Montreal and Véloroute Gourmande – Day 5

Café 1792, where we plan to have breakfast, didn’t open until eight so my intention was to sleep until 730, but I forgot to reset my alarm from seven. After it went off, I couldn’t get back to sleep.  A latte and breakfast burrito gave me energy to start the day.

We had a 3 km ride back to the trail, which was more than half cycling infrastructure.

Almost half of our 66 km ride today was on a gritted surface. All but a couple hundred metres was fairly good quality, except for a couple spots on the slopes where water had eroded the trail a bit. However, we began on asphalt.

If you’ve been reading the past few days of the blog, you know how impressed we are with the cycling infrastructure hearing in Quebec. But it’s not just the cycling infrastructure that makes these rides special. It’s also the culture and the public art. Here’s a few examples of the public art we saw along the trail today.

Véloroute Gourmande is part of the Trans Canada Trail and we have seen a number of the pavilions. 

This building is a replica of the station that was in Bromont. It houses tourism information and staff.

We encountered many places along the trail to rest. 

The cycling infrastructure varies but it is almost always present.

We are seeing more autumn colour and fallen leaves.

Waterloo is on Lake Waterloo and has an active transportation bridge crossing the north end of the lake.

Waterloo has a park with a lot of public art.

There is another tourism office in Waterloo, and bathrooms. 

City Hall was decorated for Halloween.

We passed lots of lovely homes.

This gritted section through a hydro corridor was one of the rougher areas we encountered, but still wasn’t too bad.

Today had the most climbing of all of the days on our trip with over 600 m and just over 60 km.

Quebec has a law requiring drivers to give cyclists 1.5 m when passing in zones of more than 50kph, and 1 m in zones of 50kph, or less. We had 13 km on a gravel road, but the surface was pretty good, and only about half a dozen cars passed us over the entire distance.

This very fancy garage that looks like French château caught my eye. It matched the house in the background.

We left Véloroute Gourmande to ride a couple of kilometres into Eastman for lunch. It is a small town of just over 2000 people, but has many restaurants and seems to be a very popular spot for walking and biking.

We had lunch at Bowen Café. It was very good, and not as expensive as where we had lunch yesterday.

Next to the café were free e-bike charging stations with locks so that you could leave your bike while it was charging.

The next section was not paved and was quite hilly.

It was a relief to ride on a flat asphalt road beside a lake for a couple of kilometers.

Before long, we were back in the woods on a section with a lot of short, sharp up and downs.

I was in the lead with David and Dayle somewhat behind and Cindy, bringing l up the rear. But we got too far apart and Cindy took a wrong turn. It took us about half an hour before we all managed to get back together. This is where I waited, sitting on the fence, here’s David who went after Cindy finding me. Cindy showed up shortly thereafter, and then Dayle. Cindy unnecessarily climbed one steep hill, and David several causing him to accumulate 100 m more of climbing than I did, today.

At this point it was getting late and we were getting tired so we decided to go straight south into Magog instead of following the route which shows as a blue square. 

This was our first sight of Magog.

Magog is Lac Memphrémagagog, and has a beautiful waterfront with separate infrastructure for cyclists, and pedestrians. It was very busy as we rolled into town about 5 PM.

We passed the Lake Memphremagog monster, known as Memphré. It is a “legendary creature said to inhabit Lake Memphremagog on the border of Vermont and Quebec. It is described as a long, serpent-like sea monster or dinosaur and has been the subject of local folklore and over 200 reported sightings since the early 19th century.”

Cindy’s friend Tushita was in Magog today hiking with her boyfriend and another friend. We planned to meet them for dinner. They were waiting for us at our accommodation when we arrived. We quickly changed, then walked a few blocks to dinner. 

The restaurant had a lovely patio and it was warm enough that we were able to sit outside for our dinner.