300km plus weekend

This weekend saw us preparing for our big trip. We road with everything (almost) that we are planning to take with us on our trip from St. John's to Ottawa. The first day we road out to Swartz Bay, then ferried to Fulford Harbour, across Saltspring Island to Vesuvius where we took the ferry to Crofton. From Crofton we road to a B&B out near Duke Point but not without stopping at the Crow and Gate for dinner. Initial trip data was fouled up by user glitches with the GPS.

The joke was on us to find Fiddick's Farm B&B, at the end of a long days ride, to be at the top of a hill - pushing our bikes up an almost 24% grade long driveway to their hill top house. We found out later that there was a back entrance to the property that avoided the initial downhill then back up again and had a more gentle approach in grade.  The three days of riding (315K) were a lot of fun and we learned a lot about hills (1500m of climbing on day 3) and about the pros & cons of highway riding (good shoulders, gentler grades).

The next day took us from the B&B to Beach Acres and back to the B&B.

Day 3 threw us for a loop. We rode from the bed and breakfast The elevations on one map was what Google had told us they would be - Duncan was going to be a slam dunk, an easy day. The elevations that we actually did was not so tough but we went into it with a mindset of about 1000 metres less elevation gain.