Having stayed up kinda late the night before, we rose a little late. our host then made us a nice big breakfast including sausages cooked in beer, and eggs with fresh spinach from his garden. Follow that up with more pleasant chatter and, needless to say, we more than a little late getting going (at least by my standards so far for days where miserable-weather-avoidance didn’t influence the pace of morning activities).
The Montreal-dwelling friend had warned me (as had other people I encountered earlier in the ride) that road maintenance standards fall of dramatically upon crossing the Quebec border. Sure enough, while quite rough, the roads certainly weren’t the worst-maintained roads that I’d encountered (that distinction having to go to the stretch of Saskatchewan Road 48 which the highway department there seemed to have given up on maintaining as paved; second place going to the section of Hwy 3 in BC with the overly wide and wandering rumble strips). In spite of that, I was still mightily glad to cross the border into Quebec, and finally be done with riding across Ontario:
Shortly after getting into Quebec, we started missing turns (and making the occasional wrong turn in an effort to get back to our route). In retrospect, I’m most inclined to attribute this to the unique combination of factors where not only are there multiple roads to complicate wayfinding, but there was company and pleasant conversation to distract from that particular chore (as the route we were trying was largely new to both of us, so…).
Eventually we got to Hudson, and took the ferry over to Oka. I somehow neglected to photograph the ferry, which is disappointing because it’s still an old barge/tug setup (and neither the barge nor the tug are particularly fancy; think large raft being pulled behind some guy’s motorboat and you’ll have the general idea). Moreso because there’s a new ferry there (and a single vessel at that) which looks slated to replace the old ferry.
Once across the river, we were along a route more familiar to my friend and stopped making quite so many wrong/missed turns. That said, the late start combined with all the backtracking, stopping for directions, etc. meant that we got into Montreal too late for me to pick up the better replacement back rim for my bike, and that said pickup would need to be done in the morning (as would the wheelbuilding, which would mean another rather late start). At one point, I was tempted to just load us onto a commuter train into town to make it to the bike shop before it closed, but there wasn’t a train scheduled that would have actually accomplished that. So instead we just continued riding, and got in some time around 10:30pm. my friend’s wife (another internet friend who had actually introduced me to her husband as someone else interested in severe bike craziness) had a dinner waiting for us (said dinner had in fact been waiting for us for several hours) and after washing, eating, chatting, and making my (rather brief) notes for the day, I turned in about as late as I had the night before.
]]>The hot humid weather having broken while I was in Ottawa, I was blessed with moderate weather and a good brisk tailwind. Consequently, I was in no hurry to leave the good company of my family, and didn’t hit the road until around noon.
I had made the error of using the distance between my two points on Google maps to estimate how far I’d have to ride for the day, and then taking quite a different route (i.e. following the grid of local/country roads rather than cutting diagonally across it on a highway) and this added about 25-30km of unexpected riding, but the riding was good riding. I frequently found myself using my large chainring, and not wanting to interrupt the ride just to feed or water myself. I also took only one picture, to give a general impression of the scenery:
and made a quick stop in Alexandria to pick up some Gatorade (though I had originally planned on cream soda) to take to the home of the internet-friend with whom I’d be staying, for this:
Another mutual internet-friend (from Montreal, and therefore my subsequent host, and riding companion for the next day) arrived shortly after I did, and once we had both showered (and shot the hell out of Barney) our host treated us to an evening of good food, good company, and good scotch, all while we showed off our various pieces of gear. Ultimately, we retired at some time around much-later-than-I’d-normally-stay-up-before-a-riding-day.
]]>I woke up to a hot, humid morning which held the promise of an even hotter, more uncomfortable day. When breaking camp I folded my fly in a place that caught the eye of a few rec centre staff who were out on their coffee break. One of the asked what I was doing, so I told him that I was biking across the country and had just camped out behind the maintenance shed. He took a peek, agreed that it seemed a pretty good place to camp for the night, and went back to his break.
Getting into my day’s ride, I found myself back on Highway 17 for a stretch, but not the stressful and threatening 17 that I’d become quite used to. Rather, this stretch of highway had been replaced by the 417 just a little way off to the right, but unlike the other sections of “old 17”, hadn’t been kicked down to the municipal level, or given a new number.
