Two good days, two good rides

Destination: Oka!

We rode Montreal -> Laval -> Deux-Montagnes -> Oka today on a perfect summer's day. It was a bit of an exploration ride, one we'd wanted to do for years, so today we left the front door on bike, and two hours and twenty minutes of effort and we arrived at the ferry (traversier) at Oka.

Oka village was about two hours twenty riding time and 50 km in distance from (approx) Montreal, which we define here as Parc/St-Joseph.

Did we say a "ferry?" Yes, to cross the Ottawa river to Hudson. And to our surprise, it was a new ferry (a pair of them) and not the barge-type they had in the past. We paid the two dollars and we had a nice break in the ride on the open water. Summer's great!

The ferry ride was shared with a dozen other cyclists. Some were going to Rigaud to take the ferry there to come back to the north side of the river. No one else was coming back to Montreal!

In Hudson, we got back on shore and started the ride back to montreal. It's a longer ride back, but we had a tailwind to help us along. This is a quiet, narrow country road with big houses and some nice views. We stopped at the first dep we found for a recharge (the CFM traditional chocomilk and Reeses peanut butter cups)

The route was Vaudreuil, Pincourt, then back on to Montreal island at Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue and then the excellent Lakeshore boulevard (speed limit 30 km/h) to Lachine, then along the river though the nearly-nonstop waterfront park in Lasalle and Verdun. The entire section of on-island riding is truely excellent. We passed on to the Lachine Canal at atwater market, then through Old Montreal and up berri and axis north to villeneuve and home.

118 kilometres, 5:30 riding time, around 6 hours total time, and an average speed of 21.6 km/h.

Inspiration: the gazette cycling blog had a thing about the lakeshore recently, and I had wanted to do oka, and I knew the ferry would cross the river, so I made a ride out of these ingredients.

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Louiseville to St-Elie-de-Caxton saturday.

We took Sid on a Mauricie (introduction to Maskinongé area) ride, a modest 80 km, and a nice tripling of his annual mileage so far this year. So, this was an easy version of our recent Maskinongé explorations. That's what we thought. Sid was thinking about something different, like his sore, sore ass. Lucky for him the last 25 kilometres are steadily downhill.

We did a bid of explorations north of St-Severe to Charette, and we agreed that this valley is one of the nicest we had ever seen.

The weather forecast was iffy, but we had less than one minute of rain all day.

Supper in Louiseville was greasy. But it did give back some of the thousands of calories we burned.