Riding with a new friend, Tom Tom

This can only be described as a lovely dewy morning as I set out from Bancroft on day two of my week long, much delayed and anticipated ride. The planned three-week mid-summer ride, went to a one week at the tail end of summer. I take what I can get and this will be a week to sustain me through the long winter that is surely coming. Actually the timing may not work out too badly – today is the first day of school for the new academic year so the accommodation should be more available and hopefully cheaper and the weather is holding up so far the days are still hot, but the evenings have cooled down. The rainy season, has happily (for me anyway), not yet arrived, though this may not last.

I actually left home yesterday afternoon at about 2 p.m. on Labour Day Monday, a couple of hundred kms just to ease into the adventure. The traffic coming from cottage country was just horrendous, I was very glad to be going in the opposite direction, almost devoid of traffic – people going too cottage country on Labor Day afternoon were clearly the exception. It was somewhere between 5 and 6 when I stopped in Bancroft and started looking for a place to stay. It turns out that there is not much, and the reasonably priced B & B I had considered earlier had a ‘No Vacancies’ sign hanging, damn, so much for my theory. I ended up at the Sword Inn Hotel, a motel, that calls itself a hotel and charges extra for that. The place is ok, just a bit overpriced, but a Google search didn’t get me much else at a better price, and I was tired and hungry. There is a reasonable restaurant a few hundred yards away, so all worked out fine and here I am on Tuesday morning back on the KLR, lining zipped into the mesh jacket against the cold. Temperatures are expected to get into the thirties later on, but the night time temperatures are already much cooler. It’s a bit later than I should have taken off, but a combination of doing a little work (or possibly just interfering with my colleagues) and a desire not to leave when the sun will be shining directly in my eyes, has kept me procrastinating to almost nine.

The KLR’s very simple totally mechanical instruments has been augmented with a very 21^st century device – a very fancy Tom Tom Rider 400 GPS system. I finally closed my eyes to the expense and splashed out on this. I have tried it out on a few short rides and so far it has been damned good. You can get it to produce a route that is either the standard fastest route, or three degrees of thrilling and mountainous routes. The icon is labelled ‘plan a thrill’ which I think is somewhat cringe worthy, nonetheless I have planned a few ‘thrills’ (hey, keep the mind from the gutter) and so far that is exactly what the device has delivered. The nice thing is you can do the planning on our laptop and then sync the routes to the Tom Tom. Needless-to-say the documentation and instructions available are conspicuous by their absence and a great deal of frustration and wasted time has gone into figuring how the thing works, I am getting there, but suspect that I still have a lot to learn. Anyway, I have planned a fully, most thrilling and mountainous route from Bancroft to Trois-Rivières, it’s six hundred and something kms, and ETA as calculated by the device  is 7 p.m., that can’t be right, 5 p.m. at the latest.

View from the road - Ontario Eastern Highlands 

I am cocky and confident, besides the Tom Tom, I have loaded the KLR with three additional items for the trip:

• 1.       A 5 litre can of gas to extend the range to about 430 kms of the stupidly small 13 litre tank this bike is equipped with.  I have not yet completed the blog post of where I came within a half teacup of gas to being stranded in a cellphone-signal-less zone whilst the sun setting and the mosquitos were revving up engines.
• 2.       A light-weight tent with mosquito protection – see above.
• 3.       A light-weight sleeping bag, see nights getting cooler comment.

Of course this means that I look more like a Bedouin on a camel than a cool dude on a motorbike, but so be it, cool is not me anyway, I am the not-so-easy-rider!

Fully Loaded

The thrill factor is certainly being delivered, the Tom Tom leads me besides still waters, up hills and through valleys, yeah though the shadow of death haunts, I fear no evil. It could barely do any better, this is the Eastern Ontario Highlands lovely forests and some of best motorcycle roads to ride anywhere on the planet. Highway 28 with it’s sumptuous curves and smooth blacktop, god it’s almost sexual. Eventually I end up on Centennial Lake road, now devoid of cottage traffic, marvellous, simply marvellous. I have ridden here before, but in the opposite direction. It’s forest, lakes and hills, Canadian Shield nary a human planted thing to be seen. Then suddenly without warning I enter the Ottawa Valley, fertile flat once upon a time flood plain, and the hills are history, this is farming country and John Deere rules the roost. It’s almost a relief to ride some straight roads and pick up the speed

The town of Kanata brings the straight run to an end. I assume that the town’s name, Kanata, has the same root as Canada, which I believe means 'village' in Iroquoian. I imagine French explorer Jacques Cartier asked a local where the hell he was and the answer was ‘kanata’, you are in my village, and so this huge chunk of North America became to be called ‘village’ because of a translation problem. I end up on Sir John A MacDonald Parkway which traces the southern shoreline of the Ottawa River right the way into the centre of Ottawa City. I like Ottawa, it’s a lovely city, not entirely sure I want to live there, lousy with snow in the winter and lousy with bureaucrats all year round, only kidding on the bureaucrats, I have no issue with them, actually in many things I think we need more regulation rather than less. For my South African readers Toronto is like Jo’burg and Ottawa is like Pretoria. Anyway apart from one funny incident with the Tom Tom for no rhyme or reason takes me on a brief loop through a residential subdivision, I had no special reason to tarry in Ottawa and cross the river into Quebec, the city of Gatineau. Suddenly, and I have mentioned this before, you are for all intents and purposes in another country, it’s nice, international travel without the schlep.

