Some bike beta.

miles today: 0 total miles: 1,565 km today: 0 total km: 2,519

We are sitting in the airport now … it’s weird to reverse a month of human-powered progress in just a few hours in the air. But everything has to end at some point, and the “real world” awaits us at home. Before we stop blogging, though, we wanted to share some thoughts mostly in case anyone is looking to do a similar route as this one in Canada.

Route finding and some gear nerdery

We got our hands on a couple-year-old Wahoo ELEMNT Roam GPS-enabled computer for navigation. The V1 version is cheaper if you can find one and had plenty of functionality for us - V2 seems to have better display and a stronger GPS antenna, which might be nice, but as it was, we already felt a bit of gadget overload and the V1 did all we needed it to. With this, we were able to set our route ahead of time using the RideWithGps website. We ended up paying a small fee to them to enable splitting routes and also to see a heatmap of previous riders. Splitting the route was key in order to break the route into daily chunks and the heatmap was helpful when trying to judge whether some roads were really ridable or not - if the heatmap showed previous riders had been there, that gave some confidence that the road was suitable (if not perfect) for riding. This gave us flase confidence in one case, however, when a bridge was out. RideWithGPS wouldn’t allow us to route over the bridge (good!) but looking at the heatmap, we concluded it was ridable (not good!) and, clearly, it had been in the past.

The Wahoo machine battery lasted more than 13 hours (our longest day) so we just recharged each night. We mounted a 15-watt solar battery charger (made by SunJack) on the trailer and on sunny days, at least, it fully charged each day. The Wahoo charged in an hour or two each evening and we could also top off our two phones at least partially. We were able to charge up the battery from an outlet when that was available as well.

So we mapped out the entire route on ridewithgps before leaving home. This was also kind of a mixed blessing in the sense that having the route predetermined limited our flexibility (more about that later) but we were also able to choose much smaller, less busy roads with this approach! Even that bit us a couple times with gravel or with “bike paths” that were really ATV trails or just not developed enough, but it also kept us off busy roads that we would likely have ended up on without this approach.

There is also a phone app for ridewithgps which is nice for checking in on routes, etc., but actual editing, splitting, and sharing with the ELEMNT app was klunky/impossible. In addition to wanting to keep this blog up, we carried a lightweight laptop for route management, blogging, and researching areas on rest days, etc. Again, trying to balance the need for technology with our Luddite tendencies - we found this combo to work well.

Camping logistics

We were told ahead of time to book campgrounds ahead of time which was definitely important in Ontario! Partly, we were unaware of a Provincial Holiday (that, hillariously, zero people could explain a meaning behind) that created a long weekend while we were in Ontario. Campgrounds filled up and, with one exception, they would have turned us away without a reservation. Quebec has the awesome “Bienvenue Cycliste” program with minimal requirements being that cyclists are guaranteed a spot (not always your own picnic table, etc., but that’s fine!), spots are less expensive, and there is meant to be a sheltered cooking location in case of bad weather. We found a single site in Ontario with a similar program, but none in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia. So…there’s a balance between planning each day in advance, or going with flexibility, but we opted for more certainty this time around. Things seemed to slow down later in the month (and off into the Maritimes) so maybe we could have been less planned.