Canada Day Bike Ride

Oof, as I feared, this 100 Days To Offload challenge is turning out to be quite a challenge for me to keep up!

I'm currently well into my first vacation week of the summer. With the deconfinement that was still in process when I had to decide and advise my employer of my vacation dates, I decided to only take one week, and keep the rest of my vacation days in reserve for later this summer. Since Canada Day (our national holiday on July 1st) happened during my vacation week, I get to report it to next Monday, so this stretches my vacation a bit. :-D

The forecast yesterday was for rain and highly probable thunderstorms in the afternoon, so my dad and I had planned a short bike ride in the morning when it was sunny. There was a lot more people than I would have expected for a week day on the bike trail, when I actually remembered it was Canada Day. As in many other countries, with the pandemic, public celebrations for the Fête de la Saint-Jean (the provincial holiday on June 24th) and Canada Day were understandably cancelled.

We rode about 20 km and turned back. We had lunch at his place then I came back home. The weather was still fine, sunny and hot, therefore I decided to try my luck and went for a second ride on my own.

I decided to go to the Vieux-Port de Québec by taking the bike trail that follows along the St. Charles River. This part of the ride is always nice, it's a city park all along the river, on each side.

The bike and pedestrian trails along the north bank of the St. Charles river Much vegetation can be enjoyed along the St. Charles river The St. Charles river at a point farther East, with another bridge crossing it

Before arriving at the Vieux-Port, we ride past the Quebec marina.

Boats in the Quebec marina

And the obligatory Château Frontenac shot... (not very good I must admit)

Majestic Château Frontenac above the street

And down on the street, I saw a car we don't often see in these parts (and old Rolls-Royce).

An old Rolls-Royce car

Past the Vieux-Port, I decided to continue along the St. Lawrence River on the Corridor du Littoral bike trail, right to its end underneath the Quebec Bridge.

A bicyle on a pier over the St. Lawrence River, with Quebec's two bridges farther in the distance Shot underneath the Quebec bridge

On the way back I met this little guy. Since I don't have a big zoom lens (yet) for my camera, I had to approach it quite a lot to get the shot, but the duck (Mallard?) never moved. I wondered if it was injured but I didn't know how to find out, or what to do if it was.

A wild duck sits in the grass

I ended up riding about 40 km, so overall 60 km for the day. A very nice day indeed!

This post is day 6 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. I'm making an English and a French version of each post, and I decided to count each as a day. If you want to join in this challenge, visit the 100 Days website.

tags : #EN, #100DaysToOffload, #biking