Week 8, part 2 - Sunday's blog, posted on Monday :)

It's time to finish off the blog from week 8. Here is part two folks; fasten your seat belts.

Thursday morning we head from Kingston into Brockville, ON. At this point in the tour, the days start to blur together. This day was fairly uneventful. We rode along a nice bike path for the majority of the day, but stopped partway at a boat tour of the 1000 islands. Our group didn't go on the tour unfortunately, but we did end up making it into camp a lot earlier than usual, which I suppose can be taken as a positive!

We quickly set up our tents, which was good. The space available in the park was limited, and it soon became tent city, with the only available real estate on the slope of a hill.

 

While we sat around waiting for something to do, Christeena braided my hair. It was so great! I wish I had taken a picture... I guess I'll just have to ask her to do it again?! :) Anyways, she braided several girl's hair, and so Dan decided to take a swing at it on Danita's head while Christeena supervised. Always learning on Sea to Sea.  

 

After the braiding and sitting around eating delicious homemade cookies from Jess's mom (her family lived close by), we head into town to do some blogging. At Tait's Bakery we got some Wi-Fi and after telling the very interested owner about what we were doing on Sea to Sea, we also the promise of free breakfast for the next morning! We were very excited. Everyone went to get a brew because the Wi-Fi was getting slow with all of us using it, but I stayed to blog (I knew that Gregg would be checking!). After the blog I joined up with them and had some poutine. It was a delicious afternoon snack :)

 

Dinner was provided by a local church and we had peloton meeting. When it came time to tell stories of donations or receiving money along the road, Sara came up with her mom and told us about how she has a jar in which she saves her money, and when it gets full, donates it to a cause. She was donating the contents of her jar to Sea to Sea, and the total came to over $300.00! So amazing. She was very happy and proud to be able to make that contribution :)

 

 Post-peloton and small groups, I head down to the docks at the lake we were staying at. Christeena is a bit of a "tent-rebel" and sleeps outside each night, (You gotta commend her for it!), and told me she would be sleeping on the dock that night, so I decided to join her and stay under the stars. We were joined by Jess and Katie later on, and had a small group of people come out and hang out there for a while to talk and sit under the stars. Kaitlyn brought cider and snacks to make it a complete party :) The guys tried to play a joke on us by distracting us while one of them slipped into the water, and swam up to the other side of the dock, popping out of the water to scare us, but unfortunately I wasn't scared and all I got was a wet mattress from all the water they splashed up. However, Katie gave a good scream of terror so it was pretty funny. Here is a view of the lake from the hill that I took earlier that afternoon.

 

The next morning, Friday, Zach's angel's head into town for our free breakfast. We brought along with us Christeena and "Little" John Stehouwer, Carla, and Jess. We had breakfast sandwiches with bacon and they tasted amazing. Also, the coffee was pretty great! 

 

Not 15km down the shoreline in our route we had another stop at Jess' place. Her mom had made cinnamon buns and boiled eggs for all of the cyclists, so we stopped and had a few. By the way, the cinnamon buns had cream cheese icing... it was amazing! The view from their street was also beautiful.

 

Here we are, enjoying the coffee and food. Matt looks pretty content.

 

Here is my bike! Across the waters is the state of New York! We were so close!!

 

That day we had a time-trial (TT). For those of you who don't know what this is, a TT is where you bike a particular distance, in our case, 26km, as fast as you can and time yourself. I had only done 1 other TT before, and it was 10km, so this seemed impossibly long. Especially since my last TT took me almost 20 minutes. This was part of my motivation to not participate. However, after seeing all of my riding buddies take off to participate (it started at SAG 2), I decided to join in. The ride was great, but I definitely could feel my body working pretty hard. It was funny... I wasn't tired, but my muscles were pretty tight and starting to burn. Anyways, I did much better this time than on my last TT. I averaged 33km/h and made it in around 47 minutes according to my watch. The actual results wouldn't be released until Peloton that evening :) I wasn't worried about getting first because I knew it wouldn't happen, but I was happy to have participated anyways! Probably helped to work off those cinnamon buns a bit!

