July 21, 2017, Day 61, Rivière du Loup, just a few km tooling around town.

This is what summer is all about! 

We’re sitting outside on a terrace mid-town Rivière du Loup. The sun is shining, it’s warm with a light but cooling breeze. I could be wearing a light, pretty summer dress and not even have my ski jacket at hand for later in the evening, (as one must in Calgary).  That is if I had a light pretty summer dress…..  No, I’m wearing cycling shorts and my usual purple shirt with my reflective vest. And my whistle, can’t forget that! I’m also sporting a nice black chain impression on my unevenly tanned right calf. 

Today is a rest day. We started off slowly and set the pace for the rest of the day. Charlie needed to go to a pharmacy to pick something up and initially I planned on hanging out at Tim’s until he rejoined me. My main motivation for that was that I knew there were at least 2 hills I’d have to climb if I wanted to go with him. And I don’t want to do any hills I don’t have to. He went his way and I headed to Tim’s but then I thought, I’ll catch up with him. You never know what adventures we can find together. And so I did. The hills weren’t all that bad either, probably because I hadn’t already done 100+ km today.

This is a busy little place. Lots of tourists poking around the little shops that have their wares enticingly displayed. There are flower baskets and everything is vibrant with colour. Soon, however, a thunderstorm is expected. We have been fortunate so far in that, other than that wild, demonstration of Mother Nature’s power we endured in Alberta between Bassano and Medicine Hat,  we haven’t been exposed during any other storms. 

I can feel it’s getting cooler…. 

It’s pouring! Rain is bouncing off the pavement, and the streets, minutes ago alive with people, are all but deserted. Where did they all go?  Charlie and I left the cafe/bar and took shelter under an overhang where I made our lunch. “What will you have? ” “Oh, just the usual, ham and cheese with cucumber on a pita with a squirt of ranch dressing.” I know we looked like street people sitting out there on the side of the road. Street people without a hat or bag out.  It’s too expensive to eat all your meals in restaurants, and we find that we’re able to eat better food when we make it ourselves. Sometimes though, it’s less expensive to eat the daily special in a restaurant at dinner time than it is to go to a grocery store and buy food. For example, cans of food can cost, depending on where you are, up to $4 per can and Charlie will eat four and me, one.

There is a street festival planned for downtown Rivière du Loup tonight and there are burly men setting up stages and sound equipment. If the weather doesn’t improve it will be a lot of work for few participants. Some of the musicians are tuning their instruments, blasting out parts of songs so loudly that the sound reverberates in our chests.

I wandered up and down the street, checking out all the cute little shops while Charlie sat in a bar, had a beer and tried to upload photos onto his blog. It’s been a source of frustration for him lately as his WordPress site tells him that the memory is low and photos won’t upload. Such frustration that he called the WordPress help line and paid $130 to enable him to put his pics up. Great, except it’s not working!

Everything is wet. The prospect of setting up, sleeping in and tearing down a wet tent is daunting so instead we are staying in a one star hotel tonight.  It has what we need and it will do just fine. Soon we will mosey down the way, grab a bite, buy some groceries for tomorrow. It will be an early night tonight. Tomorrow we are headed to Edmunston, New Brunswick. We don’t expect to get all the way there tomorrow but we’ll try to put in at least 100km. 

I’m looking forward to lobster! With garlic butter!