7/18/09: Off route for the remainder of Ontario; Norland, Ontario to Bancroft, Ontario; 67 miles.
I’ll tell you what, you do this long enough - and you all know how much I love cycling, so let me preface that right now - that it just begins to beat you down. We’re there. This was 8 straight days and some 510 miles of riding. I feel it mentally and physically. Today we both rode with a touch of ambivalence and a whole lot of tired bodies. There’s no snap to the legs and there’s no sense of wonderment as you’re cruising along. It was automatic. It was robotic. It was HARD. This is when you know you’re in need of a rest day or days. So this is how I felt when I woke up……..and I think I’m speaking for Ryan to.
We had a very nice 5th wheel trailer to sleep in last evening, but I was a bit unsettled in my sleeping. Could be that the fatigue is beginning to have an effect on my sleep pattern or I’m so dialed into either my little Hotel Hilleberg and my sleeping pad and bag that I now have problems in other settings. We’ve been pushing hard so as to make Ottawa by Sunday, and I think the push is putting a hammer on us. We both left this morning on our bikes very silent and very tired, and it was taking us longer and longer in the morning to “get our legs.” Our intention was to make Renfrew today, which is on Rt 17, and about 40 or so miles west of Ottawa. This was the gameplan, to ride about 130 miles today over some challenging Canadian Shield country. We put the plan together to meet with Neil and Cheryl at Renfrew late in the afternoon – maybe! Ryan would call them around noon or 1 to give them the final call on whether we could do it or not. And to be honest, both Ryan and I were in no condition to ride 130 miles of power climbing. But…….we thought we’d give it a try.
We got it going around 8:30am after a very slow packing and ride prep session. We were dragging for sure. And we got rolling on a partly sunny/cloudy day, a day that was supposed to be a complete bust of a rain day, so I was somewhat anxious to get some distance before the skies burst forth with rain. The wind – a wonderful tailwind out of the west, so we had that going for us. The first half hour of so was slow going even with the tailwind, and I was not in a hurry to do more than 15 mph – and again this was a day without pulling gear. By the time we hit downtown Norland, if you want to call it that we had a pretty good stretch of road. The Rt 45 was jus wonderful, with a nice berm and very good road surface.
About 20 min into the ride is where the power climbing began, and it was nothing but up and down for small, medium and longish power climbs, all in the big ring and out of the saddle. The topo up here is undulating all over the place. The first hour or so of power climbing felt good, not great, but good. But I knew that with the relentlessness of this terrain the climbing would soon have an effect on the muscles. We are pretty much out of the farm country and into the bush. There’s no nice long stretches of flats and farmland, with bales and bales of hay laying atop the land as far as you can see. Now we have rock cuts, rocky outcrops and endless tracts of bush – evergreen, softwoods and brush. The streams and ponds are back to the tea color, and the homes and camps are spread very thin along the road. In other words – there just ain’t much out here but woods and rock!
Rt 45 east changed to Rt 503 east, and the towns listed on the map where sometimes no more than a sign with one to two houses in the area, or just a town sign with ………nothing. So you cannot go by the map to plan on finding food, camping, or gas. You have to ask the locals as to what is where, and if there’s anything available up the road. Plans are plans, but without the right information sometimes those plans can be junk. So we pass some of these dots on the map, dots that signify a town or hamlet, and more often than not……..nothing. You really end up riding 20 + miles between actual places of habitation. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining a bit. This was our intention when we decided to ride across Canada – not to stay on exclusively interprovincial freeways. We wanted a taste of Canada from the secondarys and the tertiarys. But it certainly makes thing a bit more complicated in the way of finding food, drink and camping amenities. And we were told by a local that the counties we were riding through were some of the least populated counties in all of Ontario.
Meanwhile up and down and up and down and up and down. This series of road reminded me completely of the stretch of road up in the Black Forest called Rt 44. We lovingly call it power climbing hell, and this stretch here in Ontario was equally as challenging, just longer! Much longer. Three days worth of riding longer. And as I told some of you before in a previous log, power climbing can literally just suck the juice out of your legs, slowly, over time, so that you have two lifeless stumps attached to your torso and clipped into the pedals. Before you know it you’ve no snap in the legs when you get out of the saddle, and your really know it when you’re beginning to dread each corer or curve in the road because you know you’re about to launch into another power climb. And another. No end in sight.
