Les Éboulements to Quebec, QC
Traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq
121 km
Spits of rain, bits of sun, nips of wind, 18 ÂşC
We began early and biked into the mist, away from the wonderful spot where we’d camped indoors and eaten dinner in the dark to keep from being discovered.
The weather outside has been strange lately, spits of rain, heavy and light, wind from all sorts of sides, mostly towards our face. We had some good hills to very quickly warm up the legs.
Lots of beautiful scenes and vignettes but very few that we photographed. It is a day that exists mostly in our memories. I was telling someone on the phone about the difficulty, the impossibility of translating so much of what goes on in our days. I can take a photo of log trucks but how do I write to you about the smell of it or the slipstream of air which accompanies it? It is good fodder to be chewing on.
We had a later than usual lunch and then ate our weight in nachos and fries. It was tempting to take a short nap after but we stayed strong!
We took a short stretch of a cycle route called “La Route Nouvelle France”, it was beautiful and I wished we could have afforded ourselves the luxury to move slower through it all. Quebec is a beautiful and strange place. It would be very difficult for it to become my place but it is magnificent to catch glimpses of it like this. Old men sitting in the yard peering at us, old women reading papers, young kids walking back from school, dogs, cats, store signs, and more and more. (On a sidenote: I saw my first real estate sign, you know the ones that homes have on their lawns when they are for sale?, featuring a person of colour, about time after 52 days of heading West!)
I was on the phone collecting some audio and an old man walked up to me and asked about our trip and offered his backyard.
We are staying with my dear friend John whom I haven’t seen in almost four years ago. When we last met in Pancake Bay, just outside of Sault Ste. Marie, he was bicycling West as we are now, headed towards his parents. He was on the road for over a year.
He greeted us with a GIANT dinner, harvested some fresh herbs from the backyard, and we stayed up way past our bedtime catching up. It is difficult to convey how sad he was to hear that we’d be leaving the next day. Not enough time in these wonderful places and beautiful people. A good problem to have.
