Day 19 – Getting into Montreal

Day 19 – Massueville to Montreal

Today we headed for Montreal where an awesome meal and a shower awaited us at Adam’s aunt and uncle’s. We started early and headed for Saint-Ours to the ferry, stopping for an early lunch at the grocery store before the ferry. It was a nice store with tables outside for us! It started raining while we were there and we had a quick chat with some motorcyclists, who assured us that 132 had a paved shoulder all the way to Montreal.

We headed to Contrecoeur, where we stopped at the tourism office (of course) and were informed that there actually was no paved shoulder for a portion of the route…and that we were far off the Route Verte…It was a nice park and they had live musicians playing.

We headed down the 132, and ended up veering off at the next big town to the back roads to avoid the traffic. Once we got to Varchenne, the bike path to Montreal started and it was great cycling…until they decided to detour the bike path around an area of the waterfront being repaired. The detour was very well signed and we had no concerns until we found ourselves at the top of a set of stairs! They had put a very narrow ramp onto the outer side of the stairs…definitely not designed for fully loaded touring bikes. It was a very exciting decent down the 4 or 5 small flights as the bikes slid even with the brakes fully applied.

We headed towards Montreal…using our slightly inadequate map to try and cross onto the island. At one point, we ended up on the opposite side of a 6 lane highway looking up at the bridge we were supposed to cross…one of those great travel moments (the Jacques Cartier bridge does not connect to the waterfront bike path…)

We crossed over at a designed bridge (after waiting for a big ship to cross underneath and having a chat with a local on his way to a rollerblading date) and ended up on the F1 racetrack! We pretended to be super cyclist but I was too tired to make a lap (another 4.4km to the 100km day). We headed safely from the racetrack to Adam’s aunt and uncle’s, where we enjoyed wonderful hospitality and an awesome meal of salmon!

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