Day 63 Atholville to Petit Rocher, NB

 63 miles, 2,100 ft ascent

New Brunswick Provincial Park where camped last night and depart from this morning displayed this bilingual sign.  New Brunswick is the only Canadian province with two official languages:  English and French.  Quebec neighbors New Brunswick, and there is now a movement of former Quebec residents to New Brunswick.

 

This is Sugarloaf Mountain in Atholville.

 

 

This giant Atlantic Salmon fountain in Cambelltown was pretty impressive!

 

 

The salmon fishing industry is heavily marketed and celebrated here.

As we rode along during the last week, we saw numerous fields of buckwheat.  Our agrarian expert, Eric, commented that he has been surprised to see so much of it.  Buckwheat matures relatively quickly, so farmers will use it to get a crop in difficult conditions.  

A number of shots of the Atlantic Ocean as we pedaled along the coast.  In the third picture, the Gaspe Peninsula appears in the background.

 

Here in our campground for this evening, I present the beach on the Atlantic followed by a photo of one of the rivers flowing into the ocean.

We had some time before dinner, and I ventured out to the ocean and waded out up to my knees to get these photos of squishy, slimy kelp.  The first shot is kelp in shallow water, and the second is dried kelp out of water at low tide.  Hmmmmm.  Wonder if we will be eating kelp on our next vegetarian meal day......... Better not to ask the question.

Our rather short 63 mile journey today was beautiful as we pedaled along the Atlantic ocean waterfront in New Brunswick.  The wind was predominately a crosswind, and temperatures rose into the low 80sF in the afternoon.  Unfortunately, however, we will have rain to deal with again tomorrow, so I am preparing my rain gear for a wet century ride.

If you wish to find out how we did riding a century again in the rain, come back tomorrow.   I will not promise a lot of good pictures under the conditions we expect, but it will be the next chapter in our saga, and there will be words, if not photos.