Another Sunday, another ride in the Gatineau Park with Grant. Actually, this time there was four of us, Grant, Steve, Trev and myself. By the end of the ride though there were only three of us left…but I’m not going to get into the details of that.
Anyways, as usual, it was an 8 am start from the Lawson’s place. We started our ride under some heavy cloud cover and things didn’t get any better as the day went on. We got rained on a bit, but nothing serious.
The plan was to do the ‘loop’ down to the base of Camp Fortune and then up to Champlain Lookout. In total, from door to door (at Grant’s place) the loop is 56 kms. Due to the above mentioned loss of one of our riders, Steve and I ended up doing more like 60 kms.
The ride up from the base of Camp Fortune to the turn off towards Champlain is pretty brutal in my opinion. It seemed to be a never ending climb! Worse than the climb up King Mountain? I can’t really say because when I climbed King the last time, I gave in and dropped to ‘granny gear’ before the top. I didn’t do that at all this ride.
I’m feeling pretty damn good, but a bit sore from the seat. I made a trip to MEC finally and picked up some official biking shorts for next week so we’ll see if they make any difference. I would have bought a new shirt too, but they didn’t have any large on the rack. And while I was there, I also picked up a handlebar mount for my GPS, so I’m anxious to try that out too.
All in all a great ride. Grant is talking about biking down to Brockville next weekend (Saturday or Sunday) so I may take the plunge and try riding on some highways and go with him. We’ll see.
I think this should be the route that we took. Hopefully that link will work. It doesn’t include the little bit extra that Steve and I did while waiting for the other two to catch up. I really would like to get a view from farther out…but it seems Firefox on my mac is having trouble with it. I’ll try again tomorrow morning at work and update this if I can.