The day had finally come to start my second ever bike tour! My brother and I were both excited to hit the road, but also concerned. All of Eastern Canada had been in a pretty severe heat wave with temperatures climbing to around 35°C (95°F), that along with high humidity had been pushing the humidex to over 40°C (105°F) most days.
The plan for the morning was to first head downtown to get the obligatory tour-starting photo in front of the Parliament buildings. After that we’d head back to the west end of the city to collect our tour-mates Ilya and Alina from their house, and from there start heading toward Richmond village for lunch.
The ride downtown was great. Chris lives just a couple blocks off the National Capital Commission (NCC)’s Ottawa River Pathway that runs alongside the river all the way across the city and downtown. Being before 9:00, it was still cool, comfortable riding and several other cyclists wished us well on our tour as we rode by with our laden bikes. Arriving to Parliament Hill, we found it buzzing with tourists, and police. It seems with all the truck and crowd knife attacks in the world recently, they’ve really increased security on The Hill.
Chris and I had to stop for groceries on our way to Ilya and Alina’s, so we took the city streets back to the west end. Being Civic Holiday in Ontario, traffic was very light, and we made it through the city as the day started to warm up. After loading up with delicious Niagara peaches and lots of water, we made our way to Ilya and Alina’s place to gather the party before venturing forth. All-in-all it was a 20km round-trip to get our Parliament Hill photo.
After some quick last-minute adjustments to Ilya’s panniers and rack, and some drama keeping their dog, Lana, calm while they both left, we had everyone assembled and were riding west along the Ottawa River Pathway again!
By this point it was 12:30 in the afternoon, and it was starting to get quite hot and humid. Our plan was to ride out Richmond Village, just next to the Ottawa’s city limits to one of my favourite restaurants, The Royals, for lunch. Most of the ride was quite pleasant. We quickly left the more urban area and were riding along Old Richmond Road past farms and rolling green hills with fields of corn. The humidity more than anything was really oppressive. By the time we reached the restaurant we were all more than ready to get off our bikes for a pitcher of ice water apiece and a good lunch.
After the late lunch, and with the majority of the day’s riding still ahead of us, we continued on south out of Richmond Village and headed on toward Smiths Falls. Our route quickly took us off of the pavement and onto a series of gravel roads. These roads were great in that they had very little car traffic and allowed us to ride next to each other and chat while we rode, but the rough surface had us going much slower than we would have been on pavement. All of these factors and the heat contributed to a very tough, long journey to Smiths Falls. Chris even ran out of water in his auxiliary 1.5L along the way.
The definite highlight of the day was at one stop on the gravel road we had a cute little pig gallop over to say “Oink!” to us. Alina was immediately taken by the little guy, which had the bigger, grumpier pig in the pen upset as he came over to more aggressively oink at us to go away.
Our route had us off of the gravel roads about 5km outside Smiths Falls, and we headed straight downtown to find a restaurant for some ice-cold refreshments and food. Finding most of the restaurants in the downtown to be closed (it was after 6:00pm on a holiday Monday), we started to get a bit concerned when Ilya found the Fort Hemlock restaurant had a patio overlooking the river and served all kinds of pub fare. Great find Ilya!
While we were eating, a pretty substantial storm system rolled through with pretty heavy rain and strong wind. There was thunder and lightning off in the distance, but we were largely spared in Smiths Falls. The storm didn’t really break the heat or humidity at all there was still an almost-tropical feel to the air.
With such a late arrival at the restaurant, by the time we finished up, it was starting to get dark. We still had another 10km of riding to do to get to our campsite at the Poonamalie lockstation. We all equipped our lights and headed on out of Smiths Falls.
We were all glad to have a mostly downhill ride that delivered us to the Parks Canada Poonamalie lockstation sign. Unfortunately, the road was blocked with a gate. With none of us having been there before we started hunting around in the dark for a way to get down to the water and the grassy lockstation grounds.
After some confusion and bumbling around, we all found our way down and started making camp in the dark. A few minutes later we were all wrestling to get some rest in the hot, sticky night air.
Chris and I, with our detour to Parliament Hill and back, had done 96km. Not bad for everyone’s first day!