riding to Fort-Coulonge (feat. PPJ)

this morning it came to mind it would be good to do a big tour, so I started looking for places I could stay close to Ottawa. Unfortunately many BnBs didn’t make it past the pandemic, luckily a motel could host me.

the route goes thru aylmer passing quyon, no ferry this time, staying in the quebec side. Unfortunately I got a weird flat after some of the gravel sections, about 40km before Quyon. It took me forever to fix the tire in front of someone’s lawn. To make things worse, I fixed things wrong and had to end up changing the tube by the quyon food trucks. I hurt my hand, almost break my single lever, wasted a bunch of time, and ran out to spares :(

Worried for quite some parts of the ride but realized that fuck it if something happens i’ll improvise when the time comes.

One of my goals of this trip was to ride the PPJ, which someone recommended at some point. And while i got to ride some of it, my gravel ambitions were overshadowed by my lack of planning abilities, leaving home way too late, I had to change my planned route and move to the road instead. With the garmin radar it was very manegeable although still scary at night.

At some point I stopped in the middle of the night, no cars for kilometres around, to see the stars. it looked gorgeous.

Despite all the bad times today, I feel very accomplished. Got to see some spectacular views, specially the sunset, which I kept riding towards.

Tomorrow supposedly 200km. we’ll see.