Day28: Changing routing to avoid Montreal traffic

Sunday July 14, 2019

I had a good night and morning in my cabin which I basically treated as a big tent, including using my pee battle during the night. My current pee bottle is only 500 ml, so I had to make two trips outside to empty it during the night. With my leg muscles very stiff and painful, that was hard and my footing was unstable. This morning was worse, but, after working at it for a while, I got back to being able to walk fairly normally. Yesterday was a 60 mile day and those seem to make the mornings harder than shorter days. Today was only a 35 mile day so maybe tomorrow morning won't be as painful.

After I got up and did some work and packed, I saw the other guest were packing their car and went over to visit some more. That turned into eating breakfast with them and having some very good conversation about being Quebecois. These folks, like many Quebecois have French as their first language and speak English well, but it is obviously a second language. They are both involved with the Quebec Independence political party.

He drives a city bus in Montreal and has done that for more than a decade. He says the traffic has gotten worse for every one of those years and is so bad that the bus schedules have had to be adjusted every one of those years. I said I'd ridden there 22 years ago and he said it was MUCH worse now. As a result, after working on routes, I've now decided to go back to the us again and take US 11 east till it ends before going north into Quebec. That has the advantage of completing my riding of US 11 over almost all of it from Canada to New Orleans and gives me another shot at getting my screwed up on-line banking straightened out. I am worried about having to wild camp on that route because Gmaps doesn't know motels where I need them for the second night, but feeling better about camping after last night.

My route today was very straight forward: ride CR 2. There were a few places where the WT left it, but not many and I dealt with those by following the WT arrow rather than using Gmap's routing software. It was windy again today and, just as I was hoping that the standard wind direction - blowing up the river - would hold all day, I got some pretty strong headwinds. Still I only rode for a little over 3 hours and I was ready to quit when I saw a motel that looked promising. It as most motels here do, turned out to be more expensive than I expected, but at the upper end of my acceptable range. Its wifi is too weak for my Flip but works fine with my phone so I'm using the phone as a hot spot to upload ride reports and crazyguy images.

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