hours she joined me and slept next to me till afternoon. I left that wonderful family with a heartfelt thank you and their best wishes. Leaving Lindsey with a peck on the cheek, I got back on the road. I didn't bike long that day, having left late. Also, the heat had become unbearable which cut the distance I could travel in half. I set up camp just outside a little tourist-trap town called Merrickville. Though it was very pretty, and the tourists told me how friendly the locals were, I found them cold and uninviting, and thoroughly penny-pinching. So much for tourist towns. Their hospitality was nothing compared to the real small-town hospitality I had just experienced. I got back on the road with no regrets the next morning. Well, the next place I stopped was Perth. I camped in the "Last duel" park, where two men had shot each other over a woman some 100 years ago. It was the last duel-related fatality in canada. Apparently, both men were in love with the same woman, and settled their dispute with single shot pistols. The one man was killed on the spot, and the other crawled to her doorstep and died there. That's as close to the real story as I got. This sleepy little town went to bed at 8:00pm. After that, the locals disappeared and the pubs were closed! One single pub stayed open later, to the late hour of 9:00pm. I went there and had a lemonade and met a delightful man named Ray. He was a storyteller, an ex-newfoundland minister who had been booted from the church because he preached that the people should read the bible themselves and come to their own conclusions. Blasphemous! Now he regaled me with tales and jokes and general good cheer until the bar closed. I mentioned to him my lack of reading material, that every bookstore I arrived at was closed, so he offered me some of the books he was going to give away. I took a couple of books of the short writings of Thoreau and a book about Jung. After talking for a while, and being declared a fellow member of the church of the peripheral-visionary, we parted ways. He left me with "I'll probably see you in prison some day!". Now I'm back on the road, where I finally found a place to access the internet. I am in a local continuing education and employment center that offers public internet access, where I am very happy to escape the still unbearable heat. I'm a couple of kilometers outside of Charbot lake, whose shore will soon have a tiny green tent on it for the night.