When I came to a left turn ending that stretch of road, and putting me on to even more minor local roads, I was somewhat (but not entirely) surprised to end up on a dirt road:
I became concerned that the rest of my highway-avoiding route would have me on unpaved roads, but my next turn but me back on pavement that ran right to Carp. On the way into Carp, I also passed a building that reminded me of some acquaintances back home, who’d grown up in the general vicinity of Ottawa, in an area that someone had described as having an unusually high density of geodesic dome structures:
Once in Carp, I managed to confuse Carp Road, Old Carp Road, and the number of times I’d have to cross March Road before turning on to it, so that my route got rather mangled and picked up an extra 5km or so before I was able to sort myself out (wayfinding is more difficult when it’s not simply a matter of “follow the only road” as it is in rather a lot of the country).
Eventually, I managed to make my way through Kanata, into Ottawa, and over to my cousin’s house, where I visited for the night and a rest day.
]]>The email from my thesis advisor on things to see/do in Deep River having included a visit to his mother at his childhood home, I stopped by after being treated to breakfast by one of my friends I’d been visiting (the other having had to go to work in the morning). It was a rather nice visit, I got to find out a bit about my advisor’s history/childhood, and that his nephew who’d been studying undergrad math (and hanging around our research group a good deal) had gone off into computational neuroscience instead.
Before going, I took a picture of my advisor’s mother and home:
and was given some food and drink for the road. I was back riding by around 11am.
A little way further into the ride, about 10km before I had the opportunity to leave Highway 17 for some Ottawa Valley back roads (an opportunity I’d already been looking forward to), the highway decided to offer me something of a reminder of what a horrible place it is, and how lucky I was to be escaping it. A dump truck passed much too close, and in so doing delivered a glancing blow to my bike which knocked my rear pannier off and threw it a few hundred feet down the road.
Being rather shaken by this incident, I took to screaming at any motorist who did anything even remotely threatening. Being on a road through a Canadian Forces Base, I somehow decided on a style of shouting somewhat evocative of a drill instructor. There still being a preponderance of idiots who’d pass in the presence of an oncoming cyclist, much of my shouting went something along the lines of: “YOU! GET BACK ON YOUR SIDE OF THE ROAD! WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?! DO I NOT LOOK LIKE ONCOMING TRAFFIC TO YOU?!”
And then I reached Petawawa, turned off on the local roads, and it was nice. The terrain also got a good deal flatter (and more agricultural again):
I passed through a few small towns, chatted up some bikers filling up on gas at a station where I was topping up my water, and a few slightly more significant hills started to pop up again. Now it may have been a seasonal thing, but I noticed that in a lot of Ontario, the ground cover was considerably thicker than I’d seen in BC. BC certainly had bigger trees, and seemed more lush in a lot of other ways, but the density of Ontario vegetation really caught my attention when I noticed that I’d been riding beside a small cliff, set back only about 3-4′ into the bush, but largely invisible due to all the plants in the way.
A short while on, when this ridge mellowed out, I naturally found myself having to ride up it (better still; ride up it only to ride right back down it after making a turn). Of course there was a nice view going up:
and going back down:
when I got around Renfrew, and was considering making my stop for the night, I encountered a pair of other cyclists who were just out for an evening ride from Renfrew to Arnprior for coffee and back. One of them hadn’t really been out riding yet this year, and would periodically complain about the difficulty of the ride. Naturally, I took those complaints as opportunities to make wisecracks. (Really, it’s difficult not to say something vaguely snarky when you’ve done 115km already in a day, not to mention the nearly 5000km already ridden on the tour, and someone is complaining about the fatigue from having gone somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20km).
Anyhow, we split off shortly before Arnprior, and upon getting into town, I headed over to the community centre, and grabbed a shower in the changeroom for the public pool. Then, since it was still horribly hot and humid, and I didn’t want to squander my cleanliness, I started to look for a place to camp in the immediate vicinity of the centre. Finding a relatively isolated spot behind a utility shed/garage, where discarded ramps from the centre’s skateboard park were also being stored, I decided that I had found my site for the night and set about eating and sleeping.
]]>It being a short ride, and there being bugs to deal with in the morning, I got going at around 10:30 in the morning. The ride was largely uneventful, and continued with similar terrain and weather to the day before.
