Day14: Countryside Motel to Woodstock

Thursday June 27, 2019

Another good day with a screwed up start and a nice finish. 60 miles in 6 hrs of riding because of light headwinds and a lot of, by my standards, small hills.

When I left the Countryside Motel, which was a very nice place with good people at a very reasonable price - highly recommended - I headed to McDs in Strathroy. After my Prairie riding I was unprepared for riding into any city, even a relatively small Canadian city, which would have a McDs. I should have stopped at the first promising local restaurant - about two mile from the motel, but I persisted in riding 4 miles to McDs. It was OK, but after that I no longer wanted to ride to/through London to get to Woodstock! Even though it was a very laid back place compared to Pontiac MI, it was too much for me. I rode back to ON 22, the road the motel is on, and then rode ON 22 to/through London on my way to Woodstock. That turned a 50 mile day into a 60 mile day, but I was much happier with the riding.

ON 22 is the old main road that has been supplanted by an interstate. The Canadians don't call 'em that, but they seem to be clones. In the US, those old main toads are my favorite roads for riding long distances. ON 22 has variable pavement quality and shoulders. A good bit of the shoulders are OK, if a bit narrow, but other parts are cracked from big trucks and big agricultural equipment running heavy loads part on and part off the paved part of the shoulder. They can easily do that since there is a wide and smooth dirt shoulder outside of the paved shoulder. That is a advantage if a bicyclist willing to ride on the unpaved part, but makes many parts on the paved shoulder rather bumpy, even with my bikes unusually wide tires run at lower pressures. Some of it might be unrideable on stiff tires - e.g. Marathon Plus at moderate pressures.

After London, I was riding on lighter traffic roads a few miles north of the main road, CR 2. That was Gmaps choice and it seemed to be a good one. Compared to yesterday, there was a lot of climbing, some of which required my lowest middle gear. I have yet to actually need my granny ring in ON.

I had stopped for a tortilla wrap snack / rest break before London and another before Woodstock. In London I stopped at a Dairy Queen for lunch and again at a Subway for rain shelter. My new phone service gives me plenty - I hope - of data service so, when I sensed that I was about to get slammed by a storm, I pulled over to that Subway for some shelter and used my phone to get a quick radar image. That convinced me to get inside ASAP. An intense downpour hit a minute or two later. I took some images of it and then decided to go ahead and check out those images as well as the ones I took earlier today. None of them were saved by the phone's camera software!

I rebooted the phone and the camera saved the test image of the bike and the now moderate rain. Riding after the rain in wet road conditions I simply didn't think about taking any more images until I got to Woodstock three hours later. I lost at least a dozen images from earlier today. Using the phone camera to create images for my web pages is neat, but much less reliable than any other digital camera I've used in the past 20 years. The images it produces are remarkably good if you don't mind that "National Geographic Filter' that it, like all phone camera images I've seen, uses to make them look unrealistically pretty.

When I finally headed south towards CR 2 at the west end of Woodstock where the cheap motel I am staying at - it actually isn't nearly as cheap, at $70 USD as last nights at $54 USD - but an equally good value - is located, a local fellow my age pulled up beside me on a very nice E-Bike and we visited for quite a while. He is a bike tourist who has done a lot of touring, mostly in Canada and other kinds of endurance adventures. We had a good visit before he hit the throttle and vanished into the distance. He didn't really have a throttle. I suspect he just turned up the percentage assist and pedaled a little harder.

He advised me about a good local restaurant where I had an excellent supper and gave his approval for this motel. We did have a lot, not just age, in common and it was a pleasure to get to visit with him. He didn't know about crazyguy, but we all can't be perfect...

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