 

Camp for the day was at NAV, a conference center in Cornwall, ON. It was a beautiful complex with a pool, bar, restaurant, spa, etc. Unfortunately the spa was all booked and so we couldn't get massages, but we set up tents, took the nicest showers of the entire tour, (some sat in the sauna), blogged, and got a delicious Keith's cider at the pub.

 

At dinner we were surprised by a local church with desserts! Here is just some of the spread that was there.  

 

We also found out at Peloton who the time trial winners were. Katie took second place!!

 

Saturday's ride was a great one because we got to move into our second province, Quebec!! We unfortunately missed the large sign because we were on a separate highway, and could only see it from a distance, but luckily this small sign was to be found along our route :)

 

 

We saw some beautiful lakes...

 

 

And found this great little bagel shop, where the bagels were made on site. Dough was made, poached, and baked in a wood oven. I had to say that it is definitely the best bagel I've ever eaten! Not to put down "Bert Bagels", but.... Quebec knows what's up.

 

A few other riders may have found this site also :)... It might have been so good that I ordered a second helping...!

 

The ride continued with great sights like the following...

 

It was smooth sailing on a beautiful riding day until, about 15km from camp Jess got a flat. A few of us were a little ahead and pulled into the nearest drive where we entered into the beginning of a horror movie plot.

 

Flat tire, middle of nowhere, no cars coming by, and the place we choose to pull into is a closed business with terrible taxidermy of Nationally protected geese hanging from the roof.

Broken down cars and no one in site...  people splitting off from the group in search of an open convenience store...

 

Luckily we all made it back and after the flat was changed, we continued on our way. However, it didn't stop us from playing out in our minds this bad horror movie plot.

 

After the flat we got a bit lost. The C's on the road were saying 2 different things, so we just made a decision to follow one set. We thought we were on the right track, but after several back alleys which resulted in a lack of C's later down the road, we figured a local got a can of spray paint and decided to mess with us a bit... Luckily I still had access to data and so I used google maps to bring us back to the right road. We'll never know what really happened there...

We eventually made it to our stop for the weekend - Kahnawake Survival School. Here is a bit of a blurb that I looked up online because I was intrigued by the school's name.

 

"Kahnawa:ke Survival School was established in September 1978 by parents, students and community members as a strong reaction and response to Quebec’s Language Law Bill 101."

 

I wasn't sure what Bill 101 was, so I looked it up. I found that it was the language law making French the official language of Quebec. I gathered that this school was established to maintain the aboriginal languages of the people there and avoid losing that aspect of their culture by adopting French as their sole language. It is my understanding that the students at the school learn their native language, as well as French and English. I thought it was pretty neat! 

 

That night, since we were too far from Montreal to make a night trip in, we had a progressive Euchre tournament, organized by Julia. It was a lot of fun and I was actually doing pretty well, but some of us wanted to see a movie that night, so we got one of the Sea to Sea vans and head to the closest theatre where we saw Elysium. I won't give anything away for those of you who haven't seen it, but it was a great idea, and in my opinion, a plot ruined by attempting to get an R rating. Oh well. it was our first movie night on tour and we had a great time going out! Here is the crew... well, those who made it into the flash range at least :)
 

 

Sunday was to be our day in Montreal and we didn't have to get up until pretty late because the shuttles to the church didn't leave until 10, however, we got up early that day. Carla was leaving that weekend with her parents and so they took us out for breakfast to Cora's! It was delicious and really fun.

 

When we got back we boarded the school buses we rented and head into Montreal. This is a picture of the church we were worshiping in. It was really impressive.

 

It was a very formal service, but they had a great choir and an excellent sermon on the issue of poverty in our local places of living. Very appropriate.

 

Following a time of refreshments in the "quiet gardens" we went to explore Montreal. Here are some of the sights I got to take before my camera died.

 

Julia and Zach dancing in the bubbles of a bubble machine on the street.

 

A mustache for each day!

 

Very big lollipops at the candy store...

 

And the world's largest gummy bear! Way too big.

 

And drinks in the park, listening to the parade go by.

 

That evening we went to do laundry and were out of luck with every place we went to . Either they were closed or weren't actually laundry facilities... Stupid Google maps... Oh well. It was good bonding time and we got to see a beautiful sunset.

 

And so concludes our blog. Stay tuned for 2 blogs tomorrow! (Have to make up for the missed day, Gregg!)