Written by jon and shira
Ideally, every day of a bike trip is better than the last. This was not one of those days. It started out cool (finally!) With a nice included breakfast, and a late start as we were taking the ferry over to the cote-nord. The downhill slide was slow - a little queasiness on the crossing (25 miles, 2 hours) and no whale sightings. After another nice picnic lunch by a waterfall in les escoumins, the chods sadly turned south and the rest of us north. You know the expression "man plans and God laughs" - well we had planned on a tail wind, which whipped all around mostly as a cross wind. And as the real highway had ended, the trucks we hadn't been seeing proved that they still had goods to deliver.
Heading north, it was a windy ride with a few hills, and a few "route des baleines" cutouts along the seashore. Arrival in forestville, least attractive town by far, by 5pm.
Heading south, the DCs had to get religious -benching Gomel and gratitude for the Canadian lamed vavnik that found them. They redefined the words headwinds and hills as " the absolute worst conditions we just endured for the last 4.5 hours" We left you guys and made s right up 138 happily riding on a sizeable shoulder, even found a familiar alt route verte road parallel to highway for a few miles...until the skies continued to darken, the hills became treacherous and infinite and the shoulder completely disappeared. With 18 wheelers zipping by us and crosswinds pulling us towards the highway, we chose safety over machismo and unclipped and walked our bikes for roughly 3-4 miles up HUGE hills only to find no shoulder in site. David's raynaud's (assuming even the non-doctors know what that is) and Shira's terror brought us to a level of discourse that was to say the least nonproductive. Hence David did what every good hubby would do- he stuck out his thumb! Within seconds we met the Canadian lamed vavnik! A lovely middle aged man driving a pick up truck threw our bikes in the back, and brought us (out of his way) to tadussac. With language barrier (where were you Jon and Becky??) we conveyed our gratitude with many "Mercis" and biked our way to hotel tadussac where David's currently warming up in a hot bath and I'm debating a hot stone massage at the spa.
21 miles for Jon (drove sag), 36 for northern route, 'refuse to answer' for southern.
No comments:
Post a Comment