55km
A road cycling day with a fair amount of climb. Done by lunchtime, which didn’t stop us having two lunches.
We climbed out of Mt Laurier in the familiar cold and mist, but this was on the Trans Canada Highway, with not much visibility. The drivers were generally considerate and moved as far away from us as they could. We are used to highways, but it’s not fun riding – single file, no chit-chat and nothing to look at with the mist and fogged glasses. It’s a different kind of riding, with a lot of concentration, especially in the mist. We try and stay far right but punctures live there. We think the scenery was quite nice though and we saw a few deer who thankfully stayed away from the road.
We were just thinking that we had seen hardly any trash – none of the beer cans, Tim Hortons and McDonalds containers that have peppered every other road we have ridden, when we turned off on to the provincial route 107.
The drivers clearly save their rubbish for here, but the difference between here and western Canada is that here the beer of choice is Carling Black Label (vs Bud Light … ). That provincial road presented some spicy hills for 20km, but it was fairly quiet and very pretty, but a terrible surface with no shoulder at all. More focus required.
Another turn at Aumond took us on to a smaller road, a mix of gravel and tar, and it was just beautiful. And we saw a gorgeous red fox soon after. The track went through perfectly manicured farm fields in a lovely valley. And the quiet was just exquisite. As we joined the Gatineau river we celebrated with the bagels we’d brought from breakfast. But we soon breezed into Maniwaki, and a very inviting stop on the river meant a mandatory Québécois poutine. Lunch 2.
The afternoon was appropriately spent drinking wine on a patio above the river.
Today: 55km
Today’s climb: 572m
Total distance: 4,267km
Trans Canada Epic 