In a good way for us. Well, lying is a stretch, but I’d like to see a cone of predictability for rainstorms kind of like a hurricane track prediction. What’s the real probability? Turns out it’s pretty low. The hills and rivers here seem to make predicting storm paths as hard as it is in Central PA.
We woke up at 4:45 today prepared to break camp and hit the road to beat the rain projected for 9:00 a.m. in Rimouski. After both our alarms went off, John called over from his tent, “The weather’s looking better.” “So, you want to sleep in a little longer?” “Yeah!”
We didn’t need to set a snooze alarm cuz less than 5 minutes later, The via Canada train came through blasting its horn. I stuck around in the tent until 5:30, but it was really a useless cause trying to get back to sleep as the campers next to us were packing up and every time we moved in the tent their dog started barking, followed by their exhortations to it to not do that. We ate and got packed up and hit the road by 6:50.
The first half of the ride was pretty easy, some hills but no steep grades. We did get some rain but it was pretty light and really didn’t get us wet. I checked the radar and the rain was to the south and east of us, not far, but far enough. The last part of the first half of the ride was a nice descent into Mont Joli invite on down to the St Lawrence.
There things changed. No rain but a relentless headwind really made the rest of the afternoon a slog, and we change leads quite often trying to save energy. It wasn’t very effective as the wind was coming in an angle where you really couldn’t hide from it. However, we were fine and made it to Rimouski by three, picked up some supplies and took John’s bike to a shop to get his chain changed.
We’re staying with Philip again, and since he had some volunteer work to do and had to take care of his girlfriend’s dog tonight, we have the place to ourselves. John fixed a slow leak in his front tire, and I went to the local supermarket and picked up some pasta and sauce and we cooked ourselves dinner.
We spent the rest of the evening routing our ride to Trois Pistoles tomorrow. From there will be taking the ferry to the North shore to finish the loop around Saguenay Lake. That should take about a week, and then we’ll ferry back to this south side and start heading to Montreal. John hit the sack, and I wrote this entry, and did some more route planning for the next couple days. Off to bed!
Leave a Reply