July 19, 2016
Day 49 Dundas to Stratford
This was a difficult riding day. We started out by climbing the Niagara escarpment, which was a very steep, long climb. It about did me in. I was tired the rest of the day from that and we had a lot more climbing to do. We didn't have any hills nearly as steep or long, but we had moderate hills all day. On top of that, we encountered unexpected gravel roads three times. The first time, Viktoriya found us a detour that got us off the unpaved road, but added about three miles.
The route today was rural with farms and fields of wheat, corn and some other vegetables. We stopped to examine one crop that turned out to be broccoli. We have left the orchards and vineyards behind us. There were no roadside fruit stands today. We missed that.
The next time we came to a gravel road, Kerry was so tired he decided to ride it for the 1 1/4 miles we thought it would be unpaved instead of taking a longer detour. Since I'm not the captain, I went along with his call. Team A chose to use a paved alternate route. We agreed to meet at a McDonald's about ten miles away. By the time we each took our chosen routes, we ended up arriving at our meeting point at exactly the same time.
Unfortunately, we were not done with unanticipated unpaved roads. With about twelve miles to go, we came to another gravel road. (The route planner did a pretty poor job with today's route!) We detoured to the parallel highway. It was a terrible cycling road. There was almost no shoulder and a precipitous drop into deep gravel on the right. The traffic was heavy and fast. After a long, hard day, it was just too much. We made it for about five miles, but it was very stressful. Viktoriya was checking her GPS and found that the unpaved road became paved at that point, so we were able to ride back up to it and save about four miles of hellish cycling. We finally arrived at our hotel close to 6PM. It was not the most fun we've ever had on a bike!
This evening, we had tickets to see "A Little Night Music" at the Stratford Festival. It was a good show and a great way to put the cycling day behind us. Tomorrow is a rest day and another play and, happily, no cycling involved.
Today's ride: 71 miles (114 km)
Total: 2,474 miles (3,982 km)
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