Today marks one month from the time we dipped our bikes in the pacific ocean and scattered some of Grandpa’s ashes off the West coast! To celebrate… We decided we’d go for a bike ride… Just head east dad said, it’s a good direction!! So here we are, all of a sudden in plaster rock!
Although, I am convinced that somewhere along the route we did a little hoky poky and turned ourselves around and are back in the western Rockies! If we weren’t going up today, we were going down (wooooo!!!). They say that if you uncoil your intestines you’d have something like a 15 m straight length… If you flattened our route today, you could probably have a highway all the way to Moncton! Over the past month I have noticed that there are consistently three routes overland… Trains, traffic and telephone poles! The train route tends to follow the river with no drastic change in direction or elevation… The telephone pole (or high current electic cables) follow the most direct route, or the path that would coincide with the direction crows fly! Then there is the traffic route, the path of least resistance, when transports are involved it is more closely matched with the trains and when there are no transports involved (today as an example) there tend to be more similarities with the telephone poles! Occasionally the paths cross and occasionly they run parallel… But thus far, we can vouch that they all definitely head east!
The day started off sluggishly… We were both exhausted from 4 days of inescapable heat and it was another warm morning! We crossed into New Brunswick early in the day…. To our surprise though, there was no big entrance sign. It was suprising because it was the first province boundary that was included on road signs, at the bottom of each giving the distance to ‘nouveau-brunswick’! So I had worked myself up for definitely a road sign and potentially fireworks and a magician that could make a rabbit appear! None of the above were included but our clocks did jump ahead an hour! So, as a token to ‘N-B’ I took a picture of the first road sign that did appear…
At mid-day we had blue skies ahead of us but it was dark, raining with sporadic thunder crashes en derriere! Not even my rose coloured glasses could see a rainbow in my rearview mirror! The weather worked out for the best, we rode with the front of the storm for the rest of the day, it had a brisk breeze and the odd light sprinkle just to cool us off perfectly!
At Grand Falls we came off the highway and are taking the northern, sparse route across the province! The roads at hilly, fun and have very little traffic on them! Tomorrow we have a 150km section with NOTHING on it! Not even a farmers field or a gas station… (we’ve made 8 pitas and dad has a family sized bag of licorice (think costco!)). But before tomorrow is tonight.. We are in the small town amongst small towns; my definition of small is when you walk past the cemetary, I could only distinguish 3 different last names amongst the stones, a lucky find is a hyphenation of two of the three! Another small town distinguishing feature was that the road coming into town didn’t have any lines on it (white or yellow!). It is though, a small town with big ambition… They host the annual world pond hockey tournament (biggest in the world!) and there was a sign saying that they have the biggest fiddleheads (if your not a bussel sprout person… You probably have steered clear from fiddleheads too!). We are at Bakers B&B for the night with wonderful hosts, we are fueled up on food from the chip hut- esque place nextdoor as everyhing else closes down before 7 in small towns (we should have known!)
We look forward to a big day tomorrow that will inevitable bring us close to Moncton! How close? You’ll have to wait and see!
3 biking days remain, a different province each day and at the end… Friends, family and lobster!!! Start boiling the vat of water now because here we come! (we’ll likely have leftover pitas too… But don’t count on the licorice!)
Sara