As I approached Deep River, I began to encounter signs that I was coming into Canada’s nuclear science country:
though I couldn’t really see the reactor site
For those who don’t know, Deep River is the bedroom community for Chalk River, home of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (which actually started off as the British Empire’s contribution to the Manhattan Project). A couple of friends of mine had moved there recently so that the male half of this couple could take a job as counsel for AECL. His brother already worked for AECL, and they were staying in his brother’s house until the purchase of their own house (coincidentally the house next door) closed. My thesis advisor also grew up in Deep River, and I had sent him an email a little while back asking after things that I should do while in town.
When I arrived, I borrowed a truing stand and added tension to my rear wheel. (I had rushed the build back in Sudbury and in rushing it, had neglected to put enough tension in the wheel. I could hear the spokes almost sliding in the hub as I rode, and feel a little extra rolling resistance from it too). After that I helped build a structure that was slated to become a children’s playhouse/gardening shed (a combination that I find evokes the image of 11-year-olds having a “sword fight” with gas-powered hedge trimmers).
After a bit of that, there was also some bathing, eating, diddling around on the computer (uploading pictures taken since Thunder Bay, writing blog entries and the like), and general catching up and chatting before calling it a night.
]]>After rising at around 9am, being fed a good breakfast, checking the outdoors store downstairs for propane (and getting referred to Wal-Mart), and then stopping by the public library to hop on the internet for about an hour and check my email, I was finally properly on the road at around noon.
I took a wrong turn somewhere in town (foolishly following the yellow signs alerting drivers to be alert for cyclists, thinking that I might actually be on some sort of common cycling route), and wound up at an interchange with Highway 11, which was divided, controlled-access, and had a prohibition on cyclists. The shoulder looked reasonably wide, and the traffic volume was far from filling up the available lanes, so I ignored the prohibition, and rode back north to Highway 17. This enabled me to have only added about 12km of unnecessary riding to my trip, instead of the 20 or so that backtracking to the wrong turn in town and taking it correctly would have required (assuming that I’d find and correct my error without making others). There was a distressed car getting a tow at one point, and that took up the shoulder, focring me into the lanes, but apart from that, the roadway didn’t strike me as particularly stressful or dangerous in comparison with pretty much all of the other roadways in Northern Ontario.
Getting back onto 17, I continued East, and was able to pick up my propane cylinder in the service station/hardware store/general store at Gagne Road, around Eau Claire. I also got a few more pictures of the scenery:
And as I approached Mattawa the mountains in Quebec became quite plainly visible across the river:
and then the terrain, in spite the road essentially following a river, got hillier.
This was actually immensely frustrating because, although the hills were quite small compared to the mountains in BC, and even a little smaller than the hills around Lake Superior, the weather had gotten quite hot and humid, and it was often necessary to stop partway up a climb simply to wipe off the sweat that was threatening to creep into the corners of my eyes (and when I failed to stop, the sweat, having been concentrated by the evaporation of plenty of sweat before it, and likely also containing a small amount of sunscreen, would make my eyes sting, and then I’d really have to stop).
Needless to say, I was beginning to develop an inclination to continue my rides later into the evening, so as to get a little more of my riding done when the air had cooled off a little. This would also allow me to put in a short day to Deep River, and allow me to stop before the day got too hot.
Towards sunset, I came across a picnic area by a lake, at which I stopped for the night. There were a lot of mosquitoes, and I downgraded my plans for a swim in the lake to wash myself after dinner to merely washing my face and hands in the lake, as I didn’t want to offer up any more skin to the bugs than I had to. Returning to the tent after my wash, and pulling out my road atlas to mark the route I had followed for the day, I discovered that there was a small road just past where I turned into the campground, and that the name of that road is “Mosquito Trail”. Clearly I was not the first person to have encountered a lot of insects in this area. I took my notes and went to sleep.
]]>I got up at around 9am, and the woman living across the street (not the highway; the restaurant was on a corner) from the restaurant behind which I had camped saw me when I was breaking camp. She came over and invited me to have some breakfast at her house when I was done breaking camp. Consequently, I got to start riding, with a good breakfast in me, at around 11:30am.
I had a nice tailwind, and the terrain was really quite flat, so I was able to make some pretty good time. It was also a good day for attractive scenery (possibly contributed to by my good mood at the riding conditions):
I was able to make it to Sturgeon Falls by around 2pm, and dropped into the local tourist information centre to use the internet to make an attempt at fixing up my mailserver (which I had discovered was having problems delivering my mail while back in Webbwood). It took me a couple of hours to sort this out, but there were other terminals, and no one else around trying to use any of them, so I wasn’t terribly concerned.
