djb

first off all, I wasn't observant enough to see you are Aussie' s...
that's pretty neat to have posted cache supplies, so you two certainly have experience with different riding adventures. I agree about the euro river canal paths, the good way comment. I've done some Latin America trips and ridden in sketchy traffic areas by mistake on other trips, but on the Eurovelo trip with my wife, I really enjoyed the calm and quiet of that Loire river route, and like you, I really enjoy meeting and chatting with locals or whoever, it's a fun part of a bike trip.

if I think of route or area ideas up here in Canada, I'll put them down.
hopefully you can scour the net for ideas and maybe some trip ideas that kind of fit in for you guys, and hopefully get more suggestions here from more Americans.
cheers

ps, it's fun with a bike forum to have people throw in ideas and details. Nice to get some suggestions and help form some trip ideas/ routes isn't it?

gregmacc

Hi AeroGut ... very interested in a little piece of Canada and thanks for the suggestions ... We have some of the Adventure Cycling brochures and will most likely get their maps once we commit to a particular area.

gregmacc

Thanks Reddleman ... hadn't considered that far north ... but why not?
Although, I'm going to need help convincing my wife to go anywhere where bear spray and barrels are a thing .

gregmacc

... cheers hilltowner ... will definitely check out inspiration from ACA for that area

gregmacc

Absolutely ...

PedalingWalrus

Ok. Australia. So I think you might enjoy Vermont and Canada. For a loop I would probably do something like this

Fly to Montreal

djb

good idea
and time depending, they could look at le route verte possibilities and go along to Quebec city and back?

gotta get ready to bike to work now but will look and think more another time, today is -14c but no wind, so not bad at all.

PedalingWalrus

yeah, the only thing that can get them in early June is the bugs...but June is June - whatyagonna do ? :-)

IPassGas

We have biked most of the great lakes, St Lawrence, Quebec, Nova Scotia. Here is a route we did in 2015 (see route overview therein).
https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/FOGCOW

This year we plan on something in Quebec again, Montreal to Gaspe, loop around peninsula and back, with side trip to Saguenay. Check out the route Verte system, it is wonderful and camping/food/wine great. We usually have about 1 month off work, but could easily lengthened these places to 6 weeks. Best time of year for great lakes/maritime is July/August. June (you mentioned) can be more rainy, but is good.

When we retire, we plan to do Australia/NZ and would appreciate route info....eventually. Hopefully it is not burnt to ground by then

mev

Do you enjoy touring in Tassie? Some suggestions in similar vein:

The "edges" of North America have often been my favorites.
- On the Alaska Panhandle, taking the ferry to Haines and then cycling over the coastal range to Haines Junction, Whitehorse and back to Skagway to catch the ferry back. This pushes your 35 miles/day and there are bears but otherwise one of my favorite trips. With six weeks, I would then combine with other destinations in British Columbia/Washington/Oregon including: the San Juan Islands (haven't been but good reports), perhaps Vancouver Island and otherwise parts of the northern Pacific Coast in Washington and Oregon. Some areas with traffic but overall not too bad. Also ideal time to visit this area.
- Atlantic Canada also among my favorites. Nova Scotia well set up for tourists with various "trails" to ride. The Cabot Trail is more famous for cycling, but also areas along various parts of the coast. PEI isn't large - but has some good cycle places to visit. Newfoundland was more rugged when I visited - and less touristy - which is it's own charm. I also enjoyed cycling along coast of New Brunswick in cross-Canada trip. Maine also gets pretty interesting once you get off US1 and down into some of the peninsulas. Weather is ok, though early in summer does have potential for obnoxious black flies.

For six weeks combining together routes in either Pacific Northwest or Atlantic Canada has a lot to offer and this is the right time weather-wise to visit. You can dial it more towards the tame (e.g. PEI) or more towards the rugged (e.g. L'Anse aux Meadows up in Newfoundland) depending on preferences.

