59.5 mi / 4:42:46 time / 12.6 mph avg. / 1102 ft. climbing
Staying at Camping Riviere du Passant 

After a good rest in Montreal, it was time to head east across southern Quebec. We headed for the big bridge over the St. Lawrence (though not before stopping for a last Montreal meal at a creperie), and as usual, it had complete bicycle facilities in a separated lane with separate access points. As we rode up the giant span, the morning sun shone through the bars of the suicide fence curving above our heads, and created a crazy strobe-light effect to our eyes as the sun would be briefly shaded and unshaded at something like a 100Hz oscillation. It felt like it would have given me a horrible headache if I hadn’t been able to move over a bit into the oncoming lane and out of the shadow. Beyond that, I thought the bridge was awesome, and probably the easiest big-city, big-river bridge I’ve ever rode over. 

Rett, on the other hand, hated it, I think mostly for the frequent speed barriers (meant to slow cyclists bombing down the slopes) that she had to walk her bike through. I felt bad because as amazing as Rett’s progress has been at learning how to ride a bike, there are just some things that most “native” cyclists can do that just don’t feel natural to her, and I think that simply doing an hour long practice session would go a long way towards expanding her skills. But somehow we never find the time, and obviously the middle of a towering bridge was not a place to learn.

The region-wide bicycle facilities continued even on the much more suburban eastern side of the river, including many bike lanes, off-street bike paths, and an awesome “bicycle spiral staircase” for getting us up to a bridge crossing a major highway. 

Along one of the paths, a woman asked us if we needed help while we were stopped looking at my maps, but beyond that, I might have to revoke the “Friendly Canadian” stereotype, at least for cyclists. Not that anyone was unfriendly, but we seem to receive almost no “bonjour”s,”hello”s, waves, or even glances of recognition from cyclists passing the other way on the path. And it can’t be because couples on fully-loaded bikes are old-hat to them, since we haven’t seen a single other like us this whole trip. It’s very unusual. 

Tree-covered mountains began rising up from the plain, like piles of poop that God’s dog dropped as they walked the earth, when God forgot to bring enough plastic bags. Luckily the roads mostly skirt around them (and they don’t smell). 

Until we reached the campground tonight, no one we spoke to outside of Montreal spoke English, which definitely makes it feel like we’re touring a foreign country. It meant that instead of one cheeseburger with everything on it,  and one with everything but tomato, we instead got one with everything but tomato and one with *only* tomato. Oh well! But we got the poutine order right, that’s easy! 

We headed for a private campground a bit further than my original plan to camp at a national park, in order to shorten the difficulty of tomorrow’s big ride. When we got there, the girl in the office said they were closed (for the night), and had we tried the national park (now 5 miles behind us)? Luckily, unlike at the Cook County campground, she quickly turned around an figured out how to let us pay for a site without their computer on. 

We even got a riverside site, on a rocky, babbling stream, making us 5-for-5 in camping on the water! Of course I promptly fell in the river and cut up my hand trying to cross it over the rocks. Which was actually somewhat concerning (not the hand), because the night was already setting up to be cool and dewey, and wet clothes and shoes wouldn’t help! 

Even more exciting than falling in the river was that there was another touring cyclist staying a couple sites over!  France (a person, not a country) is a solo woman last from Vancouver, but who had been working her way from Amsterdam for some time. When she proudly offered her age (70), both Rett and I were shocked. We had an excellent dinner-delaying conversation where we talked about the goodness of people, learned that it is still possible to expand and change yourself late in life, and essentially agreed that bike touring is awesome.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2016 at 8:00 pm and is filed under 2016 Bike Tour, bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.