After getting back on the road, I went a bit further, and then had some lunch at a picnic area overlooking Lake Nippising
Continuing on, I made it to my host’s home in North Bay at around 6:45pm, in time for dinner.
]]>My host in Webbwood fed me a good breakfast, gave me some good tips on alternate routes to the Trans-Canada for pretty much the entire run to Sudbury (and even a little past it) and I was able to get on my way by about 9am. My goal for the next little chunk of ride was to put in around 140km/day in order to make Deep River (to which some friends had recently moved) in three days, and keep the Sault-Ottawa leg of the trip down to seven days (though I’d budgeted eight).
The local roads back to the Trans-Canada, and the Trans-Canada itself were fairly uneventful, but the first stretch of alternate route, Old Nairn Road, had been indentified to me as being in a bit of disrepair. Having already ridden on some stretches of road which were in pretty horrific disrepair, I didn’t feel particularly concerned by this. As it turns out, the road did have a few spots where disrepair made it difficult to avoid cracks, potholes, etc. but was generally a very nice, quiet, scenic ride:
Unfortunately, a little ways down this alternate route, I noticed that my rear wheel was rubbing against the brakes in one spot. After doing a quick check for broken spokes in the area, I tightened a few just enough to get rid of the rubbing, resolved to get it back reasonably close to true either in the evening or the following morning, and continued riding. Not yet having encountered a grocery store, I stopped for lunch at a pizza place just outside of Sudbury, and then continued into town.
Sudbury had the first noticeable air pollution that I’d encountered since leaving Toronto to begin the trip, but it wasn’t terribly pronounced. The city being littered with metal refinery smokestacks much like the prairies were littered with grain terminals (except more densely), I felt compelled to take a shot of some of the local industry:
I then picked up a new batch of groceries in town, drawing stares in the grocery store as though I’d arrived from another planet. One woman nearly dropped her grocery basket when she saw me. I was mildly amused, but also surprised that this was the first time that my cycling clothes had drawn such a reaction. After all, I’d passed through plenty of other (admittedly smaller) forestry and mining towns without a reaction, so it wasn’t simply a matter of class.
Regardless, I picked up my groceries (and decided to grab a pack of citronella tea lights in an effort to keep the bug away from me rather than merely off of me while camping) and set out again. Right around the middle of downtown, the rubbing returned, and when I went to adjust it further, I noticed that the rim was actually coming apart.
I was a little put off by this, since it appeared to require immediate repair, and since said repair would take long enough to shorten my riding day to a point where I’d have to take a 4th day to get to Deep River. Additionally, I wasn’t particularly thrilled when I considered the quality of replacement rim that would likely be available in Sudbury. On the other hand, it was something of a relief that I had/identified this failure in a city large enough that it would be possible to buy a replacement rim at all. It also seemed that I shouldn’t have been terribly susprised by this turn of events since I’d started with a decidedly non-new rear rim, and put some 4000-4500km of extra wear (and heavy wear at that). My best guess is that it died with a good solid 7500-10000km life behind it, so it was just plain used up.
I still rode on it another kilometre or two in order to get to the sporting goods store that was along the way and had a suitably sized replacement rim (identified by calling back to Webbwood and asking after my options, then wandering up to some folks having a BBQ in a side yard and asking to borrow their phone book so I could call and ask about their stock). Then I pulled in, and their mechanic kindly allowed me to use the shop to rebuild my wheel with the new rim (they actually had a whole wheel, but I couldn’t bear to replace my hub with what they had to offer, so I gave them back the hub and spokes as thanks for the use of the shop).
I didn’t get a terribly good picture of the damage, but if you look closely near where the rim reads “OMEGA” you should be able to make out the thick, hooked portion of the rim (that holds the tire in) coming off the rest of the rim, and the edge of the rim being somewhat deformed around there:
All in all, it was about 4 hours from finding the problem in the wheel to setting out from the store with the new rim suitably installed on the bike (though it wasn’t a rim that I’d want to count on to get the rest of the way across the country, and had the wrong size of valve hole in it to boot).
It still not quite being dark when I was done, I figured that I’d set out and try and cover a little extra distance before finding a place to camp at the side of the road. Naturally, roadside campsites decided to prove themselves scarce, so I didn’t manage to stop until nearly 10pm, when I found a closed up restaurant with plenty of clear land behind it that I figured I could use. It was also right across from a cell tower, so I could confidently call ahead to North Bay and make plans for the following night (now that I wouldn’t be passing through it in the middle of a day).
