It was still raining Monday morning, but we wanted to move on anyway, so we put on our rain gear and headed out. We decided early in our ride, when the route signs pointed us off onto a muddy track, to just ignore them and follow the roads. This was a great decision, as we encountered very little traffic on flat roads with good pavement, and were able to make great time, covering off about 30km by lunch. Coming back to the Velo route at Rigny-Ussy, we debated stopping at that point, particularly since the rain seemed to be picking up, but after a hot lunch, the sky lightened a bit, and we decided to push on.
As it turned out, this was a great decision, as the rain finally stopped and we had a dry ride for the last 13km to Langeais, making a distance we really hadn’t been counting on.
Langeais, it turns out, is a beautiful town. There was less greenery than in some, but our B&B had a nice garden, and a great view overlooking the chateau and the town. It’s only downfall was proximity to a church that rang its bells every hour, plus an extended performance at 7:30am and 7:30pm, which tended to interrupt our sleep. But you can’t have it all, I suppose.
After two nights there we pushed on to Tours, which is where we are today. We saw our first blue sky in several days, though it was still mostly cloudy and a bit cool. Today’s ride was probably the best we’ve had, again lovely flat road right along the river. The countryside was green and despite a long stop to explore the chateau and gardens at Villandry, it didn’t take us long to get to our destination.
Coming into Tours almost ruined our day, though. Despite being a small city of about 130k people, it was crazy busy, and the route signs disappeared for a while, leaving us to guess our route a bit until we were close to the center to be on the city centre tourist map. To top it off, there’s extensive construction of a tram line, so there’s a new bridge over the Cher that wasn’t on my map, and the bike lane was regularly getting blocked by construction vehicles, plus randomly disappearing when space was too tight (much like Edmonton, I guess, but everythings harder when you’re not familiar with the city.)
This very negative first impression led us to decide to stay only one night, but once we were settled into our hotel and started walking around the town, it quickly redeemed itself. There are a number of pedestrian streets in the older parts of town that are busy with people and more diversity of food than we’ve seen elsewhere in France. French food is great, but it was a treat to be able to be able to stop in and have a quick kebab instead of having to wait through the hour long process of more traditional French cuisine.
So Tours has now received the seal of approval, despite a rocky introduction. We’re hoping leaving town will go a bit smoother, as it looks like there should just be a separated bike path along the Loire, starting 4 blocks from our hotel end going all the way out of town. Hopefully the reality is as good as the map.
We’ll be moving onto Aboise tomorrow, though we may do a bit more exploring of Tours before heading out.

Getting here was an exhausting experience. It’s the second time I’ve flown bikes, so there was nothing new about packing or getting them to the airport. But there were some added complications to flying internationally with them. First, because we were flying Westjet to Toronto and Air France the rest of the way, there was some confusion about baggage policy. The longest leg policy applies, so Westjet is supposed to charge the Air France surcharge. Unfortunately, their agent was not well trained, and tried to charge the oversized & extra bag fees, as he would on a Westjet flight, but at Air France’s rates (total charge $375/bike). Despite showing him a copy of the AF policy, he couldn’t deal with the idea that Air France treats bikes differently from other baggage. He offered to waive the $75 extra bag fee, but the total price was still double what he should have charged. After I argued a bit more, he eventually said he’d just check them to Toronto for free, and we could deal with it there. I accepted this offer, and that just left getting the bikes through the oversize bag check. Unfortunately, the Edmonton airport doesn’t have a large enough bag scanner in the Westjet terminal, so we had to open the boxes and have them hand searched.

