GP Day 1 — Good Touring Karma

12pm: Quick update while stopping for lunch, mostly photos!

9pm: In for the evening after 61 very beautiful and interesting miles, The day started off in the high 70s. I had stayed with John and his friend Beth at their hotel so Sarah and Matt could enjoy a restful night without a crazy cyclist waking them up at stupid-dark-thirty.

On our way to the trail up to Grand Isle, we saw Sarah walking and stopped for a short chat, and a photo op before we HEADED DOWN THE WRONG PATH. I misunderstood exactly where the ferry that wasn’t running because of mechanical problems, and guided us 5+ miles to a dead end where the ferry would have been. Dreading the thought of a 10 mile detour back to a different route, I saw a man in his boat fishing by the ferry dock. Dana’s dad Bill Miller’s prophetic words circled in my head: “It doesn’t hurt to ask!” So, I asked and the man hemmed and hawed that he didn’t have enough room for the bikes. I said we could do one bike at a time and take the bags off to make it easier. I even offered him $. He finally agreed and I went to tell John that we had a private ferry. I went first and got to the other dock, unloaded Papa H and my bags, and Tom from NJ went back and picked up John. When we got John unloaded I pulled out a twenty and Tom said, “No, I’ll take the good deed and the good Karma and that’s enough.” Namaste, Tom. Whew, that was a bullet dodged.

The temps were soon in the high 80s and we stopped for lunch and water refill and continued heading to our Warm Shower’s host cabin — a rustic cabin with no road and no electricity and no running water. More on that later. First we had to go through the border and the nice woman there was very impressed by our trip plans and what we had in our bags. Moreso that we didn’t have alcohol, firearms, tobacco, or a number of other things. She also asked where we were staying tonight and I pointed to the marker on the map. She asked the address and we replied that the host only gave us the coordinates, not an address. Well, the complication of finding out more details was enough for her to just say, “Go ahead and have a good trip!’ We made it to Canada on day 1. Yay.

We’re in Quebec and it’s French speaking and neither of us knows any French. Fortunately, there are a lot of English speakers. We had a nice early dinner at l’Iceberg restaurant, and then went to a grocery store and convenience store in Lacelle to pick up a beer. The cabin was another 1.5 miles and about 6 pm we headed there. Storms were predicted for Friday morning so we hoped the cabin would offer respite for the evening and an early start.

Execept we couldn’t find it. The map took us to an intersection that showed as 4-way on the map but was really 3 way, and the missing road was where the cabin marker was! ????? Confused, I started looking for anything that looked like a road nearby and I happened on a driveway where Mario was just exiting on his e-bike. I asked him if he knew about the cabin and he said he had only been living there for a couple of weeks and didn’t know the area. BUT, his nephew who he lived with was a bike traveler himself and he would be happy to help us find it. I left John with Mario to wait for Ben and went to find the cabin. Mario had said that Ben would probably be fine with us camping in the yard. Long story short, the cabin was hot, VERY rustic and probably would have been fine on a cooler day. I called John and he told me Ben was on his way so I headed back over the rough field road to Ben’s house. We were invited in and met his dog, Sirius, and to keep it shorter, had a wonderful evening of chatting with Ben and Mario and are now bedded down in the air conditioned living room, getting a good rest for an early start tomorrow!

Not long after we got settled, a fierce, high wind thunderstorm came through that likely would have drenched our tents.

Touring Karma was good today! G’nite!