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October 10 Monday Bicycle touring from Matane Quebec to Grande Vallee Quebec In the morning we find only a small pool of water settled into the rear corner of our little bicycle touring tent. As I clamber out of the tent I notice we are ten feet away from a fresh plot. Good thing I didn't go stumbling around too much in the dark last night or I would have fallen into the hole. We cycle all day and have candlelight Thanksgiving dinner in bed. How romantic. Actually, we are in a closed roadside stop or 'route halte.' It is freezing outside and we have just spent the last hour climbing a fifteen percent grade and are soaked to the skin with perspiration. Once we stopped pedalling and got off our bikes, the only way we could get warm was to set up the tent to block the chilling wind and climb into our sleeping bags. Dinner is a couple of packages of Kraft macaroni dinner with diced tomatoes thrown in for flavour. It is hot and sumptuous. My feet, on the other hand (is that possible?), feel like blocks of ice. Happy Thanksgiving! After our delicious cycle touring meal of Kraft dinner, Sharon makes cucumber-cheese-tomato sandwiches and I drink the two-litre Coke that I lugged over 196 kilometres and up 4880 feet today on our cycle tour. At least the pop is cold. We didn't know it was Thanksgiving until we noticed all the stores were closed and schools we went by were dark. We though that Thanksgiving wasn't until next weekend. Well, that explains the cars with groups of people in them yesterday, touring the road. And all the hunters out for goose dinners. It is cold in the wind. Luckily it has been behind us and was pushing us along on our overloaded touring bicycles. The road was fairly flat until twenty kilometres before Grande Vallee, then it took off like a skyward rocket. The St Lawrence River continues to look more like an ocean than a river. Huge breakers smash against the rock wall that built along the road. It reminds me of the cycle tour we did of the Oregon coast -- only this time the wind is with us. So far. |
