Hudson Hawksbury Oka - It's the Ottawa River Ride!

A bike ride? A boat ride? Or Both? The Oka-Hudson Ferry

We started at Hudson train station.

This was supposed to be an easy recovery ride after Jay Peak on Sunday. It turned out to be seriously head-windy (30 km/h with gusts to 50 km/h) and long with 110 km total distance.

The main challenge was to ride against the wind to Hawkesbury Ontario.


Ottawa River

Halfway to Hawkesbury at the Quebec-Ontario border, is this power dam. It offered excellent picnic terrain for a great lunch stop.

Then we reached Hawkesbury, crossed the bridge back to Quebec, and rode with incredible tailwinds on Route Verte #1 down the river to Oka.



Perfect paved shoulders - ideal for riding fast with big tailwind!

When I arrived at the ferry, a minivan was being manually pulled (with a rope and 20 humans in a tug-of-war with gravity) up the steep initial hill from the ferry - with lots of tire smoke.

I took the Hudson-Oka ferry (picture above) back to Hudson and that was a very nice Monday ride.

Here's the ride map, courtesy a bike ride Google Maps mashup. The link provides complete step-by-step directions. Or you can fake it, I mean just follow the river, like I did! (click on the the "map" button to see the non-satelite version)



View Larger Map

Now, if I only knew how to adjust the picture display size here in the blog. %$###@ computers!