Ottawa River from the Gatineau side

My end destination is Trois-Rivières as mentioned, I have made really good time, but still the Tom Tom estimates my arrival at about 7 pm, by my reckoning I’ll have eaten dinner and be on my second Scotch by 7 pm. However, that’s when things go a little awry. I seem to spend an age tracking through semi-suburbia, miles and miles of twisty roads I’ll grant you, but with a speed limit of 40 km/h and the constant danger of le enfants running out after wayward balls, is hardly a thrilling ride. I start to get a bit tired of this and stop for a cup of coffee I consider re-programming the Tom Tom to take a more direct route, I look at Google maps on my smart phone and see that actually the original route will very shortly get me out of the populated area and into more wilderness. So coffee-ed up I resume the ride.

Indeed the hilly area north-east of Ottawa is as lovely as the Ontario Highlands, more rugged even. The blacktop is generally in not a great condition, the curves are quite tight and mostly the speed limit is 90 km/h. The cars on the road actually expect you to honor the speed limit at it’s maximum even though cornering here at that speed would be suicide, so yes this is turning out to be a pretty thrilling ride. One of the routes I spend quite some time on is Quebec Provincial Route 315. Not for the faint hearted, and not for a cruiser, suddenly and with almost no warning the pavement ceases and I’m on a gravel road, one with seriously loose gravel. Twists and turns and 20 degree inclines, oh boy, it’s a real adventure ride, I’m very glad I didn’t re-program the route, and start to wonder if I will actually make it to Trois-Rivières even by 8 pm. I must tip my helmet to Clinton Smout and his one day course (see http://not-so-easy-rider.blogspot.ca/2015/09/on-and-offthe-road-that-is.html) I find the tips and tricks that I learned there invaluable in the endeavour to keep vertical. One section of the road is under repair, a fairly steep incline that is now just a narrow track of soft muddy material. The KLR takes it in it’s stride, piloted somewhat expertly I must say by yours truly.

 

On Route 315

Eventually Route 315 joins up with Route 323 and I'm directed to go north. It feels that I should be going a bit more east, but who am I to contradict the Tom Tom, another nice road to ride, much better condition than the 315, and fully paved. Then I turn north again on route 327, I’m starting to get a little worried, but then it directs me to turn east, good, but on a gravel road, up into a forest, I follow. I have a little bit of a bad feeling about this route, but I follow, this is supposed to be an interesting ride. This is where things go seriously tits up.  Several turns later and I get directed down a road that is a cul-du-sac. I turn around at the end of it and the Tom Tom demands that I should go go back into the dead end. I am reminded of the story of the woman that drove into a lake – her GPS told her to go there so she did, even though she could see it was a lake.  Here the Tom Tom totally loses the plot and it sends me in route that ends back at the road the ends in a cul-du-sac.  I stop and reprogram for the most direct route to Trois-Rivières, but that makes no difference to the immediate problem, still sends me in circles. I ignore the machine and manage to find the road that brought me into the forest and finally get back to Route 327. Just great, one reason for buying the thing is to stop me getting lost, looks like that's not going to work out.

There is no cell phone reception here so I can’t check with Google maps, but my instinct tells me to ignore the Tom Tom and go south, back down the way I came until it recalculates a route that makes sense, which it finally does. Memo to me, dial down the adventure level, too much thrill and you can get lost and if you want to get to an end point in a reasonably amount of time. I realize that I’m actually not even going to make it to Trois-Rivières at all today. It’s after 5 pm and I’m tired, I’ve been riding nearly all day, and still about 200 kms from where I intended to be. The ride was great, but I am disappointed that I’m not where I wanted to be. I know all that stuff that it’s about the journey not the destination, nonetheless when I set out to from Point A to get to point B, I actually don’t want to only arrive at point A and a half.  Which today means my sainted Aunt Agatha, or in French, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. This may well be a lovely town, but I only get as far as a few blocks in from the motorway, slap in the middle of the ugly zone that seems to surround all North American towns, empty lots, car dealerships, semi-derelict garden centers, car tire places and cheap motels. It is the latter I am looking for, I just want clean, safe and with decent internet connection. I have a question for the proprietors of motels – what is with the couple of plastic chairs next to each door, really, like a table would be too much?

 I spend the evening trying to work out a nice route to follow, for tomorrow. 31