Last year I cycled home from Ottawa with a group of six others. It was an amazing trip. If you wish, you can read a summary I wrote for the Ontario Traffic Council’s quarterly magazine, or you can read the daily posts starting here. You can navigate through the posts from oldest to newest by using the arrows near the bottom of the post. I will be doing daily blogs again on our trip this year.
Five of us from the original group are cycling to Lake Erie starting Sunday. David and Dayle, from BikeBrampton, Nelson, Brampton’s Manager of Active Transportation, Rani, a local cycling enthusiast and myself. We invited another friend to come along – Wayne, a cycling advocate from Caledon.
Our approach is somewhat different this year. Last year Jim provided us with amazing support. He drove his van pulling a rental trailer full of our bikes and luggage to Ottawa and supported us as we cycled back to Brampton.
This year we decided to do a circuit, starting and finishing on our bikes. However, some of us are able to ride further than others. Nelson and Rani want to ride the full route every day and carry all their belongings on their bikes. David and Dayle, found the distances we cycled last year left them with cyclist’s palsy and wish to avoid a repeat of that. I crashed my bikes in March. I had some fairly serious injuries including a broken C4 transverse process and concussion. I am still recovering from that and need to ride my upright bike and limit my distance. Wayne is capable of riding the full route every day, but is happy to have support for carrying his belongings or for days with miserable weather. So we decided to take David and Dayle’s van. We will take turns driving a section each day. On Sunday we will attend Greg’s Ride, a fundraiser for Share the Road.
The original plan was that we would leave Brampton on Saturday and ride our bikes to Hamilton. However, a couple days ago, we were informed that the AirBnB that we were to stay in in Hamilton has been closed because bedbugs were discovered. We were unable to find anywhere to stay on Saturday night, so we will be driving to Hamilton on Sunday morning and then will continue on our ride as planned on Monday morning.
I think Nelson will still ride to Hamilton. He has family there. Rani will carpool with someone going to Greg’s ride for the day. The rest of us will cram into the van. We will pack it Saturday night to make sure we can. Two bikes will go on the bike rack. The other two bikes, luggage, cooler, etc and four people will hopefully fit in the van.
This is our route for the five of us from Brampton/Caledon. Nelson will be starting and finishing in Guelph.
The temperatures look great for cycling. Monday and Tuesday might be quite wet with a little rain on a couple other days.
So I bought some new wet weather gear yesterday.
I should stop procrastinating on my packing by writing this.
Hope you enjoy following along.
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I’m looking forward to following the whole crew’s adventure through your writings as I did when you blogged about the Ottawa to Brampton ride last year. I wish I could’ve accepted the invitation to join the ride but my commitments keep me tied down and unable to be away for prolonged periods. I do appreciate it though, so maybe the next one. Following along here in the blog will be the next best thing. Bon voyage à tous!