Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City

We’re on the road again!

We wanted to do a week-long cycling trip somewhere closer to home this year, and decided to go from Ottawa to Quebec City via Montreal and the Eastern Townships. This route allowed us to visit family in Ottawa, friends in Montreal, and hopefully have some time to enjoy local cheese and beer en route!

Trip planning went about as expected:

• 1.5 weeks beforehand we had a day of finagling getting a bike rack and bikes and gear onto a car headed for Ottawa, as Via Rail doesn’t take bikes from Toronto to Ottawa
• grand intentions of packing four days before we left became most of the packing done two days before we left (at least it wasn’t the day before!)
• a clever friend asking the night before we left if we had re-waterproofed the tent since we had damp patches when last we used it (we hadn’t, and the tent went to Ottawa already with the bikes)
• but also some excellent route recommendations for Ottawa-Montreal from our cyclist friend Lasha (take old Highway 17 on the shore road instead of the Google-recommended route, which takes you over loose gravel)

And then we were off! We took the train to Ottawa on Friday after work, had some family visits that night, and treated the tent fly with waterproofing spray. Saturday morning we had a delicious and fortifying breakfast with Joel’s mom, brother, and aunt, and then we headed out! The first part in Ottawa was lovely (Joel lived there for 18 months and knows all of the cycling routes), and the rest of the route took us by big houses along the river as we retrained our muscles into cycling shape. Notable food: delicious strawberries and squeaky cheese curds from a farmer’s market, and cold beer at 100 km (a welcome relief from the “feels like 32” weather). As we continued on, we found a fortuitously-placed campground just west of L’Orignal, at 120 km into our day. We swam in the Ottawa river and watched the sun set across the water as we made dinner, then watched a fireworks show on the Quebec side of the river before falling asleep.

The next day was also spent covering ground. We had rain right at the Quebec border, and spent the rest of the ride barely ahead of the storm as we raced towards Montreal. At 70 km in, we hopped onto a commuter train to get to Montreal sooner… and ended up using that time gained to recover at Lasha’s place, instead of going out on the town! It was definitely time well spent, after 190 km in our first two days.

The next day we had alternating sun and thunderstorms as we went along the dedicated cycling trails of the Route Verte: through tropical-feeling Île Sainte-Hélène in Montreal; through fields in the suburbs; everything paved and mostly flat. Despite our late start (and complaining butts), we still covered 100 km before arriving in Granby in the Eastern Townships. We scoped out a spot to camp in a park before heading to a microbrewery for dinner, but it turns out that camping spot wasn’t needed: a friendly man at the bar named Denis was flabbergasted by the amount of bags we were travelling with, by bicycle no less, and he insisted we stay with him and use his shower. (We decided to not not read that as commentary on our ‘arome de cycling’!) We were happy to accept, and were delighted and grateful to find the next morning that he also fed us breakfast before we rejoined the cycling path that was 500 m from his door.

The Route Verte that we followed for most of our trip is part of the 5000 km of dedicated cycle paths that various levels of Quebec government have invested in. The level of maintenance varies from route to route; paved paths with kilometres-travelled signs suddenly give way to chunky gravel running along the riverside, which eventually led onto hard-packed gravel with rest stops every 5 km or less.

That day of cycling was also full of variety. After second-breakfast we decided to detour for some local food, alas it was not to be (the microbrewery was not serving at that hour, and the cheese factory had been turned into a restaurant), after that it was flat and paved path over old rail beds for a while, and we passed many other cyclists on fancy fast bikes, seems to be quite a popular area! That eventually gave way to what Joel called “nice variety”… I realized I should have known we were in trouble when this Route Verte path was called “La Montagnarde”, ‘montagne’ being French for mountain. We took several breaks and went through lots of Gatorade, but we made it up and over them and enjoyed the downhills as we rolled into Magog, 60 km later. I was extremely grateful that Joel had booked a nice B&B that night that included massages; that plus the short(er) day of cycling was our only rest day of the trip. (Oops.) We wandered the shore at sunset and had an incredibly filling dinner of fondue and beer at La Memphré (microbrewery), and vowed to return to Magog!

We did have to climb that road in the distance...

After a great cooked breakfast at Au Virage B&B, we headed out. Sherbrooke, the first city we passed through, was full of unnecessary hills and earned no love from us. We briefly joined the tail end of a pack of fifteen local cyclists as we climbed up more hills, but lost them on the downhills as we needed to go fast and make up ground. This plan felt like it was being thwarted as the Route Verte led us along rough gravel paths fo a while, so we did some executive decision-making: we’d strike off in a slightly different direction and visit a cheeserie (cheese factory), and still arrive in the same place after cycling the same distance! …except that early into the 20 km and 300 m of climbing (and descent) later, we realized that there might have been a reason why this was not the way that the Route Verte took us (HILLS). But we continued on, and enjoyed exceptionally fresh cheese and a blueberry-chocolate ice cream sundae at the top of a hill before continuing to camp down at the bottom of a hill. The next morning we discovered, to our delight, that the hasty waterproofing in Ottawa had worked, and we were all dry despite the overnight storm!

This painted rock-cow was stationed on the highest hill

We were back on the Route Verte the next day, this time on a flat gravel rail bed (think baseball diamond gravel) from outside Asbestos to a fairly direct route northwest through Victoriaville, a beautiful little tourist town which broadcast early 2000s music in the streets. We stuck around for the farmer’s market and headed out. We intended to do at least 100 km that day to make a short day to Quebec City the next day, and at 85 km we found ourselves taking a rest/gatorade break outside of a small town. We were intending to make a few more km before surreptitiously setting up our tent at a rest stop somewhere outside of the town of Lyster. As we rested and sugared up for the final push, two women on bikes stopped to talk with us. One of them asked where we’d be camping, and didn’t buy our vague generalities — “I don’t think there is camping just outside of town! …do you want to stay at my house?” — which was surprising, to say the least! Her son had cycled across Canada and she remembered how much he appreciated whenever somebody offered to host him. She offered us a bed, a shower, and produce from her garden, and we were incredibly grateful.

The next day was more mix of paved and gravel trails along fields and treed paths, but since it was our last day on the road, it flew by. We made our way along the cast-iron truss-bridge where our awkwardly wide bikes meant we got to talk to other cyclists, who let us know we’d be seeing the Grand Prix Cyclists Quebec that day. Watching the Grand Prix cyclists was humbling: we’d been impressed at how we’d finally gotten into shape with our bags by cycling just over 600 km in 7 days, and here they were racing over 200 km in 5 hours, with over 3000 m of altitude gained (same as our entire trip!) as they cycled up into Quebec’s Old City and then dropped down to the riverside, repeating that 12 km course 16 times. We meandered and admired the public art along the riverside, and made our way to our Airbnb and then delicious food as we explored Old Quebec.

Fancy restaurant food

Camping-fancy food

The next morning we continued our explorations of Quebec: pastries, tourist traps, wrought iron shops, and lunch at the Plains of Abraham. We eventually caught a bus back to Montreal and spent the night with our friend Gab before we took the train back to Toronto.

It’s been a wonderful trip, and we are so tired, happy, sore, delighted, incorrigible and again reminded how fortunate we are.

7 days, 611 km, 3057 m ascent, what a trip!