July 19, 2017, Day 59, St Nicola to St Jean Port Jolie, Quebec, 124 km

It was like a sauna!

Eight o’clock in the morning we stepped outside Thomas’ home where we’d spent the previous night. The sun was shining but it looked misty outside, especially over the water. Humid! I’d forgotten how humid it could be but now I remembered nights where you couldn’t get naked enough to sleep. We’d missed all that the night before as we’d stayed in Thomas’s cool air conditioned basement. 

We felt energized and well rested after spending the evening with Thomas. We’d tried to introduce him to our breakfast concoction but he declined, preferring his own of eggs and croissant. St Nicola is located just across from Quebec City  and I told him how tempted I was to go across to an ice cream pallor called “Mes Chocolate Favoris”.   They serve soft vanilla ice cream with an assortment of thick gooey dips! Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, chocolate hazelnut, cookies and cream, dulce de leche, salted chocolate caramel. The best!!! Worth a trip across the river….almost. Thomas smiled and said there was no need for that. There was one right in town and another, the original,   in Levis up the way! That put some drive in my drive chain! We were going through Levis anyway.

Well, of course it ended up being a complicated, convoluted route to find it, (and Charlie and I lost each other for a while), but in the end I had a bowl-me-over salted chocolate caramel cone.    Charlie, who never ate desserts before but since starting his trip has been slurping them back like a pro, decided not to have one and smugly sealed his lips in refusal to taste mine. Good! It was too delectable to share! Then he told me how great he felt for not having had one and I told him how great I felt for having snarfed back every bit. Good thing we don’t have one in Calgary. 

Highway 132 running east has super wide shoulders and generally smooth pavement. Most of it is part of La Route Verte and they have pretty high standards for their cycle paths. Eastward we rode with the wind at our backs. Not totally flat but nothing too challenging. It was a very nice ride. The St Lawrence River was often visible to our left and we passed many pretty little towns with their carefully maintained homes surrounded by flower gardens, all in vibrant bloom.   Drivers taking the 132 are used to seeing cyclists and indeed we saw many others from the super sleek in their spandex on their expensive featherweight bikes, to older adults pedalling too fast to be believable, (until we noticed they had battery packs to give them that ummpth), (wish I had a battery pack to give me some ummpth), to other cycle tourers like ourselves. I always want to talk to them and we do whenever we can.

When you’re rolling along at a good speed, you create a breeze despite the heat. When you stop, it doesn’t feel like it would be long before you’d shrivel up and die. The wind started to increase and with it came the occasional drop or two of rain. Refreshing! Soon, however, those scattered drops turned into a full-on deluge of warm wetness. We stopped and put on some rainwear before continuing on. Our target for the night was St Jean Port Jolie. (We’d actually cycled from Levi’s to Rivière de Loup 2 years ago and all should have been familiar, but aside from a few interesting buildings and points of interest, it was all new to me).

St Jean Port Jolie is a pretty place, as its name indicates. There are a lot of artisans living here, sculptors, potters, painters, etc.. When we got in to town they were closed up for the night but we peered in some windows.  I’d love to explore. Not to buy. I have learned that I do not need to own something beautiful to appreciate it. I can just look at it and enjoy it in the moment. Besides, I don’t want to carry as much as a Cliff bar wrapper with me if I don’t have to.

After checking a couple of hotels we picked one that had a restaurant and we spent the night there. So good to be clean! Spaghetti for dinner downstairs. We seem to be craving pasta lately.     Anyway, it was way too much for me, but fortunately I know someone who can help me out under those circumstances!