As I posted previously, my second bike tour was to be a group tour with my brother and some friends who had never been on a bike tour before. In fact, of the four of us who were to go, I was the only one who had ridden more than 50km in a day.
With such an inexperienced group, we planned out our trip from Ottawa to Kingston, Ontario.
How did we decide on this route? We had each booked a week off work, and I had to leave time to fly to Ottawa from San Francisco and back. That left us with up to 7 days to do the trip. We could have done two or three days out and two or three days back. We decided that we wanted to take the middle day as a rest day. Combine the schedule with our daily range of 80 to 100km, and we had a one-way range of 160 to 300km. Kingston, being about 200km from Ottawa, and a city none of us had visited, made it a good destination in that range.
Early on, we decided to turn the trip into a loop instead of taking the same route there and back. Now that our final destination and rest day location was decided, it was time to look into more detail how each day would break down. We’d need a stopping point nearly mid-way for the way there as well as the way back.
Having taken a kayaking trip on the Rideau Canal in 2011, I knew that there was very affordable waterside camping at the canal lockstations. Smiths Falls, Ontario is both nearly halfway between Ottawa and Kingston and has several lockstations nearby. With that, we decided that the way there would go through Smiths Falls.
For the way back, we decided that we would ride along the 1000 Islands area of the Saint Lawrence river from Kingston. 80km of riding would take us to Brockville, Ontario. Having never camped in Brockville, I wasn’t sure what (if any) options we would have. Luckily, some quick Google-ing found that Brockville has a campground near downtown along the river that caters to bicycle tourists. With that we had our second camping spot.
The only hitch was that the distance from Brockville to Ottawa was a bit longer of a final leg than the other days at 110km, but with the route being much flatter than the route to Kingston, we figured we could stretch our range.
Now we had it, a roughly 380km loop that we’d ride over four days with a rest day to see the sites and attractions in historic Kingston. Now all that was left to do was pack up the bike and gear and get back to Ontario!