Swedish adventurer stops Down East

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EASTPORT – Until Tuesday afternoon, Eastport was merely a point on the map, the place where Renata Chlumska would at last get out of her sea kayak and transfer back to her bicycle.

Today, the place feels far more personal after a dose of Down East hospitality for the traveler who started her journey – by land and by sea – 11 months ago in Seattle. She is on her “Around America Adventure,” in which she is covering 11,200 miles around the perimeter of the United States.

Coming up from Cutler, and having paddled 27 miles since Tuesday morning, she was greeted in the Passamaquoddy Bay by five others in kayaks. They were alerted to her arrival by her satellite phone, and then accompanied her to the harbor and honored her with a bottle of champagne.

“I haven’t had it because I’m not drinking alcohol on my trip,” Chlumska said Wednesday. “Besides, I have four more months to go. It seems early to celebrate. But yesterday did feel like a finish line, coming out of the water.”

Dozens in the welcoming crowd on the breakwater asked her to stay a day and enjoy their city.

She did that, staying two nights before pushing out this morning to get in more mileage in Maine – this time on her mountain bike, with 200 pounds of gear, including her kayak, towed on a trailer behind her.

Chlumska, 33, is an extraordinary athlete who seeks out the extreme. Outside Magazine in 2003 named her one of the world’s toughest female adventure athletes. In 1999 she was the first Swedish woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest in Nepal.

She has returned there to work with other expeditions, and has guided others up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania seven times. Back home in Sweden, between her international jaunts, she makes her living as a motivational speaker.

Now she is immersed in a solo journey, unassisted by outside organizers, to traverse the edges of the United States by sea kayak and bike. Starting from Seattle last July 4, she paddled the Pacific Coast to San Diego, then rode her bike across the Southwest to Texas, with the kayak in tow.

She paddled the Gulf of Mexico, rounded the Florida Keys and headed up the East Coast toward Maine. She will cross the state toward New Hampshire over the next week, and expects to cover about 25 miles a day on the bike.

She will cycle to the Great Lakes, paddle again, then cycle the last 1,200-mile stretch across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. She hopes to reach Seattle by October – about 480 days after starting her spectacular journey.

The entire trip will cost her about $200,000. That comes from a mix of her life’s savings and cash from sponsors, some of whom have supported her outdoor pursuits for about 10 years.

She pays all her expenses, and asks only for permission to pitch her tent. She takes a hotel room when she needs a shower or laundry facilities. But she doesn’t say no if someone invites her to stay for free.

That has happened already in Jonesport, Cutler and Eastport.

No, she’s not lonely, because she calls her parents in Sweden every third or fourth day.

Yes, she’s tired.

Yes, the weather was bad in most places.

But who’s complaining? She feels on top of the world most days.

She doesn’t make plans beyond the next day. But since her arrival in Washington County, a series of phone calls – starting with her hosts in Jonesport – have helped things fall nicely into place.

During last weekend’s steady rain, she spent a day in her tent at a boat landing in Addison, unable to kayak against the weather. At 5 p.m. Sunday when the rain eased up, she did a six-mile stretch to Jonesport.

Drenched, she asked the U.S. Coast Guard for a place to stay, and the Harbor House Inn on Sawyer Cove, a bed and breakfast, was called.

Inn owners Maureen and Gene Hart gave her a room for the night – free – after hearing her spectacular story.

In the morning, Chlumska told her story again, this time for a video to be shown at the Jonesport Historical Society’s next meeting.

“She came here unannounced, and she arrived 11 months to the day she left Seattle,” said Maureen Hart, who called up the coast to see if others could help the traveler. “She is very engaging. It was a gift that she landed here.”

She spent Monday night at the Cutler home of Renee and Andy Patterson, then Tuesday and Wednesday nights in the rental apartment above The Commons in Eastport, also gratis.

Two kayak guides from Robbinston, Tess and Stephen Ftorek, arranged for kayaks to meet her in the bay – a kind of welcoming that she has received nowhere else along the way.

“Renata is such an inspiration to other women,” Tess Ftorek said. “She had a dream, and she is following her dream. She is doing exactly what she wants to do.”

The dream took four years of planning. She was going to make the trip with her fiance in 2003, but he died in a climbing accident in 2002. So she is doing the trip alone.

“Adventures are my passion, and I am lucky that I can live my dreams,” Chlumska said. “Others have passions of writing or art or music, and some people have the privilege of pursuing their passion.

“Mine is the outdoors, and combining travel and cultures and meeting other people in the world.”

Surely, she won’t soon forget those she met Down East.

Renata Chlumska’s journey can be followed on her Web site, www.renatachlumska.com.