Thinking of summer
Winter’s back again and this time, I’m feeling it. I’ve spent the last few days holed-up in the apartment wanting to be anywhere but here, yet not wanting to go outside to do it. Fortunately, it’s supposed to get almost to freezing tomorrow and the wind finally quit today. It’s still in the single-digits tonight though, so I didn’t do TNUA
At some point in the past few weeks I started thinking about rides near my parents’ summer place in Canada. It’s on Wolfe Lake just outside Westport, Ontario [history] in the Rideau Lakes, not quite halfway between Kingston and Ottawa. We’ve been going there since 1962 and they bought the place in 1973.
So far I’ve mapped out two metric century (100 km or 62.13 mi) loops—one to the north of the cabin and one to the south of the cabin—and nice little half-metric starting in Westport. There are some—perhaps more interesting—rides I could do, but I don’t know the conditions of some of the roads any more. It’s been 12 years of so since I’ve been there, and 25 years since I was there with any regularity. A lot has changed.
It’s not whether the roads are ridable or not. The issue is which bike to take. For dirt roads I’d take Bike. For pavement I’d take Yellow Bike.
“Bring them both,” my mother told me.
I took her to lunch yesterday for her birthday. We went to Hogan’s Hideaway and caught the tail end of the lunch crowd. In fact, we were the last lunchers to leave. I started with their cream of artichoke soup with roasted red peppers, and followed up with their chicken sauté, which was chicken bits, kielbasa bits, olives, spinach, red peppers and pasta sautéed in a garlicky sauce. Mom had a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing.
So among other things, it’s been decided that I’ll pack both bikes in the back of the Buick and spend somewhere between a week and two at the cabin in July or August. It all has to be scheduled around their doctor visits and my brothers’ vacations, so there’s no specific date yet.
I’m hoping to have a digicam by then and will try to borrow a laptop at least so I can empty the cam’s memory card after each ride. And who knows? Maybe I can find wi-fi in a café or at the Westport Library.
In googling around, I’ve found these interesting links:
- Rideau-info.com—More than I ever knew. They even have a Bicycling the Rideau page
- Rideau Canal—Friends of the Rideau
- Rideau 175—2007 is the 175th Anniversary of the Rideau Canal
- The Ottawa Bicycle Club has a supported, two-day annual ride in June called the Rideau Lakes Cycle Tour. It runs right through Westport on its way from Ottawa to Kingston and back. I’m not quite up to back-to-back 180 km rides with 1,800 other cyclists, especially not the week after the Great Finger Lakes Bicycle Tour and the BikeJournal.com ReUnion 07 weekend. Maybe next year.
- The Kingston Velo Club has many club rides, some of them starting in, or running through Westport.
- The Cataraqui Trial is a 104 km rail-to-trail from Smiths Falls to Napanee. My south-of-the-cabin metric parallels the trail from Harrowsmith to the Perth Road.
- This panoramic explains why my north-of-the-cabin metric goes clockwise. I’d rather descend Mountain Rd than climb it.