While our arrangement had gotten the trip going, it wasn’t ideal, and our leisurely 3 hour layover in TO ended up being a hectic rush to pick up everything and get to the departure counter to recheck them (side note: it’s not easy to fit a boxed bike on a baggage cart onto an elevator.) We did manage to accomplish it, and at only $100/bike it was even cheaper than I’d expected, so the result was satisfying. The flight to Paris was uneventful. I did not appreciate Peter Jackson’s over-wrought extension of The Hobbit, but there’s only so much an airline can do. We were left with just a couple of final elevators to negotiate with the bikes before loading them onto the train. Though the TGV website indicates that disassembled bikes are allowable baggage, it turns out there’s really nowhere to put them, so they were kind of in the way. But at least we got here. Now in France, we’ve been doing lots of riding. API Call ErrorOur B&B is some distance from town, so it requires API Call Errora ride of 3 or so km to get to the nearest restaurant. The weather has been less than ideal, not raining but overcast, windy and generally chilly. We’re getting by, though. Yesterday we checkout out the nearby village of Ste. Gemmes sur Loire, which was doing some significant construction to its main square, so we probably weren’t seeing it at its best. The river is very high, and has API Call Errorflooded a few of the lower sections of the bike route, so he couldn’t use it as much as we’d hoped. The water seems to be receding, though, so I think it will improve from now on.

Today’s excursion was into central Angers. It was further I expected – my newly installed odometer says 20km round trip, when I’d been expection only 13 or so – and we got lost coming into the city. Kathy and I are hoping to avoid big cities for the rest of the trip, I think. We were a bit disappointed by the tourist attractions, as one of the main attractions listed, the “Maison d’Adam (artisans house)” turned out to be an art store and a few apartments in a reasonably attractive building with lots of woodcarvings on the outside. And admittedly attractive and unique building, but nothing to really recommend it. The other attraction, API Call Errorthe castle, is quite impressive and has a beautiful looking API Call Errorgarden in the base of its moat, but we opted not to pay the €8.50 admission fee. Angers did, however, impress with how busy the old city is. It’s clearly still the center of the city, and hasn’t been abandoned to become nothing more than a tourist district like you’ll find in some of the other cities in the country. The architecture, while not unique, its style and uniformity makes the city both attractive and impressive. That should be it for now. Tomorrow we load up the bikes for the first time, and will head up the Loire, hopefully reaching somewhere near Saumur.

Booking wasn’t a great experience, unfortunately.  We’ve been saving up our air miles in hopes of saving some money on this flight.  Unfortunately, when we went to book, Air Miles wouldn’t offer us any single connection flights.  They all involves at least 2 connections (Edmonto-Toronto-Frankfurt-Paris, or more ridiculously, Edmonton-Vancouver-Montreal-Paris), and several of the routes had cash prices – we only had enough points for one ticket – high enough that we’d be saving less than $200 to take those flights.  So we ended up having to just bite the bullet and pay cash.  We’re hoping to use the points that remain on a trip to Cuba next winter, but we’ll see how that goes.

The plan so far is intentionally vague.  We’re planning to bring the bikes, and head straight from the airport to somewhere in the Loire valley, which is a famous bike trip, and part of the Eurovelo 6 cycle route that goes all the way from St. Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast to  the Danube Delta on Romania’s black sea cost.  I’m currently leaning towards Angers as a starting point for our trip, and then we’ll see how things go from there.  The hope is to see a bit of rural France and have some time to relax.  The route is advertised as using primarily low traffic roads and separated bike instrastructure, so I’m hoping it lives up to its promise. We’re not sure that we’ll only visit the Loire.  There’s been talk of Provence, and Midi-Pyrenees, or maybe somewhere north of Paris – neither of us have much idea what there is north of Paris – but these aren’t the sorts of things we’re going to plan to obsession.  If we want to go somewhere else, we will.  If we’re enjoying the Loire, then there’s no reason to rush off just for the sake of something different.

It’s good to have a holiday to plan again.  I always enjoy this part.

Biking around PEI was a fantastic way to spend a holiday. I had been warned about API Call Errorhills by Marilyn, but only had problems with them the first day. It turns out that the central part of the island is quite hilly, and without topo maps, we stumbled into the worst of it the first day. It was a brutal day, as we also couldn’t stop because it was a part of the island with few services. Unfortunately, while there are frequent towns on the map, many of them only have a couple houses, and no stores or hotels.