Rob_E

In terms of the GAP & C&O canal trail, I don't think you'd ever need to stealth camp or push for longer days. The C&O has free, primitive camping all along it. The longest stretch without a campsite is maybe 20 miles. And I'm fairly certain you'd pass through at least one, decently-sized town a day. GAP has less free camping, but the towns are well spaced and almost all of them have camping sites.
I did not camp on the Erie Canal trail, but I talked to a guy who was doing it as a camping trip, and he said you can pretty much pitch a tent at any of the canal locks, which are frequent.
If you were going to bike between Pittsburgh and Buffalo, that is completely unfamiliar territory for me.
If you were going to bike from Pittsburgh to Cleveland, sticking to trails as much as possible, there would likely be a desire to do some stealth camping to keep the miles down, and I suspect you could do it by planning to end your days on the trails. The Panhandle Trail goes west out of Pittsburgh, and while there are no official camping spots along the trail, you could probably set up a tent in a more remote area. There is a campsite on the trail network near the Pittsburgh airport, I believe. I think if I were going to try to do the trip with the kind of miles you are talking, I would either spend a night in Pittsburgh or spend a night at Dravos Cemetery, the closest campsite to Pittsburgh on the GAP, south of town, and then do a 50 mile day to the Montour Trail Boggs campsite on the west side of town.
From there, if you wanted to make your way to Cleveland and Lake Erie, you'd likely head towards New Philadelphia to catch the Ohio and Erie Canal Trail up to Cleveland. But once you leave the Panhandle Trail, there's 60-70 miles of mostly road. Official camping opportunities at Harrison State Forrest and Alum Creek State Park. Those are the two I know of, anyway. Unofficial, I don't know. There is a 10 mile stretch of bike trail that it would probably be easy to stealth camp off of, and once you leave Steubenville, it's mostly rural, so likely plenty of other opportunities.

djb

• Greg, re bugs. Not sure what sort of biting insects you have, but mosquitoes and black flies are the norm here, but amount and how bad can depend on the specific areas, time of summer, and how wet or dry the season has been.
• So basically you can't easily get a magic reliable answer for how they will be, but some areas are worse than others traditionally at a given time of year.
• Usually bugs are worse in morning and end of day, mosquitoes, but depending on the day black flies can be particularly annoying. So the reality is that having bugs are part of being in North America. But really depends on where and when.
• I grew up doing hiking and canoing, in the area around here, Ottawa Montreal, so can at least give sort of reasonable ideas of bugs for here.
• Anyway, just a heads up
• PS, didn't mean to do bullet point things and am too lazy to correct it!

raybo

When people ask me about the ride I'd recommend, I always answer the Icefield Parkway between Banff and Jasper, Alberta Canada. In 6 weeks, you could start in Yellowstone, though this isn't the best time to be there, and ride up through Glacier National Park and then up into Canada. The ACA has a route, the Great Parks North, for you to check out.

If you want photos and descriptions, you can check my detailed journal. My tour took 4 weeks.

djb

Ray, isn't early June still very much in "possible snow" shoulder season up there? And if not snow, cold or cool and possible rain, to me the worst combo?

Greg, a quick explanation of black flies and mosquitoes. Black flies are worse in start if summer, they require cold flowing water to reproduce, and as temps go up and less snow melt in rivers, they get less.
Mosquitoes need standing water to reproduce, so are more as summer progresses, and less in areas that are drier overall.
Two examples near Montreal.... North of here is an area called the laurentians, where the ski resort Mont Tremblant is located. This area is particularly bad for black flies in early summer. Learned the hard way decades ago, went camping with little kids and friends, all the wee ones got munched pretty bad, so we learned never to go camping there at end of June...
Where Mr walrus suggested going, South of Montreal, that area is known as the Eastern townships, and generally has less bugs than other areas.
But it's all relative isn't it? Friends of ours from France who aren't used to mosquitoes found any mosquitoes to be horrible, they very much over react. So clearly what you've grown up with and learn to deal with in terms of covering up etc certainly helps.

Tourist in MSN

I overlaid my Canadian Maritimes trip GPS tracks onto Google Earth satellite image to show where the trip was, images below.

Loop out of Halifax. The map shows where I camped and when in YYMMDD format. Also stayed one night in a hostel on the north end of Cape Breton Island and three nights in a hostel in Charlottetown PEI over Canada Day weekend. The only times I made any reservations were at the hostels. If I had camped on Canada Day weekend, I probably would have needed reservations for that too, but other than that holiday weekend there was always room at campgrounds. Not counting time in Halifax or on airplanes, it was a bit under five weeks of cycling. I did a pretty relaxed pace, there were a few longer days but quite a few short days too. Did the trip solo. Some of the campgrounds were quite buggy, bring repellent.

I stayed at the Halifax HI Hostel for a couple nights at the start and at the end of the trip. The hostel has a very small luggage room, if you went there and wanted to store very much while you were riding, they might say no because of the small room size.

