Petit Temis bike path under attack?

Pit Stop on Petit Temis, many good cyclist-facilities exist along this trail


Welcome to the Petit Temis bridge - now vandalized, see pics in the news article


The classic Petit Temis photo-op, with unusual-for-us early morning light!


The highly excellent Petit Temis bike path between Riviere du Loup in eastern Quebec and Edmonston, New Brunswick is under attack.... from Quad-riders and vandals.

InfoDimanche.com reporter Francois Drouin reports that vandals are vandalizing signs, rest stops, starting fires, and modifying the road-access points to permit the entry of quads on to this bike path.

Here is a bad (=bad funny) computer-translation of the article here. How bad is this translation? Very bad: the Petit Temis has "fantastic wrinkle."

Wow.

We noticed last year on our visit to the Petit Temis that a few quad riders used the Petit Temis bike path as their own private race track, and scaring the bejezus out of us in the process. (We note that this is not every quad rider, just a very few bad apples - most quad riders are safe and law-abiding people just having fun doing their favorite form of outdoor recreation).

Petit Temis - Québec's best bike path?

We think that the "parc interprovinciale Petit Temis" is one of the great bike paths of Quebec, and we encourage you to visit it. The Bas St-Laurent region where it is located is truly beautiful, and if you visit once, you are sure to want to go back, and go back again. (we have visited twice more since our first visit here in 2008!)

Is it Quebec's best path? Well, we haven't ridden all of quebec's bike paths, so we can't say if it is the best, but it is top-ten for sure.

(Note: we learned of this news article via the Velo Nouvelles page of the Veloptimum website. We visit this web site (every day!) because it does a great job of rounding up Quebec and french language (but not France-centric) cycling-related news.)

For more info on the Petit Temis bike path, visit its website here. For more info on the Bas St-Laurent region, go here. We would advise you that once you get east of Quebec city, it's all good!

The Petit Temis is quite long (approx 80 miles), so we rode south one day and than back north the next day. You could break that into 3 or four days with overnights camping along the trail or in towns along the way including middle-of-route Cabano. Clicking through this route verte link will get you a map display of places with bike-friendly accommodations with the Velo-Quebec Bienvenue Cyclistes accreditation.

If you are up for a real adventure, this ride can be done without a car: Via Rail stops in Riviere du Loup, and is reported to be bike-friendly. Let us know how this goes.

Click here for our trip-report of last year's Petit Temis ride, and here for the La Presse Travel section feature on the Petit Temis.

And don't forget: the Petit Temis has "Fantastic wrinkle!"