Day 114 Sherbrooke, QC

August 16, 2019

Climbing without the bike

We had a lot a fun with Pierre today. First, we visited his son, Guillaume, at his lab at the University of Sherbrooke. Guillaume is getting a graduate degree in engineering and working on a device to sample foliage from forest treetops using a drone.

Kerry, Guillaume and Pierre with Guillaume's drone apparatus.

The drone and some of Guillaume's devices

This lab houses many graduate student projects. We walked around and saw some cool things that other students were doing. Guillaume didn't know the story of this robot, but I had to take a picture.

After our visit to the university, we drove down to the town of Coaticook. First, you need to know that is the home to the best ice cream I've had so far in Quebec. We had lunch at a Chinese buffet, which was just OK, then headed to a wonderful park to work off enough calories to have our ice cream later.

Pierre took us to the Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook. Here the Coaticook River has a 164 foot deep gorge. The park has hiking trails, as well as other recreational facilities, and on one of the trails is the longest suspension foot bridge in North America at 554 feet. The views were amazing. Also, a little amazing to me, was Kerry walking fearlessly across the bridge. Pierre and I even tried to make the bridge sway and Kerry wasn't fazed.

Kerry enjoying his walk across the bridge and even looking down!

(I need to say here that many things cause me anxiety and Kerry never teases me or tries to make the situation scarier, so I'm not being very kind to him. He said he really wasn't uneasy on the bridge.)

Also on the trail was a 96 foot tall observation tower.

Another cool thing on the trail was this little cave.

It was a short cave. I lightened this picture so you could see inside. It was very wet.

There is a hydroelectric plant on the river that has been operating since 1925.

A view of the power station on the right

People had stacked a lot of cairns by the river's edge. I don't know the significance of the "fairy pebbles".

We really enjoyed our visit to the park. Of course, I really enjoyed our next stop back at the Coaticook dairy store. No pictures there, I was too busy eating ice cream.

We came back to the B&B and finalized tomorrow's route. Pierre is going to ride with us to Waterloo. We like having company on a ride.

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