Day 3 – Acadian Route to Moncton, NB

We started off the day along the Acadian route from Murray Beach to Shediac. It was again a very quiet road with some great scenery of the ocean, and a few abandoned houses here and there. We saw our first fellow bike tourist of our trip today, headed the opposite direction at a fairly quick pace. Unfortunately we didn’t get to chat to him and only got a wave in as he quickly went by on the other side of the road.

It was neat to bike through the village of Cap-Pele, where fishing boats in people’s backyards were a norm. We passed several fish processing plants. This was a real fishing town.

Today was a hot day. It felt like it was above 30 in the afternoon. We took a break in the shade here and there. I think I drank about 4L of water today.

We were supposed to meet up with my family in Shediac today, but they got busy with work so the plans fell through.  So we decided to keep biking onwards. We were thinking of going along the eastern coast of NB through Miramichi and Bathurst, but in the end decided to go the Saint John River route to Quebec.

While we were seeing the World’s Largest Lobster sculpture in Shediac, we met a couple from Switzerland who recognized us from the campground the night before. They had taken 36 days off work and were traveling the east coast of Canada. After a nice chat and some shaking of hands, we left for Moncton for the evening.

Once we eventually arrived in downtown Moncton, we decided to Priceline a hotel for the night, with the main reason being we (or I in this case) needed a TV to watch Japan play in the World Cup game tomorrow morning. We had biked over 85km by that point so we were really looking forward to a place with a real bed. By the luck of the draw (which caught us a little off guard as we knew a couple priceline hotels downtown) we ended up getting a hotel outside the downtown area, so we are actually staying by the “Magnetic Hill” area tonight, ever so slightly closer to Fredericton, our next city.

In the end we biked about 95 km today, and ate about 1.5 times more food than we usually do (I had an entire 1kg package of microwaved frozen lasagna for supper).

The most I had ever biked before was 70km in one day (without panniers), but I found that if don’t do it all at once and break it up during the day it isn’t too bad (we’ll see how we feel as the trip goes on..).

We are headed towards Fredericton tomorrow, but we are not entirely sure where we’ll end up staying. There is a campground along the way but it’s 85 km away so we’ll see if we make it that far after a late morning start. It’s also suppose to be a really hot day tomorrow so we are going to take it easy.

Anyway, we are quite tired so that’s it for now.