On an unusual breakdown

I was rather surprised and a trifle annoyed yesterday morning when the chain on the Castafiore broke whilst I was climbing St-Jacques Street on on the way to work. While I have had issues with bike chains in the past, I have never had one break on me before. One odd thing about the break was that the link that broke was the joint link but not at the removable pin.

Fortunately, I wasn't far from my bike store and alternate means of transportation. As the bike store only opened at 10, I left my bike locked outside of it, and took a bus to work. It luck would have it, the breakdown may well have spared me having to ride home in the cold and heavy rain.

There was a new person at the bike store who looked very young. In fact, he was only 16, several years younger than the Castafiore! However, he put a new chain on and seemed to know what he was doing, which is possibly more than could be said about me.

To be honest, I have been following my typical end-of-the-cycling-year bad habit of delaying maintenance issues. I have the vague excuse that until recent I was still paying off the Newfoundland trip and related debts. However, I realized that I was in potentially dangerous situation as the Castafiore has some minor mechanical issues that will need to be dealt with at some point whilst I don't think I should use Leonardo for getting to work owing to some more serious mechanical issues. All this to say that I should make a point of taking Leonardo in to be looked at tomorrow morning.

On the death of a friend

I was saddened to read in this morning's paper that Emru, older brother of my friend Tamu passed away last night. As you may know, he was the one that was suffering from a rare form of leukemia that pushed me into putting my name on the bone marrow donors list.

A donor had been found this summer. Unfortunately, the donation was either insufficient or too late to help his body resist the disease. He was a few years older than I and leaves behind a wife and son as well as Tamu and their parents.
I can't say I knew that well, but what I knew of him I like. He was funny, smart and cool. One of my favourite memories of him was when I was helping Tamu move one time. Emru came in and was introduced to me. He told me not to believe anything his little sister had said of him. He obviously thought that his sister had been telling tales about her "nasty" older brother. However, about the only thing I could remember about him involved his son. So, with lightning wit, I replied, "You mean you don't have a son called Max whom you bench-press?" With a sheep-ish grin he admitted that perhaps not everything that Tamu had told me was a lie.

The world will be a poorer place without him. May you rest in peace, Emru.

On the difficulty of blogging about long range plans

Margo has quite rightly pointed out that once she and Chris are on the road, how and when I might join them will become much more obvious. Things will fall into place and it will be relatively simple for me to determine how to join them.

However, this does not make it easy to write about it now, as things are still very much in flux. For example, I had been assuming that the European leg of their trip would take them across Central Europe.

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However, it now seems that Margo and Chris' working plan is somewhat different. They are thinking about island hoping in the Mediterranean, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and then up across France.

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This is a relatively radical change from my perspective. One significant advantage is that I can stop thinking about learning at least a smattering of German. One disadvantage is that I might have to "contaminate" my relatively limited ability in Spanish by learning Italian!

(If I may digress, Granny once told me that she made the "mistake" of trying to learn Spanish after studying Italian. The problem was that as the languages were relatively similar, she kept on mixing the two up. She reckoned that she might have been better off sticking to just Italian. Of course, she didn't use either very often, so perhaps it was a moot point.)

Other advantages of this route would be that much of it would take place in countries where I can get by in the official languages. Then again, fluency in Québécois isn't a guarantee that you will be understood in France. ;-)

All this to say, that as plans are still in a relative state of flux, it feels too soon to dream and speculate in writing. What I should be doing is dressing up past posts with photos and maps such as the ones featured in this post. (Thank you Chris for letting me know how to do it.)

On what may come

I haven't been blogging much as I haven't really got a trip to plan in a concerted way. That is not to say, however, that I don't have trip ideas kicking around. In fact, I have three of various levels of probability.

The first is really an outgrowth of the Newfoundland trip. I skipped the Acadian Peninsula by taking the train from Bathurst to Moncton in order to have more time in Newfoundland. This was an excellent decision as Gros Morne National Park throughly deserved the time. However, the Acadian Peninsula also deserves time. In a recent issue of Canadian Geographic, it was described as a very good bike touring destination.

This is to be taken with a grain of salt as the touring described in that issue is of an exceedingly leisurely variety. As in five days to do 150 km! With a light load, I have done as much in one day. Even my mother thought it a very slow rate.

