Bikely map

After a good night’s sleep and a generous breakfast, I found myself heading out at around 11:30am. Upon reaching Gagetown, I found that my friend had already headed into town for church, and was going to be there for the rest of the day.

In spite of that, he still gave me directions to his room in the barracks, and told me to take some rations from his locker (I suppose he had extras) and that one of his roommates would likely be around to help me. He said it would be ok to take about 4 or 5 of them, and that I should leave behind the zesty turkey stew rations as they’re his favourite.

So after getting directions to his barracks from some of the other people on base (the buildings not actually having much (anything?) by way of exterior signage) I dropped into his room, and sure enough there was a roommate there who helped my find the rations in his locker, and who also helped me remove some of the packaging from the ration so that it could be reduced to about half its previous size. Noticing that my friend’s laptop was still running (and he being a friend from the gun clubs back home), I opened up a browser window with the Barney shoot-out video in it, and a session of notepad in which I wrote (in 72pt Impact) “im in ur barrikz steelin ur rashinz”. I was tempted to go for the earlier meme reference: “im in ur base steelin ur foodz”, but figured that the message left was quite internet-nerd-y enough.

It also occurred to me that said friend must’ve graduated from university in June and, having otherwise qualified to become an officer pending the completion of his degree, ought to be an officer by now. Sure enough, his name on the door included the rank 2Lt.

Gagetown being south of the St. John River, I had to cross a bit of a beast of a bridge to get down there, and another beast to get back to the road I was taking (at least for the time being) along the north shore. Once that road turned away from the river, it naturally passed over an even beastlier bridge, but was subsequently quite sane. Said bridge passed over a river leading up to what seemed to be a bit of a cottage country lake, which I caught a picture of as I passed a corner of it:

I then found myself in relatively pleasant country to continue riding. It was still hot out, but I stopped for ice cream at a fruit market set up at the side of the road, and the people there were quite friendly (more in the manner that I had been sort of expecting from this part of the country). While chatting with them, I think there was a little confusion over which route I was taking towards Moncton, but they still had some good pointers on local directions and whatnot.

Eventually, after continuing down a bunch of road resembling this:

I found a nice church to camp out behind around 50km shy of Moncton. I had a beef ravioli ration for dinner (which was actually pretty good, and included some touches, like bread, jam, and tea, that struck me as being immensely civilized — oh, and there was a questionnaire on the quality of the food in the ration too).

I saw some fireflies for the first time in a long time, and called it a night, probably pretty close to midnight.