After that first day, we wound up in a lovely coastal town, and concluded that we should try to bike along the coast as much as possible from there on out. This worked pretty well for us, as the coastal routes were much flatter and more manageable, at least along the API Call Errorsouth coast. We also quickly got into better shape for climbing the hills that we did encounter.

Traveling by bike is quite different from traveling by public transport, and different again from traveling by car. Like with a car, we could get to small, out of the way places. But because it takes all day to go distances that cars travel in well under an hour, it’s not handy to run errands elsewhere. Having seen some lovely pictures, we decided to spand a couple nights in API Call ErrorMalpeque Harbour. Unfortunately, since our tourist map listed a restaurant there, it didn’t occur to us to ask. On arrival, we found one of the major inconveniences of PEI is just how seasonal the tourist industry is. There is essentially no shoulder season, summer services open on the July 1 weekend and not a day sooner. So the restaurant was still closed.

Luckily, the place we were staying did have a kitchen, so we just needed to procure groceries. After a couple of phone calls, we managed to get a taxi out from Summerside to take us to the nearest town to stock up. All in, it only cost $60 for the round trip, so it wasn’t too bad…probably still cheaper than eating in a restaurant for two days would have been.

Then came the hard part. The north coast turned out to be hilly and had a lot of traffic. Rather beautiful, though. Happily, there were some reprives, as we biked through two sections of PEI National Park. Because there was a parallel road inland, and you have to pay to drive on the roads through the park, there was virtually no traffic. The hills were more manageable, and there was gorgeous scenery in a API Call Errorrugged, coastal kind of way.

All in all, it was a great trip. We learned a few things for future bike trips. Perhaps most importantly: when you’ve been riding all day, it’s well worth spending money to have a comfortable place to sleep. We carried a fair bit of heavy camping gear with us, and only ended up camping two nights. Next time, I’ll skip the tent and sleeping bags, and just plan on sleeping in a bed every night. We also learned that Kathy should really just get a better bike. We rented one for her, which ended up being the men’s model of the same bike she has at home. While it performed okay, it is a cheaper bike and had trouble shifting gears on hills. But I think it’s definitely something we’ll do again. Maybe not every holiday, but certainly some of them.

First the baggage check agent was extremely slow with it. There was a lot more paperwork than you’d expect for just adding an oversized bag to the ticket and paying $50 for the privilege. Then there was the lineup for oversized bag screening. On our flight, there were also about 30 mounties with large luggage, as they were packing body armour and who knows what else to bring to the G20 meeting in Toronto. But even after getting to the front of the line, we were stymied, since the scanner in the Westjet terminal was not large enough to handle a bike box. I had to be escorted to the Air Canada terminal where my bag was scanned, and then escorted back to actually get my bag into the handling system.

After that, things went pretty smoothly. The lines through security were long but efficient, and we made it to our gate just as the boarding announcement was made. No waiting, despite arriving the full 2 hours before flight time.

Most of our bags, including the bike, made it all the way to Charlottetown with no trouble. Unfortunately, the set of panniers containing my clothes and the toolkit I need to reassemble the bike ended up in the “arrivals” pile in Toronto, and missed the connection. Not lost, just late. Since Westjet is currently only flying once a day into Charlottetown, that means waiting until tonight to get them. We’ve managed to book another night in town, but it means delaying the rest of the trip a bit. I’m hoping the hostel here has all the tools I need to reassemble the bike, or I’ll be unable to get around much until tomorrow…if I’m going to be delayed, I’d at least like to get things set up so that we’re ready to go.

The weather forecast was looking decent – if a bit hot, so we set off Saturday morning with lots of water. Steph loaned us a cooler bag that attached to the top of my rack, and kept our supply ice-cold all day. The riding started well. We’d plotted a route made of almost entirely dedicated bike paths to the north-east edge of the city, and it was flat too. The wind from the north-west even pushed us a bit on the eastern stretches. The sprawling mass that is Edmonton seems to go on forever sometimes, so we were thankful when we got to Fort Road and into a API Call Errormore rural setting.

