How many 'best' days can we have on this tour? Today was stunning, well at least after it warmed up, that it is. We woke up to some very cold weather, 9 degrees! We layered up and again were anxious to load the gear truck. We were on the road before 7:30 and brrr, it was cold. It was clear skies though, and soon it warmed up. Due to my job we are some of the last people on the road, today however, a lot of people stopped at a Tim Hortons 16km into the ride so we got ahead of quite a few people. This feels good and makes us feel more relaxed. The hills were very small today with nothing bigger than 40m of elevation at a time. Some were steeper than others but nothing too bad. The first half of the ride was amazing, very gentle rolling hills and a Tailwind. The second half was a little tougher with a few bigger hills than earlier and the wind was against us from the front or the side most of the time. The best part of today was the scenery. "Oh Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the works thy hands have made... How great Thou art!" We biked alongside a lot of water today, which makes excellent scenery. It was so hard not to stop every few minutes for a picture. We even had pretty good roads for most of the day, which helped a lot. The only damper on the mood was that We had to take a detour so today's ride was about 5km longer than originally planned. The reason: the bridge was out. The detour took us further down to cross another bridge and then cut us exactly back to where the original bridge would've ended. At the time we didn't mind the detour but at the end of the ride, when you hit the km where you would've been done and you still have five km to go...
We biked along the Northumberland strait for awhile and again wow!!! We even thought we could see PEI in the distance. One rest stop today was in a park beside a river. It was beautiful. We had just crossed a bridge and there was a lot of greenery and there was a wharf and a covered bridge. Now, supposedly New Brunswick is known for its covered bridges, but this was the first I've seen this far (the other two were in Quebec 😐). We biked through Shediac: Home of the worlds Largest lobster! We took pictures but this town was really busy and biking through it was pretty stressful for me: vehicles turning off and on and even cyclists turning off and on without looking. The last 40km were pretty hard mentally and I got tired off the rolling hills; are they ever going to end?! We finally made it close to camp and could actually see PEI without straining our eyes. We could also see the Confederation bridge. We stopped at a Take Out stand on the strait. I had a delicious chocolate milkshake!!! While eating, we noticed a Campground on a bluff, with our trademark yellow gear trucks!!! We knew for sure how close we were!!! Arriving in camp was great! We are at the Murray Beach Provincial Campground. Our tent has an "ocean" view! Marcia, one of our support ladies provided a delicacy for dinner (by donation): fresh caught lobster!!! Dinner was late because they cracked them all first. A lot of people were pleasantly surprised. I'm not much of a seafood person, so I passed. I had stew beef/steak instead, very good!!! Peloton ran late and so we skipped small groups. A good thing too because shortly after, it began to rain. But, not before a gorgeous sunset. My phone could not capture the beauty of it. It was just an orange ball between the clouds and the water. Everyone was hurrying to pull out phones and cameras to get a picture before the sun went down. Then it started to rain, which surprised me because nothing had been on the forecast. We quickly put our tarp on the tent and I'm snuggled in my sleeping bag now.
144.4km
6h 36min
21.8km/h
727m elevation