Second Last Day

We’re holed up in a Comfort Inn again tonight. While it’s not raining now, the forecast says it will be by morning. Packing up a wet tent and equipment just doesn’t feel like fun. Heading out in the rain will be bad enough.

This detour cost us over a kilometer for a 50 meter break in the trail for a huge construction site.

This morning, we did head out in the rain. It rained on us for the first 25 or 39 km, never really hard, but hard enough that we wore rain jackets and ran our flashing lights. We’re off main roads so when the Mallorytown restaurant showed up at about the 40 km mark it was very welcome. Coffee, tea,, and homemade butter tarts really gave life a new feeling. The lady that owns the place was so excited about our trip that she had to have pictures (just to show her grand children).

One thing that we have noticed, is that our method of riding hard for most of the day leaves little energy, or time, to explore the places we end up in. We get to know a motel or campground, grocery stores, and various restaurants, but the things that make these places unique are often closed when we arrive, or look like they would take too much time if we come across them on the way. As we plan future trips, I think we will add rest days to allow our wounds, abrasions, sore muscles, and worn patches to heal, as well as providing some time to act like tourists.

We have just less than 100km left to cover tomorrow. The forecast says we will have rain all day tomorrow.

Its a Century

A Century, in cycling terms, is a 100 mile ride. We did one, our first one, today.

Last night, we stopped a little before our intended destination. J had today’s ride calculated at a little over 100 km. We started, from St Zotique, Quebec,  in good time. since the weather forecast for Brockville was for rain later in the afternoon and we hoped to miss it. Tomorrow is supposed to rain as well.

After 15 k or so we passed back into Ontario and on to  the Waterfront Trail. The wind is almost always from the west, so, in normal circumstances, we would be facing the wind. Today was not normal and the wind was on our backs. With the possibility of rain tomorrow, it seemed to make sense to go as far as possible today, maybe even 100 miles, the century.

Just before Prescott it started to spit rain, and then it came harder. We sat some of it out over hot chocolate, lemon meringue pie and chocolate cake in a restaurant. The rain did not stop, so we got back on the bike and rode the last 25 km splashing through puddles. It wasn’t pouring, but by the time we were done, we were good and wet.

Tonight we will stay in a Comfort Inn. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Stats: Distance: 162km

Average Moving Speed: 22.7km/hr

A Year Ago Today

A year ago today, we had just finished our walk on the Camino de Santiago. The night before we had celebrated M’s birthday and in the morning we went to the Pilgrim’s Mass and joined with hundreds of other pilgrims in  the end of something and the beginning of something else. As I have written before, that journey has had a profound, and yet, unclear effect on both of our lives. We keep coming back to it, studying it, reliving the experience.

We are doing some of that now. One of the reasons that Montreal (or actually Brossard) is on the bike trip that we are now on, is that we have the opportunity to visit with some of the good friends that we made on that journey. Last night, we celebrated M’s birthday with supper at an Indian restaurant. We are staying at C’s house and enjoying her wonderful hospitality and her cats. In the past year M and C have become a couple, another product of the Camino experience.

We talked together about journeys last night and recognized again that the thing that makes a trip, for us anyway, are the people you meet along the way. Not a day has gone by in which we have not had a meaningful conversation with at least one person, shared some help along the way (yesterday I did some bike maintenance for a woman who just could not figure out how to pump up her tire)

We have other contacts as well. You really should read J’s post about our experience at Oka.

Montebello Quebec

Tonight we are in Montebello Quebec. It’s an odd place really. in 2001, the town had a population of just over a thousand people. I don’t think that the population has grown that much by the look of the age of the houses in the area. The odd thing is, there are 317 rooms in various hotels, motels and B&B’s. The village has twelve restaurants. It’s a real tourist place, but we can’t really see why people come here. There is a golf course and a marina, but we’re not seeing much else.

The 211 room  Chateau Montebello, where we are not staying

The biggest of all of the hotels is the Montebello Chateau, part of the Fairmont chain. We’re not staying there (too expensive), but went for a walk before supper just to look. It’s apparently the largest log building in Canada, and it is amazing. The fireplace in the center of the lobby could likely hold a cord of wood at a time,.The wooden log frames are all covered with a dark finish as are all the walls which makes the place quite dark. But, it is high-class. A doorman let us in, with a sign offering valet parking for only $25 right beside the door.

The 18 room Motel Bel-eau, where we are staying

It seems that the people of Montebello make most of their livelihoods from the service industries. On this Monday in May, business looked pretty slow.

We’re on Day 3 Already

A while ago, I wrote about a trip we were planning on our tandem bicycle. Well, we’re on it! We’ve been our three days, covered almost 300 km, and, believe it or not, J and I are still liking each other.