When I think of Fort road, I usually think of the grubby, busy part of town that heads up towards Fort Saskatchewan, but towards the north – after traffic has been diverted onto Manning Drive – it’s a really lovely ride with almost no traffic. Anyone in Edmonton looking for a short ride in the country might want to consider taking the LRT to Clareview and riding up Fort Rd from there. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the end of this peaceful part of our trip, the wind was picking up, and now blowing almost straight from the north. After crossing Manning Dr. once again, it seemed that we were riding straight into a storm, and were peddling as hard as we could while making little headway. Not the best introduction to bike touring. It did die down eventually, and we made it to our B&B in one peace, ready for a nap.

The trouble with bike touring is that every little chore becomes a bigger job. Going to find dinner – not provided by the B&B – required riding about 3 km to a nearby golf course. A short ride normally, but difficult to work up to doing when we were already beat. By the time we left, clouds had rolled in and looked threatening…we decided we’d better hurry. Not fast enough, a downpour started when we were about halfway there, so we arrived at dinner soaked and pretty much thoroughly done in. At least the food was good, and it did stop raining before we headed back.

We were happy to not have any grand plans of big rides on the Sunday, since it rained most of the day. After a fantastic breakfast, it was certainly the right day for staying in and reading. Being so thoroughly worn out the previous day, we also discussed the possibility of cheating on the ride home and only going as far as Clareview – we decided to wait and see what we felt like when we got to the city limits. We did have to take a ride to go get something to eat, so we were pleased in late afternoon when the rain let up. Rather than take the highway back to Gibbons, we decided to deal with the gravel and follow the back roads into town. The difficult ride was rewarded by API Call Errorgood scenery.

Monday was the perfect day for riding home. The air was cool, but not cold, and what wind there was came almost straight out of the east, a crosswind most of the way, giving us the occasional push. By the time we got back to the city, it felt like we’d barely gotten going, so we did the full ride home, about an hour faster than the ride out…and with far more energy left over at the end. Overall, a great and relaxing weekend trip.

Lessons for next time. First, always bring full rain gear. I bought Kathy a new raincoat for her birthday, but she doesn’t have any rainpants left, so we only had one pair between us when we got caught out. Second, wind is horrible. I guess we already knew that, and there’s not much to be done about the wind, but there it is. I hope that we’ll do something like this again sometime. We’d been bantering around about doing a bike trip in Ireland, and I think we’d both enjoy that…will have to see what our bike skills and finances can support.

A few favourites are below

Juvenile Galapagos Hawk

Blue Footed Booby

Kathy biking down the Volcano

Male frigate bird

Unfortunately, it was not to be. We arrived back in Quito and got to the airport with plenty of time to spare…around 4:00, a good 3 hours before our flight was scheduled to depart. It was raining, which had never really occurred to me as a problem and I enjoyed watching the planes take off streaming water behind.

When our plane arrived, there was immediately something off. Several vehicles with flashing lights came out, and I saw some grab something that looked like an air tank – I later figured out it was an acetylene tank for welding…they were making some kind of adjustment to the front landing gear. Whatever it was, it didn’t work. We sat and sat, and waited. The word was that we couldn’t take off because the runway was too wet, despite the other planes doing precisely that.

At one point, the airport did close entirely, for about 30 or 40 minutes. As far as I can tell, though, ours was the only flight that didn’t leave at all. Finally at 10pm, they collected passengers connecting to Toronto, and attempted to make alternate arrangements. Although Air Canada can book Avianca flights they are not formally partners, and Avianca was entirely clueless about what to do. They did speak to Air Canada in Bogota, but all they did was refer everyone to an 800 number that was only open during the day. Eventually, the Avianca employee who was “helping” us wandered off, never to be seen again.

Us and the two other Canadians with the same connection headed back to a hotel…getting ripped off by cab drivers in the process – us for $10, the other couple for $20. But at that time of night, there’s not much to be done…there weren’t many cabs around.

