A Kazakh and an American walk into our house…

Not the start of a joke, but the way our Thursday evening started this week. In a previous post, I wrote about a Czech cyclist who’d come to stay with us through Warm Showers, an accommodations network for cyclists. We’d signed up as hosts near the end of the 2019 cycling season, but by the spring of 2020 everything had shut down. A few weeks ago, Ray reactivated our listing and changed our location from Ottawa to Brighton.

This week two cyclists separately got in touch to request an overnight stay, both for the same night. We made up the bed in the guest room and the futon in the upstairs loft (which we needn’t have worried about as they slept in their sleeping bags). Talgat is from Kazakhstan and has been cycling around the world for years now. As he put it, he’s given up his worldly goods to explore the world…though I think he said it more eloquently than that. Adam is from New Jersey and is spending three weeks cycling around Lake Ontario.

Both of them do a lot of wild camping but use Warm Showers occasionally, which gives them access to laundry, wifi, and, of course, a warm shower. It also gives Ray the opportunity to pick their brains about long-distance cycling. How far do you travel in a day? What speed do you go? How much weight do you carry? What app do you use to plan your route? I expect it won’t be long before he collects enough data to confidently head off on his own long-distance cycle, hopefully something closer to the 3-week trek Adam is doing than the multi-year adventure Talgat is on.

The morning after their arrival was rainy and both of them accepted our offer to take a rest day and stay another night. Talgat was a good ambassador for Kazakhstan, telling us about the kindness of the people and the beauty of the land. I just read on wikipedia that it’s the largest land-locked country in the world, the largest muslim-majority country by land area, and the ninth-largest country in the world. I had no idea. Talgat spoke some English but he’d use google translate to communicate more complex ideas, which was very effective.

Early this morning, Talgat headed west towards Toronto and Adam headed east. They were both interesting and considerate guests. Talgat shared some Kazakhstan chocolate with us and Adam thanked us about 87 times during the course of his stay. It will be interesting to see how many more visitors we get over the coming months.

When the derecho passed through southern Ontario last weekend, resulting in at least a dozen deaths, Nick was canoe camping in the wilds of Algonquin Park with a group of high school friends. I’d read of one death from a fallen tree in the Park, but we didn’t know if the storm had reached the area they were in. It’s a big park. We had no way of reaching him, so we were very relieved to get a text Monday afternoon saying that they’d been oblivious to the news of the storm and had only had a bit of rain.