Halifax had a very helpful bike shop called Cyclesmith.

Much of the north end of the Cabot Trail was a food desert, but other than northern Cape Breton Island, food and supplies were readily available. Butane fuel canisters could be bought at the MEC store in Halifax (small membership fee required) and Canadian Tire elsewhere.

There is no established bike route, no guidebook, etc. I just traveled where it made sense to go. My plan was to ride to Cape Breton Island and Cabot trail, PEI, Bay of Fundy, and spend a bit of time in Halifax. I laid out a generalized route on a map while at home and generally followed that, but in a few places deviated from my plan for one reason or another.

Where possible, I stayed at Provincial Parks or when I was on Cabot Trail some National Park Campgrounds. There were lots of RV private parks too. Wifi internet access was readily available, but some provincial and national park campgrounds did not have it or it was not working.

Two maps, first covers more area so you can get a better idea where I was. Second is a smaller area but has more detail. Of the 33 days when I was out on my loop, there were 3 days where I did not travel due to high winds, 3 days where I planned to sit out a forecast rainy day, and there were 2 additional days when it rained almost all day long but I rode in the rain. Thus, the weather could have been more cooperative, but overall I would say the weather was good.

Total, 973 miles or 1524 km total on my GPS.





I used my Thorn Nomad. That is a much heavier duty (and therefore heavy) bike than needed for such a trip, but that is my only S&S coupled bike, and having a coupled bike made logistics much simpler getting to and from Halifax, that is why I chose that bike for the trip, no big bike box in the airports. For gearing on my Rohoff, I used a 36T chainring and 16t sprocket, that is my standard gearing for bike touring. Photo taken on Jun 16, seeing snow surprised me, surprised me enough that I had to stop to take a photo.

PedalingWalrus

I was gonna suggest a similar route (including a jaunt to Madeleine islands) but I wasn’t sure of the early june conditions. Great trip!

djb

early june in the Montreal ish area is a bit of a roulette wheel. Can be cool and some rain, or it can start to get rather hot 25c and maybe higher.

greg, you probably do this, but its fairly easy to find on the net the average temps for a given month , and specifically how the last few years have been in beginning of june in diff parts of the world.
As an example of variations, when my wife and I did the eurovelo 6 route across France, we started at the end of june, but for about 3 weeks before we got there they had had unseasonable amounts of rain, so we were very glad we werent there earlier, and as we were monitoring it, we kind of figured it had to peter out at some point, which it did by the time we got there to near Nantes. Was colder than usual at first, but then soon got hot.
So its always going to be a bit of hit and miss, although clearly in some parts of the states and Canada, early june can be variable....

gregmacc

Thanks Rob ... great suggestions. It's all helping to form a mental picture of the possibilities. Six weeks is starting to seem like not nearly enough time though.
I have very little knowledge of the geographical layout of the the Great Lakes, the surrounding states and the USA generally. Online maps have their limitations so we need to get our hands on some decent paper maps pronto. Any suggestions? ... We have heard that the ACA maps are worth having.

gregmacc

Thanks for the suggestion Walrus ... This is another area we have virtually no knowledge of.
A few questions that immediately spring to mind:
What language is most commonly used? ... We know about the French cultural influence there but are people happy to speak English?
What sort of elevations (climbing) would be involved on that route? ... A lot of it seems to be on or close to shorelines so maybe not too demanding?
Are ferry crossings involved? ... we like a ferry ride ...
What's the scenery like?
Is it bear country? ... I'm fine with bears (maybe I'm just naive), but Wendy is very uncomfortable about going to areas that have wild bears.
We need to get a realistic explanation of the extent of the risks associated with camping/riding in bear country ... and effective mitigation strategies ... there seems to be a lot of conflicting information.

Reddleman

Camping around bears is pretty simple really. Bears rely on smell to find anything full of carbohydrates, ie food, toiletries and washing up liquid. So keep your smelly things away from where you’re sleeping and out of your tent. You can rent or buy barrels to keep these things in up north and sometimes campgrounds in areas where there’s hikers and bikers will have bear proof lockers to use. You can also sling your smelly stuff up on a rope but you need to get it high enough to avoid making an ursine piñata which is harder than it sounds. If you find a place where other people aren’t camping cleanly, reconsider staying there as their bad behaviour may attract bears habituated to humans.

