Today, it rained. Not a little tiny sprinkle, but about 25-30 miles of consistent rain, punctuated by a heavy downpour about 5-10 miles after I got started. It’s an interesting thing about certain things, like rain and getting wet - they crystallize thought. Whatever else you may have been thinking about beforehand, suddenly all you can think about is A) how nice it would be if it stopped raining and B) how nice it would be to be dry again. I have a philosophy about rain, which is this: if it’s going to bother, it may as well go for it. C’mon, Mother Nature, let’s see what you’ve got, is my motto. And Canada delivered. I was 100% soaking wet. Curiosity about my gear was sated; things seem to basically be OK. I wouldn’t say I *enjoyed* getting wet, but it wasn’t so bad, in the end. And the sun came out, and dried me off, and life is good!
It’s been really challenging to find places to stay at night. The area I’ve been biking through is pretty touristy and also fairly rural, and as a result, there’s not much in the way of motels or warmshowers or couchsurfing. It’s just bed and breakfasts and vacation homes, and they are way out of my price range. So today I biked an extra 10 miles (sorry, 16 kilometers) to a town called St. Thomas that’s off route but is a “normal” place, with a Walmart and a bunch of Tim Hortons and a cheap motel.
At the motel, when I arrived, an Indian man came to see me at the front desk. We conducted our transaction, and then, as I was leaving, I paused, and worked up the courage to ask the question I really wanted to know the answer to. “I’ve been all across the U.S. and now Canada,” I said (a slight exaggeration), “and I’ve stayed in a lot of moderately priced motels. And almost every single one has been run by an Indian or Pakistani family. Why is that?”
“Indian family,” he said. “They’re all Indian. Indians own something about 99% of all the motels in this country.” He proceeded to explain that it was part history, part culture. For one thing, Indians own hotels because, well, Indians own hotels. They know how to run one, it’s easy to get a loan from a bank - it’s become expected. But that, of course, begs the question of how the whole thing got started. And he had some thoughts about that; basically, what he said was that Indians like to invest in something solid, like property - and owning a hotel is a great way to invest in property. Which makes sense; if you open, say, a restaurant or store, you typically lease, but when you open a small hotel, you usually own it. Plus, he said, when you run a hotel, you get a house for free - and typically a big one that an extended family with multiple generations can all live in. So there you go. “Hotels, Motels and Patels”, he said.
After my delicious warm shower, I set out to find a hardware store in St. Thomas (and I did, and it was awesome). Biking gently around the city, no pack, no place specific to go, the sun started to set over the horizon, and suddenly I just felt *really good* for a minute. I don’t know if there’s any great metaphysical importance to that; I think a lot of it was the hot shower, being dry for a change, and the freedom to just doodle around for a minute. Plus I find suburbs to be comfortable. After a little while they get suffocating, but in the beginning they feel familiar. But it was a nice, warm feeling, and I wrapped it around me like a blanket.
