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October 11 Tuesday Bicycle touring from Grande Vallee Quebec to Forillon National Park Quebec The sound of ice pellets hitting the fly awaken us. We venture out, foolishly mount our fully loaded touring bicycles, and coast down a frigid hill into a town. Tears are streaming from our eyes. We stop at the first restaurant we come to and have breakfast and hot chocolate to warm up our face, fingers, and toes. As we head back outside to get on our frozen touring bikes, it is snowing tiny dry flakes. Ice bikers, mount your machines! There are now lots of hills with 10 - 15 percent grades. We are hot pedalling our fully loaded touring bikes up, and cold coming down. This is beginning to look like a masochist exercise in sadism. We start at river level, then pedal up gruelling knee-bleeding inclines to shoot back down and lose all of the precious elevation we had labored to gain the past twenty minutes. This is bicycle touring? Pointe-à-la-Frégate lived up to its name at a bone-numbing 4º C with a brisk NW wind. We stopped for lunch at a Dixie Lee Chicken place. It is an inside day for sure. I had a difficult time dismounting my touring bicycle. My feet are frozen again and my fingers are numb. Mexico is starting to sound real good. Are there any good roads in Mexico for bicycle touring? We cycled into officially closed Forillon National Park at 3:30 PM. That's the trouble with cycle touring so late in the season. Not many of the usual facilities are still open. We pedalled into Loop C of the campground and guess what? We ran smack into two workers finishing up for the season. I asked them, "Possible to camp here?" "Not possible!" they reply. Gee. Thanks a bunch. Forillon National Park closed officially yesterday. It even had showers. We threw our legs back over our cold little touring bikes and pedalled off down the road. In a short distance, we found a hiking trail going off from the road. We dragged and pushed our touring bikes up a thirty foot-incline to a semi-flat area. We thought for sure there would be no one around in this middle of nowhere location. Ah, the life of a wild camping bicycle tourist. Almost immediately, three cars stopped. They would come around the corner, see the gorgeous flaming sunset, and stop. No one came up the trail where we are camped though. We climbed over a mile vertical today on our fully loaded touring machines -- 5480 feet -- in just over 100 kilometres. My aching patella. |