In any case, I have a plan of sorts to take the train to Bathurst and bike around the Acadian Peninsula and through Kouchibouguac National Park to Moncton and take the train back to Montreal. This would take a relaxed week or so. Ideally, this would happen in June.

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Mummy has expressed a certain interest in joining in on this expedition. I would welcome her given proper notice and preparation.

Depending on other factors, such as whether other bikes trips are or are not in the works, I had one idea of doing a loop around the Bay of Fundy via the Digby-St John, N.B. ferry after reaching Moncton. Obviously, this would take longer than a week.

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The second trip would be to join Margo and Chris on the later legs of their epic journey from Bangkok to London. This could be rather tricky as my starting point would be something of a moving target and I would have to figure out where we would meet at well ahead of time and figure out how to get there both easily and cheaply. My very preliminary plan would be to fly to Vienna at the beginning of August and meet them there. However, this is all very speculative as Margo and Chris might easily give up halfway through Kazakstan or something rendering my ponderings moot.

The third plan is rather less likely, but is related to the Newfoundland trip. The short version is that I would fly to Deer Lake and bike to St. John's, possibly via St. Pierre et Miquelon. However, given that Alice and Mark will likely have left Newfoundland this trip may very well not come to pass, at least in the near future.

On the last day of the trip and other news

Sorry if I haven't been updating a lot of late. My best excuse is that there hasn't been a whole lot of biking news. Of course, I hadn't written about the last day's hike, even though I made a blog entry on that day.

As I mentioned, the last day featured a hike up the Tablelands. The Tablelands are an odd geologic feature of Gros Morne National Park, the one that earned its UNESCO world heritage status. The short version is that it consists of ancient volcanic sea bed, something that it rarely seen on the surface. The rocks themselves have a weird chemistry that plant life has not been able to adapt to particularly well.
If you look at this shot taken from near the top of the Tablelands, you will see that the background is much more verdant than the foreground despite the fact that both are roughly the same altitude. However, as the foreground is this funky volcanic rock, vegetation has a hard time growing on it.
As you can see from this shot of Jason and Alice, there isn't a whole lot of veg on the climb up. As well, the rocks themselves have a strange appearance and texture to them.
A fair number of them had this odd looking "skin" on some surfaces. All their surfaces had an odd feel to them, almost like plaster or sun-dried bricks. It was a very strange place.
It was also rather steep as Jason and Mark demonstrate in this shot. We stopped for a break to regroup and to get in a group shot.
It also allowed us to take pictures back towards Norris Point and Bonne Bay.
In order to get to the start of the hike, we had motored across Bonne Bay in Moonshadow. I must confess I was somewhat uneasy by the crossing as the wind and waves were higher than I felt comfortable with in such a small vessel. When we got to Woody Point (the village opposite Norris Point) Alice negotiated a ride in shuttle bus up to the start of the hike.

It was a spectacular last day. Then it was back to Alice's to pack and to catch the plane back to Montreal. More hike pictures are on my Picasa site.

Other news

I found out today that I will be gaining an "official" sister-in-law. My brother Philip intends to make an honest woman of Dominique, mother of his daughter. No date announced. This is slightly surprising as in the past Philip has voiced opinions against being formally married. Admittedly, this was prior to his getting involved with Dominique. Best of luck to them.

In the bargain, I gain Eowyn as an "official" step-niece. Interesting that I now have one "true" niece (Désirée), one (soon-to-be) step-niece (Eowyn) and one proxy-niece (Isla) and no nephews to speak of.

On getting the facts after the case

You may recall my post that raved about biking between the Midway Motel (which I didn't rave about) and Corner Brook. Well, I was casually poking around the Atlantic Canada Cycling route database when I came across this snippet in their description of that bit of the Trans-Canada Highway, and I quote:

"[T]he western section of this long road is given a 3 rating. ... A very strong tailwind usually pushes northward to Corner Brook. It is so strong that the railroad once had professional "wind-spotters" along the coast!"

Evidently I was enjoying just such a wind. Of course, I did say I had the wind at my back at the time.

On a gratuitous moose video and sad moose news

Margo sent me the url to this cutesy moosey video. Quite remarkable to see the creatures so relaxed and playing, especially the cow moose. I would hazard a guess that the house is roughly on the edge of a community or is otherwise relatively isolated.

In less happy moose news, I read this article from the CBC news website today. While the loss of one bull moose is not the end of the world, I was surprised to learn how few moose there are in Nova Scotia.