Prettiest day on tour … so far …

Why?

Why cycle tour? There’s all the pain of hills, the discomfort of sweaty humid days and rainy wet days and of course there’s the head winds. There’s fa-ti-gay, and the sinking feeling when you think there is no way you are going to get another pedal turn out of your legs. There’s the raging thirst on a hot day that cannot be satisfied by the lukewarm water in your bottle.

It doesn’t sound like much fun.

But … when you are out there, at one with your bike, on a winding, slightly undulating, smooth road, with the wind in your hair (through your helmet), the sun on your shoulders and a song in your heart … that is what it is all about.

Today is one of those days. A good-to-be-alive-who-would-want-to-be-in-a-car kind of day.

We start with a brilliant breakfast. Our host, Nicky, has taken careful note of dietary concerns, and turns out a customised breakfast … for each guest. Neil gets a bacon-and-egg kind of breakfast, I get a frittata- and-baked-beans kind of breakfast, and the other guests we eat with get breakfast tailored to their keto diet. (The other guests are from Toronto. We get hints from them on how to spend our time there, a written list of ideas, and a phone number “just in case”.)

With full bellies, we saddle up and point the bikes at Kingston. We ride out of Newboro, turn onto quiet Hutchings Road and take that to Perth Road. Then it is Perth Road pretty much all the way to Kingston, even passing through a town called Perth Road Village. The roads are lined with lush green Canadian forests and lakes and waterways, which makes for brilliant views almost all the way to Kingston.

We arrive in Kingston too early to check into our AirBNB, so take a wander through town, hunting for ice cream. It’s a bit hard to find, but we finally luck out, though it seems scooped ice cream is the go around here, rather than our Quebecois favourite choc-dipped soft serve.

After getting access to our home for the night, and showering the day’s ride off, we head into Kingston … a little late for most of the town attractions. We have a beer overlooking our old friend the St Lawrence.

Did you know the St Lawrence is not a river at all, but a fleuve? Neither did I until recently. A fleuve empties into the sea, while a rivière does not. In some common contexts, a fleuve is also a large rivière. The St Lawrence qualifies on both counts: it is a monster river, that flows into the Atlantic.

At the suggestion of a woman at the information centre, we hop onto a (free) Wolfe Island ferry, and cross to the island. From the ferry we get views of Kingston and Fort Henry and enjoy a cool breeze. Once on the island we head (along with everybody else off the ferry who must have spoken to the same information lady) to the  Wolf Island Grill for a drink and dinner on the terrace overlooking the water.

The sun drops below the horizon while we eat; the sunset view over Kingston caps off a brilliant day on the road.

Stats for today:

• Distance: 54.9km
• Climb: 334m
• Average speed: 20.3km/h
• Average temperature: 35C
• Moving time: 2:42:30
• See our ride on Strava

The beer picture

At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today’s beer picture was taken at a waterside bar in Kingston. It turned out that Neil didn’t like his beer. When he told the waitress, she replaced it and didn’t charge for the yucky one.

Along the way today: