Title: Day One – Leaving Halifax and getting wet
Date: August 18, 2007 9:44 AM
Category: Bike
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It’s time to leave Halifax and begin the tour. The Radisson hotel was good, offering a small semi-private compound to park the bike in. They called it secure, but to me that suggests at least a gate and there is none. Mind you, Halifax looks a pretty safe place to me and the Daytona does at least have a scorpio alarm. It’s also chained to the fence and covered with a fitted cover. I haven’t lived in Manchester for a long time, but the paranoia is still with me, gnawing, making me anxious.

I’m in the Maritimes, a place that claims to be some of the best biking in the world and I have my Daytona 675 with me, equipped with freshly scrubbed Metzeler 1’s. However, the signs aren’t good today. Like most bikers heading out for a ride, I watch the weather almost religiously. It’s calling for rain showers pretty much all day and no matter how many times I change the channel and watch a different report, it’s all telling me the same thing: I’m going to get wet today and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s also 15 degrees celcius and I am starting to really regret not packing thermals. Still, at least I have my waterproofs with me.

I was planning on recording the entire ride to video, using a twenty20 ball mount camera and Archos 504 PMP but while the camera is supposed to be IP68 rated, I have been having some problems with it and have yet to get a decent video. Today is not the day to be experimenting I feel so I leave the camera gear in my car bag. As I’m riding with my Garmin GPSMap 276c, I will take my tank bag. It’s an old Marsee that I modded to include some routing and cable management so I can listen to both my iPod and GPS instructions at the same time. The usual ride gear goes into the tank bag: snacks, iPod, spare headphones, ear plugs and, hoping against hope, sunglasses. I usually ride with a camelback too, which also has in it spare pants and my emergency tools, which short of re-attached by RAM mount are probably useless and I hope will remain untested.

It’s been a few days since I last ride, time spent in unfamiliar hotels, but getting into my Teknik leathers immediately feels like home. Good job as I will be wearing them quite a bit over the next two weeks. Next comes the two piece teknik waterproofs. They instantly ruin both my looks and enthusiasm, but then my I have little choice. The space on the truck my Daytona occupied for the past few days now contains my Ogio gear bag with all my clothes. The trunk and indeed top bag and all the seating are occupied and I can only ride. I can either wear the waterproofs and try to have fun, or I can get very wet and definitely not have fun.

My ride today is at least mercifully short. The destination is Mahone Bay, a small town north of Lunenberg via Peggy’s Cove which is supposedly the most photographed lighthouse in the world. The way is the Lighthouse route which, as the name suggests, winds it’s way past a number of lighthouses and that can only mean coastal roads. In other words, twisty.

Outside, I realize this is a fog, though visibility is a few hundred meters at least. Good enough not to scare me too much. As I put the GPS and tank bag on the bike and get ready to go, the rain is light but I am already hot in the waterproofs. No matter. It won’t last long. GPS, helmet, gloves on and we’re off.

For a city, albeit not a large one, the traffic is reasonably light. Aside from lights and a few road works, I’m at least mostly moving and in a few minutes, I’m out of the city and on the 333. Now, however, the rain is starting to come down. Mercifully, the fog isn’t bad but I am regretting the new silvered visor for my Shoei helmet. Despite being clean, it seems incapable of staying fog free. In hindsight, I probably should have used my clear visor but it just doesn’t look as good. At least I am reasonably dry.

At this point too, I realize the main problem with a route that is named in the guidebooks. It’s full of tourists. While only an idiot would want to drag their knees on a day like today, I would at least like to get where I am headed before the sun goes down, assuming I ever see it through the clouds that is. I learned other things about named routes that day:

1. Not only do they have lots of cars, but they also seem to wend through every small community in the area, like an innumerate doing a connect the dots puzzle.
2. Because they have lots of villages, no sooner do you hit a decent straightaway than you immediately see another 50km sign.
3. Because they have lots of villages AND because it threads along the coast, there aren’t a lot passing places.

So there you have it. The best possible start to the ride. Wet, low visibility, lots of cars and few places to (safely) get around them. Now, I did head past lots of folks, but I’m not sure I got out of third gear all morning. I certainly didn’t go very fast either. There was just no point and no opportunity.

By the time I got to Peggys Cove I’m both wet and bored. The rain at least should stop for part of the time, but what if all the roads are like this? I’ll check MapSource again tonight, but as far as I can see, it’s this or the highways and I simply hate highways. Not only are they straight, but on a bike like the Daytona it’s only a matter of time before I get a ticket.

First up, the scenery at Peggy’s Cove is beautiful. Very rugged and picturesque with the scattering typical New England brightly painted clapboard houses nestled in the rocks. Shame the light was so poor. Having arrived just minutes after the truck, which set off a good fifteen minutes earlier than me, I at least didn’t have to carry my gear around, so I dumped it and wondered over the rocks. Now, let me just say that the signs about the rocks being slippy REALLY need to be heeded by anyone wearing bike boots. While I didn’t go near the edge a couple of slips made me very wary.

At least the lunch was good. The choice isn’t too varied, but hey, this is a fishing town. That aside the lobster chowder is very good and the coffee is mercifully hot.

Back in the waterproofs, we head back to the truck, only to find some idiot had hit it. Noting major, but front fender is compressed and the license plate looks like it might fall off. I’m already cold and tired, so I just jump on the bike and let everyone else deal with it. whatever, I have the photos.

Onwards, and the rain is now falling harder. Back up the lighthouse route it’s the same story. Lots of cars and while the scenery is quite picturesque, do I really want to get this wet? I built my routes to take me on the back roads wherever possible, but this is getting hard. My feet are now soaked and my fingers are getting cold as I forgot to bring latex gloves for under my alpinestars. As I reach the end of the 333, I have a choice: I can turn down and head to the 329, which looks on paper to be superb or hit the highway 103 and just get where I’m headed as quick as possible. My decision is made by a factor I haven’t yet talked about: the road surfaces. Whoever designed the topography of the roads blessed us. Great scenery, good turns /etc, but whoever laid the tarmac was incompetent. Or very old at least. It seems like the surface is ancient and some primeval force has been playing the squeezebox with it. The road is full of undulations, kinks, scars, rents and has more potholes than I have ever seen. It was on this ride back up the 333 that I swear my kidneys began to hurt from being shaken so much so my decision was made. Any other day, in good weather at least, I would have taken the 329. But on this occasion, with frozen fingers and waterlogged boots, I hit the 103.

Now, perhaps I needed to do this for comparison anyway, but I can say the highways in NS are pretty decent. At least the 103 is. There’s virtually no cars and lots of passing places. I should perhaps point out that a lot of highways in North America are just two lane roads, which being English was a surprise. To me, highway is supposed to be fast moving, multiple carriage-way. I guess not, but I digress. So basically, I tucked in and wound it up, but despite my misgivings on highway riding, there were no cops. I did anger one biker though. An older guy on what looked like a BMW of some kind. I kind of went past him a little quick and he didn’t exactly wave at me the way most bikers do. At least, he wasn’t waving with all his fingers…

No matter. Soon, I’m off the motorway at back on country roads. The rain has not let up, so there’s no point trying to have fun yet, not that the number of cars would let me anyhow. I find my destination and check in, only to discover when I get back out that my waterproof GPS really isn’t and it’s stopped. It doesn’t matter now.

The room at the Ocean Trail Retreat is basic, and it is a trail to the ocean too, so at least they aren’t lying. The wet gear comes off and instantly hits and hanging space possible. Luckily, the leather itself isn’t too wet, and at least I packed a spare pair of gloves. The boots are soaked though. I stuff newspapers in them and put them on the heater. The room is now heating up with the faint but undeniable smell of rain-soaked leather.

The GPS seems to be dead too. It’ll power up, but powers straight down. I don’t fancy hand annotated maps so it joins the boots on the heater, battery out and it instantly steams up. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

I make perhaps the worst hotel coffee ever and settle down to read in warm clothes. Day one is over. I am 170km down with another 2200+ to go. If it’s like this the whole way, I think I might just have to rent a car and park the bike somewhere. Sometimes, it is possible to say good things about cars.

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