We used Google Maps to set up the trip. They’ve got a beta program there that will set up bicycle routes. We used that, transferred the route to Mapmyride.com and from there to the Garmin. The first line of the Google map warns users that this is a beta program and should not necessarily be trusted. In most cases it has done a good job. This morning, it took us off of a busy paved road (Highway 7) where we were motoring along at 27-28 km/hour on to a gravel road; very scenic, very slow. In the past three days more than half of our pedaling has been on gravel roads, rail trails and cycle paths. Google has mostly done its job, however, at one point it had us looking a very large pond where it thought there was a road.

These guys were working on the Cataraqui Trail and gave us lots of directions and advice. They were passionate about their trail.

We are having a great trip. You can see more details at the route journal that we are keeping on Crazyguyonabike.com. The best part of theses trips is always the people that we meet on the way. Our mode of transport  gets lots of comments from both cyclists and noncyclists. Lots of folks stop to talk, to give advice, to tease J about being a hanger-on. They want to know where we came from, where we are going, and how sore we are now (we are a bit sore)

So far, the weather has been great, on the hot side. Tomorrow there is talk of rain. That could make things a little more uncomfortable.

May 24 Weekend

We call it the May 24 weekend, but it actually is Victoria Day and, our country being friendly to the long weekend, is actually celebrated on the Monday closest to the actual day. This year, it was this past weekend. The weekend marks the unofficial start of the summer holiday season. Lots of folks traditionally plant their gardens and flower beds on this weekend.

This year , we went camping. We did the same thing three years ago and almost froze . It was so cold that we said we would never camp on this weekend again. A bunch of our friends were planning to camp, but J refused to book a site until the state of the weather was clear. The weather did look good, so, J went to the park and got one of the last non- reservable sites on Thursday afternoon. We went to the park for Thursday night and it was so cold that we wondered if maybe we had made a mistake after all.

In the end it was a great weekend. Temperatures got up into the low 30′s and people were actually on the beach and in the lake. We read a lot, enjoyed some conversation and laughter around campfires, and generally relaxed. The summer has truly started and, for us, that means a lot of travelling. Thursday, we leave for our latest bike adventure. You can follow some of the trip here on this site or get the more complete travel log at http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/10665 (its more complete because J writes there as well)

We’ll return from that trip and head to San Francisco (by plane) for a wedding and then to Edmonton, shortly after, to meet a new grandchild.

The life of Riley (whoever he is)

A Year Ago Today

Burgos May 13 2011

A year ago today, J and I were in Burgos, Spain, at the beginning of an adventure that has marked our lives permanently. We were beginning a walk on part of the Camino so  we could learn about and examine the concept of pilgrimage. We ended up experiencing pilgrimage instead, and, as you could read in posts on this blog last summer, the experience affected the following months. It’s hard to describe just what the effect is, but its the kind of experience  you want to go back and find again, to hold it in your hand one more time, to be able to recreate the sense of belonging to something, to grasp again the feeling of achievement, the sense of community, the stripping down to basics that is the Camino.

I’ve just finished reading Jane Christmas’ book, “What the Psychic told the Pilgrim”. Jane does a good job of describing what happens of the Camino, the awesome scenery, the walking relationships, the group dynamics, the accommodations, and the sense of self discovery that comes with the experience. Many times, as I read her account, I could see myself in her experiences. Through her writing I was able to relive my Camino. It was good. It also made me want to go and do it again.

The book ended up in our house, because a friend had bought it for someone who was considering doing the Camino this summer. It turned out  this someone already had a copy, so our friend gave it to us. The book is not a travel guide. In fact, I don’t think it should be read prior to the trip. It is the telling of one person’s experience, one person’s journey, and each person will experience their own pilgrimage in their own way. Reading this book before walking will set expectations that will close the door to actually finding your own way through the journey. I think  each pilgrimage should begin with something of a blank page. Travel guides, listing accommodations, restaurants, points of interest, etc are fine, but reading books to tell you how you might feel or react to the pilgrimage, in my opinion, can reduce the experience to an attempt to recreate someone else’s.

In the meantime, we continue to treasure the memories, we live through the changes  the experience made in our lives, and we cherish the lasting friendships we made during those weeks in Spain.

Mother’s Day 2012

My mother is a special lady. She’s special to me, her son, the rest of my siblings, and to her grandchildren. She’s, in a large way, responsible for who I am today, although I’m not always sure who that is. She might be responsible for that as well.

My mother, throughout my childhood, was my greatest booster. For her, all of my ideas were good ones. I can’t remember a single critical word about my thoughts, dreams, plans. Sometimes they were met with an “ohhhh”, but in the excitement of the telling, I never really realized that she was not on my side.

We spent a lot of time driving places together. She drove me to organ lessons (which later morphed to the piano) and sat in the car, out on main street, while Elmer U tried to get my fingers to go to the right notes for the right amount of time.  She drove me to public speaking competitions (sort of a nerdy thing to do in those days) and sat through the painful repetition of the same three to five minutes of text. During those drives, when it was just the two of us, she listened.

