Route Verte 1 Table d'Hote: Day 73 - Trois-Pistoles to Saint-Flavie - And Then We Pedalled...... Cross Canada 2015

August 14, 2015

Route Verte 1 Table d'Hote: Day 73 - Trois-Pistoles to Saint-Flavie

Bon matin, aujourd'hui nous avez la choise du menu un ou menu deux.

Menu un compris : beaucoup belle vue, rien autos, et beaucoup colline.

Menu deux compris: beaucoup autos, rien colline, et moins vue.

No substitutions!

We chose menu one, the Route Verte 1 route out of Trois-Pistoles which was a dedicated bike path mostly along the coast. Menu two was the good old Hwy 132 which ran inland, good shoulders and pleasent views but pretty heavy traffic.

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The scenery along the Route Vert was beautiful and the bike route wound though forests and along the water. The only downside to this was that the shoreline was interrupted with frequent steep headlands that the bike path had to traverse. And steep means steep. On some my Garmin was reading 16%. On some they were probably steeper because my Garmin turned off on auto-pause because we were going so slow. Oh, I forgot to say we were mostly on hard pack gravel, not pavement.

This was tough biking. At the crest of every headland my lungs and heart were getting very friendly with my esophagus. The Wheee factor wasn't there on the downhills either since you don't really want to wheee around a sharp corner on a dirt path. The upside of all of this through were the beautiful views we were getting over the Bay of St Lawrence and the beauty of the solitude of bike paths.

Headed towards the coast east of Trois-Pistoles

Not many silos today, more of these guys. Time for payback!

Looking down to the water. The climbs and decents were very steep. Ok for a day trip but extremely hard work on a loaded touring bike.

Great cycling by the water. Full on maritime environment now.

These were the headlands that we were having to negotiate

Nice bike path through the forests and over the headlands. Get you're cv system in shape!

We weren't by ourselves on this adventure though, last night we saw another touring couple about our age in the campground. We met them at at breakfast, Kathy and Tom Norton from Ohio, who were doing a tour of the Maritimes (they did an epic Trans am throwing in a west coast addition last year). We had both ridden in on Route Vert 1 from the east yesterday and were commenting on how beautiful it was, and how today's costal sections may be even better!

Kathy and Tom Norton with Kirsten. Kathy and Tom are doing a maritime cost tour. They will be continuing along the entire Gaspe coast, sounds like a great trip. They've got a journal going of their trip on CGOAB.

After about 20 km and an hour and a half of very beautiful seaside cycling alternating with lung busting climbs and skidding decents, we were on a short paved road that connects a couple of pieces of the bike path. A minivan pulled up beside Kirsten and she had a nice conversation with the local couple who were driving the van. Their van had a bike rack. They knew the area. They also knew that they should speak to Kirsten as her French is pretty good while I can just barely navigate a restaurant menu.

The advice from the Van people was that the next section of the Route Vert, that we were going to be turning onto in about 300 m, was another 10 km of unpaved trail even more beautiful, and even more difficult than what we just did. When they looked at our loaded bikes, they strongly suggested that we should not take it. A short conference with Kirsten and a couple of my key internal organs and that was it. We beat a short 1.5 km retreat back to the 132 at Saint-Simon. I should note that the road we were on was the ONLY road that reconnected with the 132. Once you set off on the bike path you were committed to the end.

Beating a retreat back to the 132. It was still in a very pretty setting, just not nearly as scenic as the coast.

Once we hit the 133 we were back flying along at 25 - 30 km/ hr with a really nice tailwind. There was a good shoulder so the traffic was tolerable and the scenery was still quite beautiful, back to farms and silos. Once past Saint-Fabien, where we stopped for lunch, the road started into rolling hills, but only single digit grades and good pavement. With a tailwind these were fun! Also about 10 km past Saint-Fabien, there was an auto-route that ran the rest of the way to Rimouski and Mount Joli and the 132 became the costal tourist road, so the traffic volume, in particular trucks, dropped considerably. Back to really great riding.

Kathy and Tom had stopped in Saint-Simon so we we back on our own. We made good time through Rimouski on an excellent bike path system and then along costal roads through Rimouski East to Saint-Luce where the shoreline was dotted with holiday cottages and interesting shops and B&b's. This was a really great ride. We made it to Saint Flavie, which is along the coast about 4 km from Mount Joli and decided it looked like a great place to stop for the day. Found a nice motel, had another great dinner looking out on a beautiful sunset on the Bay of St Lawrence, and prepared to bid farewell to our friend. Over dinner we had been recounting what we considered our "best biking days", and many of them were ones that we had spent along the St Lawrence over the last 10 days. Tomorrow we turn south and head inland to New Brunswick. It would be nice to continue along the Gaspe coast like Tom and Kathy are doing, but we need to get to St John's before the snow flies!