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October 12 Wednesday Bicycle touring from Forillon National Park Quebec to somewhere before Perce Rock Quest for Percé Rock! Last night was quiet for traffic. I slept well in our tiny bicycle touring tent. It is about 4º C. this morning. There is no wind yet. There is a 'belle vue' across the water. We packed up, got on our fully loaded touring bicycles and coasted down the hill. It is a chilly way to begin the day. We stopped at a hostel for breakfast, but they weren't open in the kitchen yet. We got back on our touring bicycles and pedalled blissfully along until we came to a construction zone where they were oiling the surface. As we hunched over our handlebars on the side of the road we watched the oil truck cover the right lane in black goo. I thought they would let us go through after that. But, no. They turned around and covered the left lane. Okay, I thought, we can still ride our fully loaded touring bicycles down the middle of the lanes where there is no oil. But no. The truck driver turned around and did the very centre. The entire roadway was a black sticky oozy mess. A pickup truck stopped behind us. "Hey, Sharon," I kidded, "go ask that guy if we can throw our bikes into the back of his truck." To my amazement the guy responded with "No problem." I must say that is much better than hearing "I think not." We wasted no time in throwing our fully loaded touring bicycles into the back of his pickup. Inside the truck's cabin was cozy and warm with the heater on high and the sun shining on us through the windshield. What a difference a windshield makes! I sure miss those on my fully loaded touring bicycle. We rode with our gracious host past all the rotten construction, tar, gravel, and oil patches. Now this is how to bicycle tour! In Gaspé, at a Provigo grocery store in the Jacques Cartier Shopping Centre, our hungry bicycle touring stomachs kicked in. We bought rye bread, eggs, icing sugar cake doughnuts, and milk for our cereal. We also bought spandex gloves to keep our fingers a little warmer both when we're on and off our touring bicycles. We can wear them alone or they are small enough to fit inside our famous pretty useless 'stormless-shelter' bicycle touring gloves. We cycled across a bridge leading out of town. Looking for a place to stop and fuel our empty cycle tourists tummies we saw a marina and pulled in there to fill our water bottles from a hose. Back on our bikes, we followed a path that took us under a bridge and lead to a park with a picnic table on the other side. The wind wasn't too strong and the sun was shining in a clear blue sky. The sun wasn't shining very strongly, but it is the warmest in the past few days ... I have lost all craving for ice cream lately, even though we have cycled past numerous 'bar laittes.' We leaned our fully loaded touring bicycles against the sides of the picnic table and, getting out our little bicycle touring Whisperlite stove, got down to business. For breakfast I ate nine eggs, six doughnuts, two banana muffins, and washed it all down with a couple of bowls of hot chocolate. Bicycle touring certainly can work up an appetite. Luckily we caught that ride around the construction, or else I really would have been hungry! Sharon decided to oil our chains. She cleaned my bicycle chain and my touring bicycle's rim. When she went to turn my rear bicycle wheel with her hand, she could barely budge it. "What the?" she hissed. "You've been riding like this? Your brakes are constantly on!" I kind of thought I must be tired in the legs -- even the little hills had been tough on my fully loaded touring bicycle. Then, I remembered yesterday ... when I was pedalling slowly up one of the numerous mountains, I had felt my bicycle's rear tire jerk over sharply for an instant. But then it felt normal again. I thought that maybe a gear had shifted by itself, or maybe my back tire had run over a small rock that I hadn't noticed and had squished out from between the bicycle tire and the pavement. Now I realized what had really happened. A spoke had broken. Great! Go to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. But good luck! The spoke turned out to be on the non-freewheel side of the bicycle wheel. Sharon says that is a lucky break ... if breaking a spoke on a bicycle tour can be considered lucky. If a spoke breaks on the rear, it is almost always on the freewheel side because those spokes have more stress on them from the way the wheel is dished because of the cluster. And when a spoke on the freewheel side happens, to fix it entails removing the cluster in order to put the new spoke in. And sometimes those clusters are notoriously difficult to remove. Like stick it in a vice and let a gorilla move it. Up to this point, I have broken six spokes in total in my lifetime of bicycle touring ... and all of the other five were on the freewheel side. Maybe the bicycle touring gods are looking after me, after all. Replacing a spoke is not so easy a task when one is on the road. *They have flexible carbon fibre spokes now that work in a jiffy and will work well enough to get you down the road to a proper repair facility. Of course we have none of these. So, I took off the bicycle tire and bicycle tube while Sharon found a replacement spoke of the right length from the collection she carries taped to her bicycle's down tube. I threaded the spoke through the hole and tightened it up. We put the rim back on the bike and then Sharon trued the rim to the best of her ability. She's much better at tweaking the right spot than I am. Every time I try straightening out a bike rim, it more resembles a taco chip than a bicycle touring rim. By the time we had finished working on the bikes it was time to eat again. I dug in and polished off a box of Muslix cereal. On the box it says 'Use less than your regular cereal.' I poured the entire contents into my bowl and then added bananas and lots of milk. I then finished off the remaining doughnuts and banana muffins. Ah, to be a bicycle tourist with a gargantuan appetite. By now it was 3:30 PM (almost time for supper! Yeah!). We cycled back to the marina and used the washroom and filled up our water bottles again. There is lots of broken glass on the shoulder. Maybe this place should be called Glasspé? We pedalled away from Gaspé. It didn't take long to get dark. I wanted to cycle all the way to Percé Rock so that I would be able to take a picture of the sun rising behind it in the morning. But, by the time the sun set at 6 PM, we were still about 42 kilometres away -- probably at least a two-hour bike ride. We camped at the first place Percé Rock came in to view. Coming around a corner we saw the famous hole in the rock and stopped to admire it and the sunset over the bay. After the sunset faded, I went to a house on the other side of the road and asked an elderly couple living there if we could camp on their land. Sharon and I had been standing in front of their house watching the sunset and they had been watching us as we looked and pointed this way and that. The old lady said she didn't speak English. She said she didn't own the land over there. I pointed behind their dwelling and said, "Camping. Tent. Vous terrain." At this massacre of the French language, the old gent came forward and began speaking marvelous English. He said we could camp by the trees back up the hill a ways over there on some land they didn't own. No one would mind, he assured me. He even said we could stay in the house across the road. They don't own that either, mind you. The fella who owns it lives in the States and hasn't been there for ten years. The last time he was there he was 65. "Maybe he's dead," I say. The old chap tells us there is no electricity, but the door around back is open. He says it might get cold out in the open tonight, especially if the wind comes up. He told us the guy who owned the house used to have some souvenirs inside, but a bunch of motorbikers from Toronto broke in and stole them and took his Fleur-de-Lys flag out of the house and burned it over there, he said, pointing to the ditch. And some people wonder why the French hate the English? Maybe touring cyclists can help mend some bridges? We passed by the house on our way to a little patch of land that jutted out into St George's Bay. Sharon didn't feel right about staying in someone's house without their permission ... although I was pretty sure the owner wouldn't be showing up tonight. We set up our compact bicycle touring tent and had a beautiful view of the rock from our campsite. It is very cold already. We crawled into our bicycle touring sleeping bags, trying to get warm, and ate a few chocolate cookies and water -- which is nice and cold. After reading to Sharon for a while, we lay in our sleeping bags listening to our short-wave radio. We are getting our money's worth out of the candle lantern I bought at Mountain Equipment Co-op. It gives off some heat, too. Sharon says it is one of my purchases that actually worked out. She wasn't keen on it when I first bought it, arguing it would get busted right away. It gives off a surprisingly amount of light and it is cheaper than the batteries we had to constantly buy when we used our flashlights to read and write in our journals. |
