The camp site was beautiful. The bugs were not. Black flies that landed and bit causing very visible (and itchy) red marks in seconds. Small, but nasty. We missed the mosquitoes at night because we were in our tents by dusk. That wasn’t the case at 4:30 this morning when we got up. I ate in the tent again, and resisted opening the “hatch” because of those darn flies. But this morning it was the ‘skeeters. I went out with my first round of packed stuff and by the time I got back to the tent, there were at least six flying around. I have magic potion stickers that Sally S. gave to us last year, but they were packed away on the bike and by the time I found them, I would’ve had twenty more bites. Best defense is to get on the bike and hightail it faster than a mosquito can fly (about 1-1.5 mph. That doesn’t work for the ones you run into!)

8:50 pm. Just some pics for the moment. Wifi connection not very good. On our campground on the Saguenay fjord is beautiful. Heading for the town of Saguenay tomorrow. More when we get there Friday afternoon.

Update July 28, 1:05 pm: We slept in until 7 today since we didn’t have to leave for the ferry until 9. We had ridden to the ferry office yesterday afternoon to make reservations, so we just had to show up. It rained overnight — the best rain to have, and was still cloudy and a passing shower at 7:15 made sure everything the wind had dried was damp again for packing.

Another good day. 47.8 mi, 2688 ft of climbing from Rimouski to Trois Pistoles.

beautiful day, didn’t have to do an early start, nice weather, moderate headwinds (at least until the afternoon) but also I’ve been a bit of going up. I didn’t say climbing because at one point John asked if we were actually going up, and I replied yes for another mile and a half at 1% grade. There were some harder sections including one about 7% right out of the gate from Rimouski, but nothing that challenging.

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.

75 miles, 2561 ft of climbing from Campbellton New Brunswick to Val Brilliant.

Beautiful day, nice and warm but not too hot, and all the climbing was that about 1%. I followed the Matapédia River for almost 60 miles. It was like riding a rail trail it was so gradually up. Early morning traffic was light, but if I’m much busier today we’re on with lots of trucks and campers heading in both directions. Later in the afternoon we got off of the main road 132 and we’re on some lovely back roads. Hard to tell the terrain from Pennsylvania except that the majority of the trees here are pine.

Maria, QC to Campbellton, New Brunswick, 53 miles, 2,176 ft of climbing. 7 miles shy of 1,000 for me on this trip. John probably has 3,500 since starting in April.

After some whopper lightning storms last night, the skies cleared this morning and it was another great riding day; but not a lot of pics. Sort of like the Oregon coastline overload I went through last year. Lots of little coves with picturesque little towns are 5 miles apart and if you want some examples, look back in the blog. There will likely be more when we cross the St. Lawrence on Wednesday.

We took the day off today. There were thunderstorms all along our route today and some pretty impressive lighting displays along the bay in front of us. Charles was kind enough to let us invade his space for two days and even lent us his car to go to dinner (fresh and locally sourced salmon linguine for me and cod for John). Good day to chill out and Sunday looks dry for the most part with just a chance of light rain. I did get a whole two miles in riding for coffee this morning, and spent some time lubing and adjusting brakes on P. H.

Woke up to the sounds of ducks, and a number of unknown bird calls, and the shadows of the trees from the early rising sun on the teepee walls. I took an early morning walk around the grounds — the ice skating pond, the glider by the ocean, the private boardwalk — and watched the northern gannets and cormorants on their early morning fishing runs (the gannets tactics are to go up high and dive bomb their prey). We joined Anne for coffee and breakfast while Gui was out on his pre-kayaking bike ride. She recommended Richard Power’s book The Overstory about the connection between people and trees. It’s on my list for the fall. Did I mention Gui was a Phys Ed teacher and has a full gym in one of the buildings “on campus”? He joined us after the ride and we continued our conversations from the night before about touring, longevity and staying in shape and, of course, our two countries approaches to health care and education.

53 miles, 2,037 ft of climbing. Grande Riviera to New Carlisle.

It was a beautiful day for a ride, and today was short by our recent standards, so we took our time. Some headwinds to deal with through the last half, but John and I have synced up enough to know when we need to switch leads to save our energy.

The highlight of the day was arriving at our warm showers hosts’. There is a whole family complex, and two houses that were built from railroad cabooses.

Fearing another rain out according to the weatherman, we got up at 6 and were out of our hostel by 7. We had around 56 miles to do today, depending on which way we went, and rain was supposed to start around 11. We took one last look at the radar and headed out. Suffice to say it never rained on us all day .

We left Gaspé on a great trail that took us around the edge of the bay. It ran along an old train track, and just when our GPS was telling us to turn right, the Route Verte 1 sign said go left. So we did as that’s our preferred route. It led us to a causeway which was shown as connected on our map. As we got closer to the railroad bridge up ahead, the path got sandy and it was hard to control the bikes. Add in that there were car barriers just like the ones on the trail we had been following and we were pretty certain we were still on route.