Today was a rest day, but tomorrow I will be back on the bike for a 40-mile ride that will first take me to the ferry that will carry me across the St. Clair River back into the U.S., to Algonac, Michigan, and then to a bike shop in Macomb County where I plan to buy some new bike tires.

Some of you may be wondering why this cross-country trip has involved more than a week of biking through Canada. There is a simple reason for this that embodies a lesson I learned in my running group several years ago.

For many years, I’ve had a reputation as the slowest of our Saturday morning runners. I’ve tried all kinds of things to pick up my pace, like training with a 20-lb. weighted vest and doing sprint intervals. None of these schemes worked. In the end, I found only one reliable way to finish the run faster: carpe viam brevem. Translated from Latin, this means “take the short way,” or “take a short-cut.” A running friend who was in on this strategy inscribed a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary to me this way to make sure I never forget this important principle. I’ve used it on several occasions and trust me, it works! You may want to use it yourself someday. Your running friends may be scratching their heads wondering how you pulled this off, but hey, that’s their problem, right?

For this bike trip, I am primarily using the Adventure Cycling “Northern Tier” map route, but over the past week or so have been using their “Lake Erie Connector” maps that take a shortcut through Canada along the northern shore of Lake Erie. This shaves off extra miles that would be needed to dip south of Lake Erie into parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. It also allows me to head across Michigan and take a ferry across Lake Michigan to Wisconsin. You’ll hear more about that later. So, yes, I am still on a cross-country bike trip, but one that is a little shorter and involves more than one country.