Father-son odyssey on wheels
Cyclists will attempt to complete tour around Great Lakes
The Great Lakes are truly great.
They contain one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. They are larger than seven Northeastern states combined. The shoreline is equal to nearly 44 percent of the circumference of the earth.
The shoreline is what interests Walter Zaczek, 60, and his son, Adam, 16, a junior at Niagara Falls High School.
Over the past four summers, they have ridden their bikes around four of the Great Lakes and plan to take on the last and biggest — Lake Superior — next summer.
Zaczek, a State Parks employee for 40 years, is divorced and lives in Lewiston. Adam lives in Niagara Falls with his mother, Roberta Cortese, a kindergarten teacher at Harry F. Abate Elementary School, and his grandfather, Alfred Cortese.
Walter Zaczek said the bike trips have taught him a lot about being a single father.
“Instead of just watching your son grow up, you grow with him. When you’re on the bike you talk to each other one on one, more like two people than father and son,” he said. “We ride together and we grow together.”
Adam Zaczek is the youngest person to circumnavigate any of the Great Lakes on a bicycle, let alone ride a bike around all four lakes, according to all known records.
He began riding the Great Lakes when he was 13 and has clocked 4,400 miles on the odometer on his 21-speed Jamis mountain bike.
He got the bike in 2005 for their first Great Lake trip, six days and 614 miles around Lake Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes.
The second trip — they always make the journey in the second week of August — was around Lake Erie, 750 miles in just over a week.
Lake Huron was the next to slip away under the tires of the two long-distance bikes — 1,100 miles in two weeks.
Their last trip took them around Lake Michigan, 1,200 miles and two weeks of adventure and misadventure.
Zaczek drove them in his car, with the two bikes on the back, to Muskegon, on the west coast of Michigan. They parked the car in a lot for campers and started pedaling north up the east shoreline of Lake Michigan.
Each bike had water bottles attached to the frame and saddlebags on each side of the rear wheels. The saddlebags contained two changes of clothes, spare tire tubes and other mechanical stuff for the bikes, and emergency food like Granola bars and Pop-Tarts.
The snacks were for on-the-go nourishment. The Zaczeks eat in restaurants and spend the night in motels along the way after a day’s ride.
Adam, with the appetite of a bike-riding teenager, remembers fondly some of the restaurants along the way.
“I’m so hungry at the end of a day’s riding that I’ll eat anything,” Adam said. “But some of the food we find is excellent.”
He remembers a restaurant in Ontario that was quiet fancy. People were wearing fine clothes and the Zaczeks walked in wearing T-shirts and shorts.
“We stuck out a little,” Adam noted, “but the waiter was so impressed with what we were doing he gave us free desert.”
After parking the car on the Lake Michigan trip, they rode due north to their first stop in Traverse City.
“The first couple of days we had miserable weather,” Zaczek said. “It kept raining, a northwest wind was blowing in our faces and it was hilly.”
They rode 70 miles the first day, well below the 100 miles they strive for daily. They ride until nightfall and look for a motel with a restaurant.
After dinner, they catch the weather on the local TV and talk about what route they’re going to take the next day and how far they think they’ll get.
“By then we’re done for the day and we go to sleep,” Zaczek said. “We get up at sunrise, have a light breakfast
and get back on the bikes.”
They’ve had only three flat tires in all four trips so far, and they were fixed on the side of the road. But trouble hit one Sunday while riding around the top of Lake Michigan in the Upper Peninsula. A rock or some object broke a spoke in the back wheel of Adam’s bike and he couldn’t go on.
They tried hitching a ride, holding up a cardboard sign that read, “Bike problem, need ride.”
Vehicles drove by, but no one stopped. After about an hour, a Michigan state trooper pulled up and Zaczek asked for assistance. The female trooper told them the state police cannot help stranded cyclists.
“It’s part of the adventure,” Zaczek said she told them. “You’re on your own, buster, or words to that effect.”
Father and son walked 20 minutes to a gas station, where a guy in a pickup drove them 20 miles to a motel in the next town. As they signed in for a room, Zaczek told the desk clerk about the broken spoke. The clerk said he knew a man in town who used to own a bicycle repair shop. Zaczek phoned the former repair shop guy, who drove to the motel and took Zaczek and the damaged bike to his garage, where he fixed the broken spoke.
“It took him an hour and he asked for $12.50, but I gave him $25,” Zaczek noted. “He said he had never heard of anyone riding a bike around all the lakes and he wished us well.”
Not everyone they came across was as nice as the bicycle repair man.
Adam found the people they passed on the ride between Green Bay and Chicago down the west side of Lake Michigan to be less than pleasant.
“Drivers would honk at us and tell us to get off the road,” he said. “But most people are nice. I liked the people on the ride around Lake Ontario. We found the best people in the more-isolated areas like Manitoulin Island.”
The Zaczeks have had about a dozen narrow escapes from being hit by irate drivers.
“One trucker on the Lake Huron trip passed us at least six times,” Zaczek recalled. “He kept coming back and blowing his horn, yelling at us to get off the road. He’d come as close as six inches from our bikes. It’s miserable when that happens.”
A variety of wildlife catch their eye along the way— a black bear on Manitoulin Island, a flock of wild turkeys around Lake Michigan — but the strangest animals they’ve seen are people’s pets, including llamas, a herd of buffalo in Michigan and ostriches hanging their heads over a backyard fence.
“You have so many new experiences,” Adam said. “We found a freshwater well on the Lake Michigan trip and we drank from it. I had never done that before.”
Occasionally, they encounter other bike riders. One memorable one was an 85-year-old man from Toronto attempting to ride around Lake Ontario. Zaczek doesn’t know if the old guy made it, but two nurses from Kingston, Ont., completed a bike ride around Lake Ontario.
After riding side by side all day long for a week or more, do father and son get along all right?
“Most of the time,” said Adam. “We disagree every now and then, but if we ever got into a real argument, that’d be the whole bike trip.”
Just before the last bike trip, Adam spent two weeks in Yosemite National Park in California with his mother on a four-day camping trip and climbed the 10,000-foot Half Dome with a 60-pound pack on his back.
Adam, an honor student at Niagara Falls High, holds the freshman steeplechase record for two miles over hurdles and water. His father ran track and played football for Niagara Falls High School on a team that was second best in defense among high schools nationwide. Adam’s grandfather is in Niagara Falls High School’s Sports Hall of Fame for basketball. Adam passes his photo in a hallway on his way to the gym.
Father and son are already planning for the mother of all bike rides — more than 2,200 miles around Lake Superior. They’re going to start a week earlier than the usual mid-August.
They expect it will take more than two weeks, and with motels few and far between around the north shore, they’re planning on bedding down overnight in tents. Zaczek said he is looking for someone to drive ahead of them with the tents and wait for them at overnight stopover points.
“It’s going to be a little more complicated than the other four,” Zaczek said. “But we set out to do all five lakes, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
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