Bear spray can be bought in most hunting and outdoor stores in the north. It’s a capsicum based spray that in the event of being charged you spray in their faces. I never had to use mine when I lived and worked up that corner of the world. Most of the time bears keep well away from people, it’s when you surprise them suddenly that there’s conflict. Cycling along together at a sensible pace and chatting will probably give them enough notice, while hooning down a hill silently won’t. And if you get between a mother and her cubs GTFO.

gregmacc

Thanks for your input IPG ... looks like another option worth serious consideration ... gotta' love CGOAB ... checking out your link now.
We have a few tour journals at CGOAB including some done in our part of Australia. For your inspiration: https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/dire...r=gregmacc&v=3

Tourist in MSN

I assume you have already figured out good sources on the internet for planning based on weather averages. My favorite is:
https://weatherspark.com/

It is oriented towards locations with airports where weather data has been collected. There is some discussion here for Montreal, so the link to that is:
https://weatherspark.com/y/25077/Ave...ada-Year-Round

A couple years ago that website changed how they define a day with precipitation to be a wet day, that now is a day that has at least 0.04 inches (~~ 1mm) of precip,

***

Bears, there are three kinds of bears in N America. You won't see any polar bears, so don't worry about them. Brown bears (grizzlies) are the nasty ones. Black bears more common. More info here
https://geology.com/stories/13/bear-areas/

Black bears can be troublesome when camping in the wilderness, but they are pretty rare. They are much more rare if you are camping in organized campgrounds. And black bears if they wander into your campsite will leave if you make enough noise and throw rocks and branches at them. I usually hang my food up high in a tree in a dry bag. Black bears can also climb trees, so best to hang food from branches away from trunks, see photo below, I had my food in color coded dry bags when backpacking last summer when I took that photo. Some people put food into bear resistant containers. There also is a bag called Ursack that I think is made out of Kevlar that bears can crush whatever is in the bag, but they can't open the bag.

I have chased away a black bear that was climbing the tree that I had my food hanging in, the noise of the bear climbing the tree at 2am woke us up, that was how we became aware of the bear. Throwing rocks and branches at it, it decided to leave on its own. We slept poorly the rest of the night, but if it came back we were unaware of it.

I bought an Ursack for backpacking, but have not used it, ... yet. Plan to this coming summer backpacking.
https://www.rei.com/product/109165/u...or-xl-bear-bag

If you are in grizzly bear areas, others can provide more advice than me, almost all of my camping has been in black bear areas, not brown bear.

You will have more trouble with small critters from chipmunks up to porcupines trying to get at your food than bears. And small critters like that are common in organized campgrounds where bears would be extremely unlikely.

PedalingWalrus

When you click on the link to the route I posted You will see in the bottom left that Google Maps calculated the elevation gain. The elevation gain is pretty good (not too hilly) for the distance covered. Now, having said that, google maps makes mistakes often ... in my experience the elevation gain often differs from my final Strava numbers.

The route around lake Champlain is mostly moderate with the exception of the south western section which is more hilly than any other sections around lake Champlain. There are opportunities for 3 ferries across as You pedal around the lake (in case You wanted to cut the route short) and there is also one bicycle dedicated mini ferry in the north eastern section leading to South Hero. The route is probably what you described as seeking: small towns, farms and semi cultivated landscape (not wilderness), freshly mowed lawns, interspersed with quirky farms and small towns with neat coffee shops and sandwich shops. Ausable Chasm is a tourist trap waterfall gorge that You will also cross. Choose at Your own peril ;-)

The route out of Montreal is pretty good once You cross the bridge over the river and the towns along the way to Vermont are pretty rural and pleasant. The Eastern section of the route in Canada around Magog is touristy, with spa's and ice cream shops and bike paths.

The Canadian section is French speaking. That means in general English is their second language. Some are happy to speak it and some are probably more nervous to speak it probably because they do not enjoy sucking at it. But in general most people will be able to communicate with You.

P.S. Don't worry about bears. You won't see any. Now that I said it you will probably see one haha. :-)
Here is a photo album from the two weekend trips we did to make it around Lake Champlain

raybo

I started my 4-week ride in early July. There was snow on the peaks but not on the ground. There was some rain, but rain in the mountains isn't all that unusual in the summer.

My suggestion was to ride to Missoula/Glacier NP and then start north from there. Not sure if it would be too early or not. Pass openings are different from year to year.

djb

you guys know these areas out west more than I do, I was just wondering.