]]>Having been told yesterday that my host in Webbwood would be heading into town around lunch (but home otherwise), I took my time getting going so that I could be quite confident that he’d be home by the time I arrived. Consequently, I didn’t hit the road until around 11:15am.
Not having bought any groceries on the holiday, I set out figuring that I’d either buy some groceries, or buy myself a breakfast at the first opportunity that presented itself. Said opportunity was a restaurant about 40km into the day, and it cost me an extra 75 cents to order a breakfast in the (very early) afternoon.
The ride was pretty short and uneventful, and I didn’t take any pictures (it was also kinda gloomy with a forecast of rain).
Once in Webbwood, I stopped at the general store in order to get some cash, a replacement razor (whose disappearance I noticed while cleaning up in the Soo), and enough food items to feel a little less guilty about the relative sizes of my purchase, and my requested cash back amount. The directions to my host’s house also sounding more confusing than they were, I asked the cashier for directions and got pretty much the same confusing-sounding directions.
While doing this, the forecast rain came down heavily and then tapered off somewhat, so I put on my raingear for the last little bit of ride, only to have the rain pretty much stop within a minute or two of getting back on the bike. Since it wasn’t terribly far to ride, I left the raingear on the rest of the way.
]]>After spending a rest day at Vélorution‘s free bicycle campground, and meeting a bunch of local cyclists in the store (and catching up with Andre, the owner, who I’d been involved in some provincial cycling advocacy with), I headed out, aiming to make it a little more than halfway to Webbwood (where lives another provincial cycling advocate who I was planning to visit).
It being Canada Day, and not having thought of that when deciding the day before to put off my grocery shopping to the morning, I rode out on an empty stomach looking to find a greasy spoon or somesuch where I could score breakfast before going too far. Unless 35km isn’t too far to go before breakfast, I think I failed.
It may be that I wandered around the Sault for a bit, looking for the 17B, before figuring out (by asking) that I had to go a little bit out of town on the 17 before reaching it, or that the 17B, not having a lot of Trans-Canada Highway traffic, also didn’t have a lot of diners to support said same.
Either way, I had my breakfast at a little restaurant in Echo Bay, and as I was heading out, another cyclist approached me, commented on my panniers (similar to hers) and mentioned that her riding partner was still out there checking out my bike. Upon getting outside, I discovered this riding partner to be one of the folks that I chatted with a bunch at Vélorution the day before. We chatted a bit more, and he suggested that the conventional wisdom of putting large panniers in the rear and small ones in the front contributed heavily to uneven tire wear (in that the back tire already supports the rider’s weight too) and should be ignored. That said, my front racks weren’t particularly well placed (or attached) to support my rear panniers, so I kept the bike loaded conventionally (I’d also want to check pannier size against wheel size pretty carefully before setting my bike up for such an arrangement).
Anyhow, I continued along and, figuring that this stretch (being flatter, and a little more populated) wouldn’t have quite the same opportunity for nice/interesting pictures, took a token shot of some of the scenery:
Somewhere around 60km into the day, I encountered a pair of cyclists going the other way. They live in the Soo, and were just on the last day of a trip they’d taken down to Toronto and back. While I was chatting with them, another cyclist from the Netherlands came by and joined us. He’d started rollerblading across Canada (from East to West) but had injured himself early on and switched to a bike to be able to continue, and to make up time. He told us about a campground/resort where he’d stayed the night before, about 150-160km out of the Soo with really friendly owners (who were interested in seeing more cyclists come through), a sauna, and a hot tub. Hearing this, I decided to revise mileage goal for the day up from about 140 of the 240km to Webbwood to 150-160km.
Continuing along, I saw a few more bits of scenery that seemed to warrant a picture:
and stopped along the way for lunch and dinner at more of the affordable-looking restaurants.
Eventually, I rolled into Algoma Mills and found Lake Lauzon Resort which was the resort/campground mentioned to me by the Dutch cyclist. The owners were friendly, as promised, and had started to offer campsites to cyclists at reduced rates and, though I had gotten in a little on the late side, phoned home, showered, etc. and then tried (unsuccessfully) to figure out the controls for the (outdoor) hot tub in the middle of the night, I still managed to have myself a good sauna before turning in for the night.
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