I slept pretty good last night and subsequently slept in a bit. Outside the wind was blowing pretty good from the East which meant I should wait it out. I decided to worked on blogging instead and finally got on the road around 11 which is very late. The find was 24km/hr plus gusts and I was making it nowhere fast. I was also a bit fatigued from all of the previous couple of weeks and just couldn’t get going.
I took a long time just to make 20 kilometers and around that time I decide to stop for some food: bagels with peanut butter and chocolate, I had two!
Back on the road I ran into Tim who was 4 days into his cross Canada bicycle tour to Victoria. He was an ex-army guy with a really positive attitude. I told him what I could about the road ahead gave him the standard advice of travel light. Maybe another 10 kilometers up the road I saw a gaggle of cyclists under a covered area beside the road. There was a couple with a small boy of about 1 years old traveling West to Vancouver and a group of four young adults (two gals and two guys) traveling from Vancouver toward St. Johns.
While the four left I had a very brief conversation with the couple heading West. I wanted to draft the group though so I had to cut it short and high tailed it to meet the group. The group was cycling in this order: Louie, Cello, Graham and Georgia with Louie more or less leading with no breaks. After a few minutes of drafting I did a pull up front to share the load. We rotated between Louie and I for quite a while until Cello took a pull on a very narrow and windy stretch.
It was tough going so I rode to the front and cranked a good 7 km into the wind at a decent clip. They were riding to Espanola then heading South over some of the islands to take a boat which cut out some time of simply taking the highway around Lake Huron. We took a smaller road instead of the highway from about 30 kilometers outside of Espanola. It was a nice peaceful and quiet ride through the countryside with little ranches along the road. We had a lot of time to talk and rode side by side for a lot of it. There was too much conversation to repeat here but it was a very pleasant ride and we seemed to get to Espanola in no time.
We stopped at a subway to discuss routes and plans. I myself decided to go for it as far as Sudbury which was another 70 kilometers even though it was around 4pm. They gave me some cream for the saddle sores that acts as a lubricant during the ride and helps the healing process before parting ways.
Please check out what the group is up to Here!
I was fairly tired but I just kept counting down the kilometers in groups of 10 as if that was the final destination in 8 kilometers to go, 7 kilometers to go until I reached the next 10 and started over again. I simply just kept going knowing I could make it before dark and that I had a place to stay when I got there.
Note there is bad road once you enter Sudbury taking highway 55 but there was not much traffic. I even found a gravel bike path for about a kilometer. I found my cousin Janice’s place very easily and was greeted by her father 93 year old Clayton Price who was married to my grandma’s sister May who has since passed away. Though Janice was not there, her sister Gwen (my main contact) and her husband Rick, and here brother Barrie and wife Diana where there. And who could forget to mention Jahlyn(7 years old) and Austin(9 years old)!
Gwen made up some dinner for me and I had a beer or two before cleaning up. It was nice they had all waited around to meet me and it was nice to meet family I had never met or really knew of before.