G2G – Guelph to Blyth – Day 1

Today we started a six day bike trip made up of two distinct parts. The first three days will be spent on the Guelph to Goderich Rail Trail with seven of us, one of whom, Lina, is doing her first trip by bike. The next three days will be in the Niagara Region with six in the group.

Today five of us drove from Brampton, one from Tottenham, and one biked from his home in Guelph to Bolts Plus where Wayne arranged for us to leave the cars for three days. It is only 3km from the trail on the west side of Guelph.

Traffic was free flowing on the 401 despite the tens of kilometres of construction that has been causing terrible jams when I have visited my son in Kitchener for the past couple months, even on weekend afternoons.

Here we are with bikes loaded with panniers and ready to go. We were off by 8:30. Three kilometres later we were at the trail. Many of the road crossings had these structures with maps and a small covered area.

I find many rail trails can be quite tiring to ride because of the surface and I generally compare them to the Caledon Trailway which is one of the best I have experienced. We were pleasantly surprised to find the G2G comparable.

We were meeting Lina in Linwood between 10:30 and 11 where she arranged to leave her car at the local recreation centre as she wanted to shorten Days 1 and 3 to about 60km each.

Wayne rode the trail a couple years ago before a massive effort was made by volunteers to improve the trail. From what he describes that he endured it has been a very impressive transformation. There are still some connections over rivers which will be very costly which have yet to be made. Here we are climbing stairs to get over the Grand River on the road.

Some of us made two climbs – one with the bike rolling up the trough, and one with the paniers. David’s bike is very heavily loaded as Dayle cannot carry much on her bike which has a carbon frame. It took two to roll it up loaded with panniers.

We made it!

Then we crossed The Grand River on the West Montrose covered bridge, also known as The Kissing Bridge, as is this section of the trail. Covered bridges are often called ‘kissing’ bridges because of a commonly-held superstition that to go quickly through a covered bridge would create a standing wave that would cause the bridge to collapse. Therefore, a law was passed to ensure all horses slowed their gait when crossing the bridge. During these moments of privacy, couples passing through would often steal a kiss or two, thus the term ‘kissing’ bridge.

Another detour to cross the Conestoga River consisted of a short stretch on 86 which is a major road, but it had a good shoulder.

We didn’t arrive at Linwood until about 11:15 and found Lina waiting patiently with custom, inscribed cookies to replenish us after 40km. There were unlocked bathrooms available at the rec centre which was welcome.

Here’s the enlarged group ready to continue.

There was a little rest stop a little further on, and apparently a B&B, we learned from a group we met heading there later in the day.

We had lunch at a park in Milverton, across from a small grocery store. A lot of things are closed on Sundays in this area so we brought lunch with us.

We didn’t stay long and we find our average speed is much lower on trails than roads and we still had 46km ahead of us. The trail seems a little less well groomed just west of Milverton, but perhaps we were also tiring.