Click to get the full panorama
Despite my best intentions, my training program has completely collapsed. Yesterday was my first ride since getting back to Seattle, which means it has been almost a month since I’ve been on my bike for anything more than the short commute to work. Last month, I only got 330 miles on the bike, and most of that in the first couple weeks. Granted, after a sweet month of New England spring biking, the week of the cold, brutal late Nor’easter snapped me off the bike and back into my Eskimo coat and I don’t feel bad about it.
A month from today, I’m supposedly pointing the bike north from Boston and heading to Newfoundland. While I spent a good part of the winter giving lectures around Boston, inspiring folks to go bike touring despite not being in the best shape, I am starting to get a bit worried about my own riding! Training for touring is an odd, difficult thing to do in town because it is cumbersome to travel around for mile after mile with a loaded bike. It’s really not realistic. But I am a big proponent of seat time and then staging your tour so that the first week is easy. The problem for me is that I have no idea how hilly the coast of Maine really is (you can’t trust car drivers to really know), then there’s Nova Scotia which looks incredibly hilly, and I’ve have a deadline as the boyfriend will fly to St. John’s to join me for a couple weeks of touring.
At this point, only a month out, I’m planning on staying the course, trying to scoot out daily on the bike and keeping a ride journal. Seattle is better than Boston for hill training and I’m sure that will help. I’ll have to think harder about training next winter. Maybe I should start looking for a bike camp?
5 Comments
Whereabouts in Nova Scotia are you going? It all depends on the route you take. There’s some locations where hills are unavoidable (eg, the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton, which I guess you’ll be going through to take the ferry to Newfoundland), but there’s also long stretches of relatively flat or lightly rolling road out in the countryside. There’s free topographical data available from a Government of Canada site that I think I have bookmarked on a machine at home, I can dig that out for you if it would help.
Hey Steve,
Any tips you have on great places to go would be appreciated. I don’t have the maps in front of me, but I was planning on coming up from Maine on the coast, and then wrapping around NB and the Bay of Fundy I think, into Halifax and along the southern coast into Sidney to catch the ferry. At least that is how I remember the map in my head.
I’ve seen pics of the road along the Cabot Trail and I can’t wait to get out there, but right now that would be the route I think I’ll take once we’re done with NF and the boyfriend goes home.
The province has sent me maps and a list of accomodations, as well as a book filled with lots of great pictures. I am most excited about finding some fiddling in Cape Breton and may get of the coast to go around that big lake up there.
OK, the topo maps are at http://toporama.cits.rncan.gc.ca/toporama_en.html. They are (intentionally?) devoid of town names, road names, etc, but the roads themselves are on there and if you have a map you can use it as a reference and figure it out pretty easily. For some bizarre reason, lake names are on there. I assume you’ve got the pack from http://www.novascotia.com with the free foldout map? That’s OK for general use, but I’d recommend one of the provincial mapbooks for getting around town. They’re around $12 or so, and all the major town maps are in there, plus provincial road maps. I have the MapArt Publishing “Halifax & Area, Nova Scotia Cities and Towns” mapbook, yellow cover, you can find it in most places.
Some tips for riding are, avoid the 100 series highways like the plague – it’s actually illegal to ride on most of them anyway. The single digit highways are pretty good (eg the 3), and the triple digit highways are rural roads, usually very scenic and quiet (eg the 333).
For tours, I’d recommend a copy of “Nova Scotia by Bicycle” by Walton Watt, available from the Government of Canada map store, along with (now that I look) topo maps printed on Tyvek. You can see a sample tour (unfortunately sans map) at http://bicycle.ns.ca/recreation/archives/toursmpl.htm.
Some great places to go… Well, it really depends what you’re interested in. If you just want to pedal for long distances, pretty much anywhere is good to go. The Peggy’s Cove daytrip from Halifax is quite pleasant; I don’t know what the attraction is in Peggy’s Cove (I skip it myself) but the surrounding areas are quite nice. I’m hoping to do a trip down to the Annapolis Valley at some point, so I’ll update you when (if?) I do that. The Busker’s Festival in August is popular with tourists, too.
In case it helps with your planning, I have a list of bicycle shops here; there’s shops in Antigonish, Bedford, Dartmouth, Digby, Halifax, Kentville, Liverpool, Lower Sackville, Lunenburg, New Glasgow, Shelburne, Sydney, Truro, Wolfville, and Yarmouth.
Finally, when you make it to Halifax, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll take you out on the town. My parents are visiting at the start of August, but if you’re here outside of that I’m sure we can put you up. If not, I’m sure my Dad would enjoy going on a ride with you (as I would myself!) as he’s a keen touring cyclist too. Drop me an email if you need any more info, too. I can scan in (or at least, photograph) images from the Nova Scotia by Bicycle book and the MapArt map book for you to check out.
Wow, this is great info. You are right that my map came for NovaScotia.com. It’s been pretty great in that I’ve got maps for all the provinces for free.
I’ll look into the other resources you mentioned. I’ve seen the riding in Nova Scotia book which was to loop focused for my needs, but that was also about 9 months ago, so of course, my ideas keep chaning about where I am off to and how I think I will get there.
Unfortunatley, I managed to bring all the maps for the first bit of the trip to Seattle to do some route dreaming, except for NOVA SCOTIA. Drats.
Thanks for all this info, and yes, let’s stay in touch. I’d love to get a bit of an insider’s guide to Halifax.
The idea behind the Nova Scotia by Bicycle book is it gives you a number of routes that you can assemble yourself. At the start of the book is a map with all the routes outlined so you can piece together your own route. Most of the routes aren’t loops, too – it’s generally only the day-tours that are loops (eg the Peggy’s Cove tour I mentioned).
For online map resources, your best bets are http://maps.google.ca to look at maps, and http://www.mapquest.ca for route planning. Mapquest has an option after calculating a route to recalculate while avoiding major highways (ie, the 100 series highways), which is perfect for cycling.
I just replied to your email, too. Good luck with the planning!