At Last, The Great Lakes

I've reached Lake Ontario at Sodus Point. I have poor, intermittent
phone signal here, so I will attempt to post from the phone.

It was an amazingly easy ride. The perfunctory accident came in the
form of a pannier falling off. The rest was just too easy. When I was
passing through Wolcott--the ONLY village of any size today--I checked
out the pizza places, but, finding them too expensive, continued
onward and discovered a spot where I got more than I could eat, and
took the rest with me and ate it as dinner. The check? $2.49.

I've don't know if I'll ever grow up. Hundreds of miles ago, in the
Berkshires, I couldn't find my tent stakes. In Utica, Krista and
Howard took me to a store where instead, I gleefully bought four
enormous, extremely sharp spikes. I wanted to run around and stick
them into stuff, but when the time came to leave, the question arose
of how to pack them. They were sharp enough to puncture any container.
We found a way of taping the tips to make them behave. Then I found my
old stakes.

In Syracuse, I went to the store and bought almost exclusively food
that made me happy as a kid. The first day, I ate a whole box of Teddy
Grahams. It gave me a slight stomachache. I didn't care. The next day
I ate an entire box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It gave me a bigger
stomachache. I didn't care.

Sometimes being a kid just makes me happy, though the stuff I end up
doing as an unstoppable adult is stuff my mother would never have
permitted.
Eating an entire box of anything, for one thing. This trip, for another.

When looking at Sodus Point on a map, I, the east-coast boy, pictured
something like Cape Cod. When I arrived, I was surprised at how
run-down it was, and how empty, in the middle of tourist season. I met
Caroline, who lives right on the water, and asked what I could give
her in return for pitching a tent on her property. She said $10. I
liked the sound of that.

I wanted to write more and organize it better, but the phone is not
making this fun for me.