Me and my mom, early days.

I think that, along with all of the other mom things that she did well, was the key to her influence in my life. She listened to me, gave her advice from time to time, as if we were peers. She made me feel important and valued. She made it seem that I could do anything, and that I didn’t need to follow her path, or my dad’s, or anyone else’s. I was my own person.

She’s still like that. I think she’s often surprised by the things that I have ended up doing, but, she needs to know that those things are likely her fault, because she never put the brakes on earlier.

Thanks Mom.

Leftover Sale Day

The village we call ours, even though we live just as close to two others that are bigger, holds an annual village wide garage sale. You sign up and pay five dollars to be put on the map for the day,  then lots of people from all over, converge on the village because they know there is lots of stuff available, all at once. We live 17 km from the village, so putting ourselves on the map doesn’t really work. No one is going to make a trip our here when they can put in a good day, going from one yard to the next, without investing a lot of gas.

So, we borrowed a driveway. We actually thought we were going to share a sale, but the folks whose driveway we ended up in must take a lot of things to the dump, because they only had one article to sell. We had lots more.

Most of our stuff had been accumulated through the comings and goings of our children. When they went off to school they needed stuff, bookcases, desk lamps, dishes, pots and pans, cutlery, and small appliances. All of this has been stored in our barn.  Earlier this spring we decided, since all of them are now gone and living their own settled lives, most of the leftovers in the shed were likely just that, left over.

We sorted through it all. A load went to the dump. The rest was cleaned and sorted, prepared for sale.

Our stuff in a borrowed driveway

This morning J and I were up before 5:30 and by 6 were on our way to our borrowed driveway. By 6:20, we had made our first sale and by 7:00 we were set up and ready for the crowds. J went to work and left me in charge.

Folks came. They came on foot, by car, and by horse and buggy (these ones were the biggest buyers). They pawed, they sorted, they hummed and hawed and dickered. They carried stuff away. By 12:30 it seemed to be over. I loaded the rejected, unwanted bits (they are still taking up quite a bit of room in the truck) delivered a table to an Amish family, and went home to count my takings. $183 for stuff that was just leftovers.

The day wasn’t just about the money though. It’s about community too. I visited with a lot of people who I had not seen in a while. Many were surprised to find we had moved to such a nice house in town (which we hadn’t) because they thought we still lived out in the country (which we do). Many went off with a piece of our lives, or our children’s lives, at a bargain price.

I’m sure we have enough to do it all again next year.

Garmin Dakota 20

As  you may know, we have a bike trip planned. We’ve decided on the tandem bicycle as the vehicle of choice this time and we’ve bought a trailer to pull behind it to carry our gear. We plan to use a number of bicycle trails for this trip, most of which are old railroad beds. These trails don’t show up on ordinary maps. We have been able to use Google Maps “beta” cycling directions to plan the trip, but what to do when we are actually out there?

We thought that a GPS would be a good idea. We could enter our trip and just follow the pink line. We had done this when we traveled by bike in Holland in 2007, so surely it could be done just as easily, and likely more efficiently in 2012. We went shopping online for a suitable GPS unit and bought a Garmin Dakota 20 along with a special mounting bracket for the bike. This unit is often used for geocaching.

The unit was backordered for about two weeks waiting for the mounting bracket to come, but it was still an exciting day when it arrived. We rushed around finding batteries to make it go and got ourselves to the maps section of the menu. Imagine our dismay when we found the “world map” loaded in the unit placed us in the middle of nowhere. We do live in the middle of no where, but the road that runs in front of our nowhere place was not on the unit. Some further research revealed that we could order more detailed maps from Garmin ($89-$159).  There were also couple of choices of “free” maps available to download.

Maps are big. The first one we found was over 800 MB. Our internet connection is not fast. After 10 hours of downloading we had a map and figured out how to load it on to the mini SD card that did not come with the unit. Quite a few more hours were required to figure out how to transfer the map that we had made on Google maps on to the GPS unit. Finally, we had our pink line.

We had stumbled across another map that promised to be much more detailed. There is something about thinking that you could do better that drives us to distraction. This download was 3.6GB so it had to be better. We started the download. It went overnight and then I spent five hours working on various projects at Coffee Culture just to get a better internet connection. Once we had the whole thing, we could not get it to work at all. We watched the video directions on Youtube over and over and could not get the thing to work.  We found a different version, downloaded it for a long time, struggled to get a clean copy on a disk and finally installed it to our computer. So far, other than topographic lines, I don’t see that it is that much better.

Getting the GPS to work has been a journey in itself. We’ve spent way more time than anticipated on the project. I sure hope the pink line is worth it. J has started printing off the Google maps because she’s not sure that she trusts the machine. She might be right.