Nominique to Mont Tremblant

July 25, 2010

Today was a great riding day. The weather is suddenly cooler (about 23 C and no humidity). As the miles rolled by, the scenery was ever changing. We saw beautiful lakes and rivers, rapids, farms, forest, a dude ranch, buffalo.

The stations were also quite interesting and lovingly restored. As always, we meet interesting local people and fellow travellers.

As we arrived at Riviere Rouge the community was celebrating "Family Day" and the station was alive with music, rides for children, free hot dogs, corn on the cob and ice cream cones. A local woman came up to us and invited us to join in and enjoy their hospitality...great fun. The mayor served us our hot dogs. It showed us that in these communities, the train station is still the hub of the community even though the train no longer runs.

As we have travelled south on Le P`tit Train du Nord, the landscape has more open spaces and we see more communities along the trail. Most rest areas are landscaped and the local community adds many special touches. Labelle train station was also a standout. There is a train museum, a caboose and various creations using train related parts. We finished our day at Mont Tremblant - a ski resort. Once again, we followed the trail around Lac Mercier and could imagine what it must been like to have travelled these parts by train long ago. There is no camping in this area, so we have decided to stay at the the International Youth Hostel.

We were still drying out our belongings after we were caught unprepared during the rain storm. The new Trangia alcohol stove and Clikstand worked great to cook our morning porridge and coffee.The Pot Cozy were ordered from Antigravity made it possible to use only a fraction of our fuel to cook our porridge.

Train stations along the trail have been restored.

The trail is used by skidoos in the winter.

Everytime the trail is intersected by a road we would have to go through a gate. This gate was easy but some gates were quite narrow and difficult to get through with our fully loaded tandem

Lunch time.The rest stops along the P'Tit Train du Nord usually have a picnic shelter in the shape of a wooden train caboose.

The trail surface was quite loose here because of all the horse traffic from the dude ranch

Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 202 km (125 miles)

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