Day 2 of our Quebec adventure: 54 miles from Sorel-Tracy to Trois-Rivières

Our day started with a 15-minute ferry ride across the St. Lawrence River and ended in a cozy neighborhood on the east side of a city of 140,000.

A bike rack on the big ferry! Which makes sense given the number of cyclists we saw streaming off it into Sorel-Tracy at 9:30 am on a Tuesday. Oh it was full of cars and trucks too — there is no bridge between Montreal and Trois-Rivières.

Once we reached the other side we were mostly on Route Verte 5. The difference from Route Verte 3 is more quiet roads and bike lanes on shoulders of bigger roads than separated trails until Trois-Rivières. Lots of farmland, few services. So if you’re getting hungry and see a place, stop. It may be a while until the next opportunity.

We stopped at an old-timey general store that’s more cute than utilitarian. Food there was candy and potato chips, not sandwiches. Yamachiche had a few more options.

On the other hand, we biked by a farm that sold quarter sections of bison. Bad timing for stopping to ask questions, never mind that I’d have to figure out what to do with 80 or so pounds of meat.

We’ve once again got different accommodations for the night. We had planned on a hotel until a Warmshowers host said yes. (This is a network of people who offer to give you a shower and a place to sleep, often because they seek the same when on a bike trip. We are hosts, and this is our first time experiencing it from the other side.)

We bought our host dinner to show our thanks, then helped him get a new grill set up and on the balcony. Then we stayed up late talking bike infrastructure and his newish project of building himself a cabin in the woods.

My beer over dinner: a salty, sour concoction (a gose) that the server described as electrolytes with alcohol. After a day like this, I’ll take it.

The campers, meanwhile, realized that camping an hour outside of town — and uphill!– might not be such a great idea after all. Especially if there was no restaurant open, as happened the night before. Thank goodness for our phones! After some sticker shock over last-minute hotel prices (there’s a big Scrabble convention in town), they found a private room in a hostel smack downtown. Just use booking.com to make a reservation.

When they joined us and our host for a well-earned dinner at the nearby Les Temps d’une Pinte, they were already raving about the amenities (free laundry! Free coffee! Clean and friendly!)

That left one person in a hotel whose location by the highways made more sense before all these changes in plans. In hindsight, after all the changes, downtown would have been the place to be.

Here’s our route.

On to day 3!