We get about 2 hour in and I feel it already. Ryan to. I begin to feel less like I’m dancing on the pedals and more like I’m a dump truck chugging up a nastly little accent. And I power over the top, descent, round a corner, and then do it all over again. Three hours in, same thing. By this point I was thinking about our first rest break, a place called Bancroft, where we figured we’d be about 60-70 miles in. My legs were pretty tired, my mind was kind of numb, and my enthusiasm was waning. And more than anything, my ability to contemplate another 60-70 miles of that kind of terrain was faltering. I though I could do it with some pop and sugar infused into my body, but it was not going to be pretty.
The road changed again, this time to Rt 28 north, and then Rt 28 east. The surface was generally good, with a few non-bermed sections every now and then. The terrain – the same undulating shield as before. Beautiful to be sure, but challenging to ride on – big time. We finally got into Bancroft about 4:15 hrs into the ride, with a total of 67 miles in the bag. Now all we had to do was the same thing again – or did we? Ryan pulled in about 10 min later and we talked. I suggested that we would probably be able to pull off the full ride, BUT it wouldn’t be pretty, and we would likely put in a 9+ hour day in the saddle. And we were averaging 17 mph for God’s sake! So we decided to just put in another 2 hours to get in a nice 90+ mile ride. But we needed to not only coordinate with Ryan’s parents, we also needed to find a town to stop in that had camping and food amenities. And up here, that was a tall task to make all the round pegs fit just right.
Ryan talked to a lady who owned the store where we got our cokes and cookies. She came out to talk to me on their little patio area. And the new was not good. Nothing she had said lay between Bancroft and Renfrew. Not a camping place at all. A couple of gas station stores, but nothing else in those 70 miles. And we certainly weren’t going to ask Ryan’s folks to “squat” in the Canadian Shield bush for a night! So next question to the woman, “how hilly was the terrain between Bancroft and Renfrew?” Very hilly was her response. Ok. Now picture was beginning to make itself quite clear. Plan change! Bancroft was now our home for today, by default.
And we were both pretty happy NOT to do another 70 miles of power climbing. So Ryan tried to call his folks, but their cells were not getting a signal, so he couldn’t even leave a message. He had to call his sister in So Cal and have her continue to try to reach them so as to get them NOT to go to Renfrew, but to drive back west to Bancroft. We just hung out at the café, ordered a breakfast and had some coffee. It took several attempts for Ryan to finally touch base with his sister and her to leave a message with Neil and Cheryl once their cells got service again. Ain’t easy out here folks. It’s the Canadian Shield!
We finally headed to Subway to eat our usual. Walked in and one of the girls behind the counter asks if we were Ryan and Pete. She said that Cheryl called left a message that they’d meet us at 3:30pm at the Subway. So we just chilled and talked with a couple of local young fellows who were mountain bikers. They treated Ryan and I like we were celebs once they found out what we were doing and how far we’d come. Had a great time talking to them and maybe even motivating them for something they’ll do one day down the line. And next to us was a motorcycle dude who overheard our conversations with the young mt bikers, and then this guy was giving us kudos and props. You KNOW you’re out of hand when the biker dudes are hitting you with your props!
Neil and Cheryl arrived around 3:30, and then we go off to find a camping area, just around the corner – this after they were damned near all the way to Renfrew to meet us. Major props to them for putting up with our crazy riding schedules and changes of plans every other day. We ended up at a nice little place a few miles outside of Bancroft, us in our Hillies and his folks in a nice little cabin. Right now I’m listening to a family reunion down in the lower section of the campground. There’s a DJ, fireworks, and a lot of people down there. The owner of the campground said everyone was invited (it’s her family that’s down there). Don’t quite know if I want to leave my little tent sanctuary for the noise?
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