23/06/10 Essex to Monroe

  Highway 3 is the worst road ever. It's a heavy truck traffic road, where cars go 100km/h with no shoulder. 

We didn't really have a choice so we hit the road after a good garden hose shower in the backyard of our hosts. When we got to Windsor we finally found a great bike shop with very competent mecanos Ambassador Bicycles. There was nothing wrong with my bike finally, just a bump in the tire. But I can live with that. More importantly we learned that we could not cross the Windsor-Detroit border by bike. 

So we tried to take the tunnel bus to get to Detroit but, bikes are only allowed in bike bags! All buses are equipped with bike racks, but it's illegal to use them. Great!

So we ended up having to dismount our bikes and put them in a taxi. We got to the other side without any problem and got attacked by a man working in the border office:

Where are you going?

What are you doing?

There's a tornado coming.

You cannot ride your bike through Detroit.

Especially you, the girl, you shouldn't be biking here.

 I'll tell you where to go and you just ride ride. You never stop, you just ride your bike until you're out of here. 

And blablabla start of the scaring campaign.

Detroit is the not the most welcoming town I've seen, with burned down apartment block, rows of car on flat tires or on milk crates and the absence of people walking in the streets, especially as we got to the western end, but it's not that bad. During day time, if you know where you're going, we felt safe.

So we went trough Detroit and kept going and we could see the weather was turning bad. So we stopped and asked this man if we could camp on his lawn. He was a bit in a state of panic and told us there was a tornado coming and we should not be staying outside and eventually he just put our bikes and his pick-up and drove us to a motel! You have to stay there. We heard the sirens twice in the city. The wind and the rain was pretty bad, but it wasn't really a tornado, just a big storm. The tornado was the only subject on all the TV channels.

Distance: 85 km