I spent most of the morning on the phone with Air Canada, and they’ve rebooked us (charging for the process, because it was an Avianca problem, but Avianca was basically unable or unwilling to help us…we will be seeking a refund for that when we return.) So now we’ll be arriving back in Edmonton on Wednesday night, after some long layovers – 12 hours in Bogota (I asked for that because I did not want a similar situation to crop up again), and 13 hours in Toronto…which I didn’t ask for, and am a bit of a loss how there can be no earlier flights we could be on.

So we’ll be home late Wednesday. Not what we’d planned, and unfortunately not enough time to leave Quito, which we’re pretty sick of. Normally, I don’t look forward to a trip ending, but this time, I’m definately ready to go home.

As it’s quiet we wanted, we were not disappointed. We opted to stay at a fairly pricey API Call Errorecolodge called the Black Sheep Inn (Fairly pricey in our case meaning it cost $65/night for the two of us in a shared room with full board.) It was an API Call Erroramazing setting. The inn was about a kilometre from town, which only houses about 100 people anyway, so it was fantastically quiet, and from everywhere – room, balcony, bathroom, yoga room, outside, etc… – you could see across a lovely canyon and set of API Call Errorplateaus, all green, except API Call Errortwo peaks you could see in the distance if it was extraordinarily clear.

Our first day there, we got ambitious and attempted a hike. The directions they gave us described it as about 2-1/2 hours to the cloud forest. It turns out that hiking uphill when your starting point is over 10,000 feet high is tiring. After 3 hours, we were about 2/3 of the way to our goal, and we decided it was time to turn back. No cloud forest on this trip, unfortunately. We did get some API Call Error rewarding API Call Errorviews. We tried coming back by a API Call Error – taking a path up over a ridge the overlooks our inn, which was marked as an easy hike on the map – and managed to get ourselves lost. We could see where we wanted to go, but couldn’t figure out how to get there. A wrong turn took us down onto private property immediately above our hosts’, but the owner was of the opinion that it was his trail and we were not going to cross. So we had to climb back up to the top and try again, ending up on an extraordinarily steep slope that was no good for Kathy’s ankles (and knees, not to mention Neil’s paranoid fear of heights!).

The next day we were not so ambitious. I finished my book, and we walked over to watch the sheep and API Call Errorchickens in the yard.

Getting into Chigchulán is much easier than getting out from it. The busses going there leave from Latacunga at 11:30 and 12 every day, arriving around 3:30-5pm. The busses leaving go at 3am and 4am, and 5am on Wednesdays. We are not morning people. So we splurged and spent the $30 to hire a truck to take us as far as Zimbahua, where there is hourly bus service back to Latacunga, which is on the Panamerican Highway. We also threw in a stop at API Call ErrorLaguna Quilotoa, one of the famous things to see in Ecuador. While the view there is also fabulous, I wouldn’t mind sticking to the postcard. The lake is a volcanic crater, and the rim where the hikes start is about 14,000 ft above sea level, and it’s pretty inhospitable up there. Icy cold and windy. So we ended up skipping our intended hike, though two others from our hotel were doing the whole 6-7 hours around the rim, which seems nuts to me. We did, however, buy ourselves some API Call Erroralpaca wool scarves, and a sweater for Kathy.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt guiltier about a purchase. Normally it’s the price that bothers me, but I felt what we paid was fair. But I’m at a loss to understand why touristy places always feature long rows of stalls of maybe 10 or 20 people all selling exactly the same thing. One woman didn’t have a sweater in Kathy’s size and a colour we wanted, and ended up almost begging us to buy something from her. It made me feel terrible, but at the same time, you can’t buy from everybody, so what can you do.

We’re back in Quito now, after yet another long day of transportation. There’s many lovely things about Ecuador, but I have been frustrated that no matter how far apart things are, it seems to take about 6 hours of tiring bus travel to get to where you’re going. From here, we’ll try to do a biking trip to Cotopaxi on Friday, and on Saturday night we fly home.