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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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).
