The American frontier was declared closed in 1890. Nonsense!

This one’s a bit of a doozy, so I’ll be splitting it up. Enjoy.

I think I left you after the organic farm, so we’ll pick it up there. Did I tell you about the toilet situation? They compost their waste, so we had to sprinkle woodchips on our poop. That was fun. I liked the farm a lot. They definitely put us to work, but it was a good experience. I told you about that already, though, so time to move on.

We headed to Buffalo, New York from there. Julia’s aunt, who is generous and all sorts of fun, hosted us for a night. She greeted us with one of the biggest boxes of pizza I’ve ever seen, of which we didn’t eat half. There was also a mountain of buffalo wings. Buffalo wings in Buffalo; I can cross that off the list. We got laundry, Internet, and showers there--all three were much needed. Then we greeted the next day with an epic breakfast that lasted for a couple hours. I worked in a quick bike ride after breakfast, then we packed up the car and pointed it toward Canada.

Crossing the border was fun. We expected to be prime suspects for a thorough car search, with the guitar strapped to the bikes on top and the car packed with randomness. But we got through easily enough, after becoming slightly smitten with the border guard. Quick side note: the border guard coming into Canada was gorgeous. The tollbooth attendant directly after was funny and entertaining. Coming back into America, the border guard was miserable and the tollbooth attendant was unmemorable. I think Canada may be desperate for a positive first impression, whereas America doesn’t seem to care too much. Maybe more thoughts on that later.

To Niagara--our whole reason for visiting Canada. Whoever visited Niagara Falls and decided not to make a national park out of it should be thoroughly punished. Seriously. It’s an absolutely stunning display of nature that is being crowded by buildings and vendors and ridiculous commercialization. The human desire to witness natural grandeur is exploited for the sake of tremendous profit. Britton and I spent about an hour talking about how we would treat the land if we owned it--how we would do as little as possible that would change the falls or the land anywhere close to it.

But it was still beautiful, in those moments when the city could be shut out. The falls themselves were humbling, and the crowds were surprisingly diverse, so there were some interesting people-watching moments. Overall, though, I can’t say I was too sad to leave Niagara. So we headed north, eventually deciding to pull into a novelty shop that sold souvenirs and postcards and such. Get this: in line at this random souvenir shop in Canada, we ran into Emmanuel, a friend who went to the same church as us for years back in Bradenton. We spent a while in the parking lot visiting with him and his family. His brother studied our map with me and showed us the best way to get to Michigan, and Emmanuel spontaneously decided to give us his GPS and his North American atlas. He said we could just mail it back to him later if we think of it. How awesome is that? Britton and I had kind of resisted the idea of using a GPS, thinking it might feel like cheating. Which it might be, a little bit. But it’s amazing how much it’s come in handy already. We try to use maps and general direction as much as possible, but once we’re actually to our destination city, the GPS saves us a lot of time in finding specific places.

Back to Canada. We found a delicious little restaurant that insisted on being Austrian, no matter how German it felt. Then we continued on to Michigan in the drive that would never end. We had recently found out we might not have a place to stay, so we weren’t sure where we’d be sleeping that night . There were some options in Detroit, but we needed to be in Grand Rapids by morning. It was after three in the morning by the time we got there. Britton and I dropped off Julia and Erin at a cheap motel, then continued driving to the church we wanted to visit. Sometime around four we fell asleep in the parking lot by the front doors.

Let me tell you about this church, Mars Hill. The teaching pastor, Rob Bell, is an absolutely brilliant man who pulls context from all sorts of places in history and culture and science and…oh, so much. Over the past couple years I’ve probably learned more from him than any other single person. A lot of my friends have asked me how I can still consider myself a Christian in spite of all my questions about God and frustrations about church. Mars Hill is a big part of that answer. There is so much hope and life pouring out of the people there. I remember reading an article from a newspaper in Grand Rapids that traced significant increases in literacy and decreases in child poverty in the city back to the people at that church. And Bell’s message, about peace and love and a massive movement toward complete restoration, is endlessly inspiring for me. He offers an alternative to the escapist, it’s-all-gonna-burn mentality that has caused so much damage. If you’re at all interested in this, or if you want to hear someone explain it so much more eloquently than me, consider leaving aside your personal feelings about Christians for about an hour, going here (http://marshill.org/teaching/index.php), and listening to the message from August 16th. Then send me a message or call me or something. I’d love to talk more about it.

We got to talk with Bell for a few minutes after the service. When we started telling him about our trip, he was like “Oh, so you were the ones brushing your teeth in the parking lot this morning! I knew you were roadtrippers!” I thought that was funny. Then we told him we plan to see him on his speaking tour in Minneapolis, and he said if we have any problem getting tickets we should ask for his tour manager and we’ll get in for free. Meeting a brilliant, innovative person who happens to be a personal hero of mine and finding him to be completely approachable and kind…something about that gives me a great deal of hope in humanity.

Okay. Back to the trip. We picked up the girls at a beach on Lake Michigan, then drove around the lake to Chicago. After dinner with a friend of Julia’s north of the city, we found out that our place to stay for that night had fallen through. The girls weren’t crazy about the idea of sleeping outside at someplace random, and we didn’t want to pay for a hotel, so we spent about an hour in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot, calling everyone we could think of and posting messages online and thinking about all our options. Thank you to all of you who responded, by the way. We had a whole team of friends calling old colleagues and classmates and such, until we ended up getting in touch with a friend of a friend of Julia’s, who let us stay in his parents’ basement. That was exciting to me, driving in the middle of the night to a complete stranger’s house and camping out in the basement.

Chicago was brilliant the next day. I use that word a lot, brilliant. I hope that doesn’t cheapen it. Britton and I took our bikes on the red line to downtown, then spent the day riding around the skyscrapers and the parks and the lake. It’s such a rush, biking with city traffic in the middle of all those buildings. The only thing that might make that day better would be Chipotle. Oh wait--we did that too. Thanks for the free food, Chipotle customer service people. The guacamole was spectacular, as always. And the burrito settled like a brick, as always. A fresh, spicy, delicious brick.

Britton and I were reading in Millennium Park that night when we found ourselves in the middle of the Monday night concert. People brought picnics and snacks and such to watch a local band play in a gorgeous amphitheater. Incredible architecture. Great music too--a sort of modern jazz band, with a couple saxes, a guitar, bass, and drums, then a trumpet that carried through the amphitheater so beautifully. You should have heard that trumpet. Britton sat next to a girl visiting from Germany. I sat next to a Canadian couple; he teaches music in an elementary school, she plays harp in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Everyone was extremely friendly, interacting and passing food and enjoying the night together.

Later Britton and I biked to a jazz lounge near where we were staying. The place was The Green Mill, the band was Marco Polo. The music was technically sound and at parts quite brilliant, but overall it seemed to be lacking some of the inspiration that makes jazz jazz. We sat at the bar next to George, who’s been a train engineer (“Not a conductor! Not a conductor!”) for thirty-something years. He told us about the places he’s traveled to for work and all the crazy hitchhiking and such he did in the 70s. He was a really interesting man who seemed like he could entertain for hours with his stories.

That place also had the friendliest bouncer in the world. He was soft-spoken and kind all night. During a break out front I saw him reading a collection by Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet. It was great hearing him talk about which ones he liked and why they meant so much to him. Then it was funny watching him hide the book and get all nervous and official every time his boss came around. I can’t wait for him to find what he’s looking for.

Pause here. Time to go pee or grab a snack or step outside, then we’ll continue.