Distance: 118km
Elevation: 808m
Around 5am, I woke up freezing and needed to put on an extra layer of clothes for another round of sleep.
A little later, when I had made coffee, my neighbor woke up and her first thing was to smoke some pot in her car. I don’t have a good nose but this was so much that I almost got high with her.
By 9:30 I was in the saddle and went straight to the nearest Tim Hortons for a second, more hearty, breakfast.
I was cycling alongside the Petitcodiac River most of the day. It had gotten really warm and in fact I felt a little dizzy at first.
The scenery was beautiful for the first 2/3 of the way but as of Moncton the river looked brown-red like liquid chocolate. I was told that this was because of the tide which was bringing in saltwater into the river every 8 hours or so.
Along the way I had noticed since several days that many trees looked like they were caught in giant spider webs which made them slowly fade. I had not yet figured out what the origin was but it looked bad.
In a break, when I was scrolling through social media, I noticed that it was Ukrainian Independence Day today. How fitting since our Cosmikk-Foundation supports NGOs that work for people in Ukraine.
Today, I had several motorcyclists on their Harley’s greet me. The last time this happened to me was when I was approaching the North Cape by bike back in 2021. I got goosebumps when thinking back to that intense memory.
Originally I had planned to stop in Moncton today but I didn’t like it there and the Gulf of the St. Lawrence Stream was so close. So I decided to push through until Shediac.
The last 20km were a little tough but eventually I arrived at the Gulf of St. Laurent and with that I also completed the 2,000km mark of this year’s tour.
On the campsite, I met Shannon and Marco, my first Fellow TransCanada cyclists this year. They had already seen me pulling in on the Sussex campground yesterday but they had been in a different corner of this large place.
They both lived in a small town 45 min away from Ottawa with two grown up kids and had just retired. They were both in their end-fifties. This tour was their transitioning project into their next life.
Originally, they had met in the military where both of them served for six years in the 1990s.
Marco had become a teacher later and Shannon had been working in the administration of the local government of their town and was a fitness coach in parallel.
Their final destination was Halifax which was only 400km away, so they had almost made it.
Tomorrow, they also wanted to go to Prince Edward Island just like me. However, they were early risers and would hit the road already around 7:30 am. We would see.
We chatted for a while but then I needed to setup my camp for the night and have dinner.
The campground was full with empty tents. The owners were mostly attending a large country concert in a nearby town. They would all come back in the night, probably drunk and it would be noisy.
Well at least I knew what was coming.