Geoff's Tour
A Journal of My Bicycle Touring

Journey Notes

It was 5C (41F) when we got up this morning. That's winter weather in Vancouver! We had no electricity and thus no heat so it was generally a cold start to the day. VanGo could have used a scarf. I started off with full winter cycling clothes including doubled cycling gloves.

About 9 km out, I heard a bang and within 3 turns of my front wheel, I was running on the rims. Something had sliced a hole in the sidewall of the tire. I replaced the tube but it was bulging out of the slice in the tire a bit so I kept the pressure low and called for backup. Rochelle caught up after about 12 km and I put on the new tire that we bought in Winnipeg. That font tire was put on when the bike was new and had over 10,000 km on it. It could have gone quite a bit further although the sidewalls were looking kind of rough. It's still kind of patchable so we will keep it for a backup until I can get another spare.

I followed Route 134 from our campground just north of Saint-Louis de Kent until Shediac where I turned east onto Route 133. We met up at grocery store to decide where we were going to camp and decided on Sandy Beach Campground in Cap-Pelé. That was about as far east as we could go in that area and still make the turn south into Nova Scotia.

I was dealing with headwinds all day and they got stronger as the day went on. It was nice to get to our campground at about 5:30 pm. It is on a beautiful ocean beach so we took a walk on it before dinner. As you can see from this picture, the campground itself is not the most beautiful in the world. Looks a bit like a refugee camp.

I've had three fairly hard days and my left knee is feeling the effort, especially from today's wind, so I think that tomorrow will be a rest day. We've got a nice beach to hang out on on a sunny day.

It seems that tonight we get campground wide karaoke. It's not quite up to the standard of the real band that last night's campground had. I can imagine that after tonight the campgrounds will get a lot more quiet.

Oh, and today I crossed over the 7,000 km (4,350 mi) milestone. The tour is rapidly coming to its end. There are only 13 more scheduled days of cycling left.