Variable terrain

Naturally, stoke level seems to vary with the hills and conditions.

Julian and I are often a good pair in getting things we want from others; I am much more willing to play social games and he is much more willing to ask people for weird things. Our campsite was cash only, but we couldn’t bear to keep riding so we went to sleep thinking “we’ll figure it out in the morning.” Julian is always preaching about how great it is to have cash so we both had plenty, but the problem with Canada is that one forgets it is its own country with its own currency (I.e. we only had USD, not CAD—this is obviously incredibly stupid but we had many things to organize). At the hot dog stand the day before, they took our USD without fuss, but the young girl manning the campsite didn’t have the authority to make exceptions.

I woke up fully prepared to have to bike ten extra miles to get to a gas station that would give us cash-back. Julian decided this was not desirable so he went to talk to the campground attendant. He came back a few minutes later, grinning. He hadn’t found anyone at the office, so he instead flagged down some local in a truck. After chatting with him, he made a USD-CAD exchange.

After that, we had breakfast with a chipmunk

The next 20 miles felt slow as conditions remained variable and we were low on water (basically nowhere has water drinkable out of the tap and we didn’t want to spend time treating it). We finally made it to a grocery store and feasted in the parking lot, a classic for us.

The scenery is absolutely beautiful, but my god were trail conditions rough for a while. Constant ruts and puddles to go around, and it was actually pretty hot in the middle of the day, despite beautiful weather most of the time.

I am back to my favorite biking tradition of lying down with my head on my helmet during breaks. My body doesn’t feel too tired, luckily, but the palms of my hands are killing me from holding on for dear life through the mud and thick gravel. The riding is more technical than anything else.

An aside: what is up with ATV’s? I don’t get it. They don’t go all that much faster than we do, kick up insane amounts of dust, smell terrible, and look incredibly stupid. We have seen many iterations of riders: a cop on an ATV pulling over a boy on an ATV, high school date night with the girl in the passenger seat looking bored as can be, a family with a four year old in a pink Minnie Mouse helmet, a parade of ten ATV’s that did not care to slow down or get to the side, many dogs letting the wind blow through their ears, etc. But seriously, you’d think they could slow down to avoid kicking up clouds of dust on us considering they have a gas engine to start again. I can’t blame them for not liking us, though, considering we cover the same terrain using our legs.

It was getting late and we had a campsite picked out about ten miles out. We crossed a road and Julian suggested that we might have had enough gravel for the day so we could re-route to zip over there and have dinner.

I hate google maps. I had sworn off it after last thanksgiving’s bikepacking trip (long story), but I guess enough time had gone by that I had forgotten.

First it took us straight off the paved road onto an insanely steep gravel road, we should have turn around then but “at least it’s downhill after this.” Downhill it was, but nice it was not. It was an insanely steep rock cascade. It’s crazy how being hungry and wanting to get to camp can make me shred it down stuff significantly harder than things I used to cry at the thought of doing. What got me was the series of nearly-impassible ruts and puddles and my consequently soaked feet.

Eventually we rolled up to camp and enjoyed a truly heavenly cone of vanilla soft serve at the weird RV Park we were camping at.

Another aside: what is up with RV parks? Why are they all Christmas themed?? The night of our thanksgiving trip that Julian and I got hypothermia, we were stealth camping at a horrible Christmas-themed RV park in Virginia. It looked exactly like the one we stayed at last night, but luckily last night was much warmer (and, ironically, we also had a warmer sleeping bag than we did on thanksgiving).

The tent site was rather difficult to find and a very nice woman in her truck helped us find it. She said she and her husband had been living there for over 30 years! She even invited us to camp at her spot. We declined only because we wanted to go straight to sleep and she would have talked our ears off. The people here are so friendly. I often talk about how southerners are nice and northerners are kind in the US. People here seem to be both.

I took a hot shower, ate dinner, and fell straight asleep, the music and chatter next to us posing absolutely no problem at all.

The next day started out with some chunky gravel but was fairly fast rolling. We ran into a couple from Quebec bikepacking from the opposite direction! They had smaller and less knobby tires than even we do but they didn’t seem to be hating their bikes—that made us feel better. Many people ride this route with big fat-tire bikes. Our bikes seem to be approaching the limit of what one can successfully ride the whole path on.

We had a surprisingly enjoyable lunch at a truck stop restaurant called “Goobies Big Stop” (the town names here are crazy).

After lunch, there were a few big “climbs,” if you can call them that. It’s all rail grade so a “climb” is about ten miles at a 2-3% grade. I once heard a woman say climbs like these were the most brutal, but I don’t think she’d ever biked in Vermont. I happily take this over 14% grade gravel uphills, even if those are shorter.

As a quick afternoon break, we stopped a coffee shop with a beautiful view and feasted on bakeapple cheesecake. It was insanely good.

The rest of the day was mostly smooth-rolling and fast. Flying through such beautiful scenery makes me feel on top of the world.

If we feel unhappy and/or slow, we have a list of what to check:

1. Are you riding on a 1-3% grade and don’t notice?

2. Are you hungry?

3. Are you thirsty?

4. Are your tires aired up enough?

5. Is there a headwind?

At one point we aired up a bit and that made us feel better. Not much to do about the headwind, unfortunately… some of the beautiful open plains can be pretty brutal, but I just get in the drops and pedal hard. Luckily the hurricane coming through Newfoundland is almost completely missing us, but winds will probably pick up a bit as a result.

We stopped for the day at a funny bed and breakfast along the trail. A shower with soap has never felt so good—we are very dirty after riding through mud and having dust sprayed on us all day. Now, happily, off to sleep.