Winnipegger rises to challenge during bike trip to Chicago

What did you do on your summer vacation? Acey Rowe rode her bike from Winnipeg to Chicago — that's 1,600 kilometres in 21 days.

It's pretty impressive considering she hadn't been on a bicycle since last summer. In fact, she didn't even own a bike until a few days before she hit the road. One of her goals was to come up with a name for her bike.

Here's her story.

We were barely out of Winnipeg when my travelling buddy, Peter, got a flat. It was almost dark and as he changed his inner tube, I palm-mashed dozens of Manitoba's famous bird-sized mosquitoes off us.

As the light faded, the task got harder and we became more and more concerned about being on the side of the highway. But then a thoughtful truck driver pulled over behind us and shone his headlights. This gave us enough light to finish the repair! Unfortunately, it also alerted every absent mosquito to our whereabouts.

​In Little Falls, Minnesota, we were feasting like kings in front of a grocery store when a woman spotted our bikes and asked us where we were coming from.

When we said Winnipeg, she whipped off her sunglasses and announced, "I'm calling the paper!" In half an hour, a reporter showed up and interviewed us. Apparently we were big news in Little Falls.

After the interview the sunglasses woman, Lois, invited us back to her beautiful home on the Mississippi River. There, she and her husband, Ron, took us out on their pontoon.

After our boat ride, we all sat at the river's edge and played Leonard Cohen songs on the ukulele, as it just so happened that Ron, Peter and I all play ukulele. It was completely lovely.

In Bay City, Wisconsin, we met Jim, the owner of Flat Pennies Ice Cream. As if delicious ice cream wasn't enough, Jim also had a caboose in the yard of his ice cream parlour. And he let us stay in the caboose!

We weren't the first people to be charmed by Jim's caboose — writer Susan Huppert was so taken by it that she made a children's book out of Jim's life story. She called it Climb Aboard.

In Alma, Wisconsin, it started to rain. Pour, even. Torrentially. As we were cycling through town, Peter suddenly turned left to go up this TRULY MASSIVE, PRACTICALLY VERTICAL hill.

I thought he was joking so I slowed down and said, "Oh yeah, ha ha, very funny, Peter…. Oh…. Oh, you're serious! Oh, OK!"

​But by the time I started to follow him up the hill, I had lost all my momentum so instead I just sort of … fell over really, really slowly.

At the top of the hill, drenched and a tad banged up, we met Mary. She took one look at us and said, "Right! You're coming home with me." She locked up our bikes in the city office where she worked and took us home to her dairy farm.

​On the way, she took us on a detour to the top of the bluffs. The view was amazing! And I really appreciated not having to bike to the top of them.

I was pretty excited to stay with Mary because she's a huge CBC fan.

One of my favourite parts of the trip was the Sparta-Elroy state trail, a "rails-to-trails" conversion that was particularly exciting as it went through three nearly mile-long former railway tunnels.

Inside the tunnels it was pitch black and about 10 degrees colder than it was outside. Biking up to them, I could actually feel the temperature drop long before I saw the tunnels. In the longest of the three, an overhead stream trickled down the walls. 

​By the time we made it to Chicago, I was a biking pro. My thighs were all muscle and my butt was all callus. Yep.

To celebrate our triumphant arrival (and to re-learn how to walk) I headed to the Museum of Contemporary Art, saw the Grant Park Orchestra perform in Millennium Park and checked out the ferris wheel at Navy Pier.

Fun fact: the ferris wheel was invented for the 1933 World's Fair as Chicago's answer to the Eiffel Tower. True story.

Oh, and I finally named my bike! Velocity Raptor. Good, right? Though to be completely honest, after some of those hills, I was pretty darn close to naming her Sisyphus....

Hear more bike stories on the season debut of DNTO with host Sook-Yin Lee on Saturday, Sept. 6, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. on CBC Radio One.