Thursday October 6th – Friday October 7th
Over the last 1500 km or so we have had great fortune finding safe, suitable skating routes that more or less paralleled major highways and took us from point A to point B on our way home. On Thursday our luck ran out.
For most of the skate biking directions have been instrumental to helping us plan the best routes, however the big risk is when the biking directions turn out to be gravel trails which are not conducive to inline skating. Ontario seems to have created some fantastic looking gravel bike trails in this region, but they are unfortunately no use to us, and Highway 7 has absolutely no shoulder for the most part making it unsafe to skate.
Normally when we have encountered this situation we have been able to find less travelled roads that parallel the highway. However, we discovered through a frustrating day of trial and error that largely due to the incredible amount of lakes sprinkled along the highway in this region there are very few roads that run close to the road. Complicating things further, every road that we explored in the area turned to gravel within a couple of kilometers. With the day wasting away with little skating being done, and the timeline tightening up as we approach one week to our arrival, we made the tough call to sit down and plan a new route.
After some research it seems like there are many more road options closer to the 401, so we decided to turn down Highway 6 and skate diagonally across the map, south westwards towards home. With sunlight wasting away, and our route now established, we decided to end the skate for the day, run several errands, and head back to our campsite outside of Perth.
The new route means we will no longer be skating through communities along the 7 – such as Maddox and Peterborough which is a shame, however we are are excited to be skating through a different set of communities that straddle the 401 such as Belleville, Oshawa and Pickering. Our new route sees us in Verona on Friday, Napanee on Saturday, Belleville on Sunday, Coburg on Monday, we will be skating to Oshawa on Tuesday, Whitby on Wednesday, Pickering on Thursday, to the AMI head offices at Don Mills and Lawrence in Toronto on Friday, and finally home to Weston Lions Arena on Saturday October 15th.
We capped off a frustrating Thursday by watching the hometown Leafs beat the Habs in the 2011 – 2012 season opener, and got a good night’s sleep knowing we had our route settled and a renewed sense of purpose with the hockey season officially underway.
Friday morning we awoke and headed to Tim Horton’s for a good breakfast before embarking on an epic skate that would take us through rural back roads, beside remote farmlands, south towards a friendlier inline skate route. We skated past countless horses and cows, several donkeys, some miniature ponies, and even a couple herds of yaks – bizarre creatures that look like hairy cows and have horns.
Mark did the morning shift with Cam, and then skated the afternoon with Matt, and put in a great skate all the way down into Verona. It was a big day of skating and we headed to the Desert Lake Resort campground who nicely sponsored our night’s accommodation, where we BBQ’s some salmon, did some work and called it a night.
It’s been a tumultuous 48 hours, but we believe we have found a solution to our conundrum, and are again back on track skating home.
Stay tuned….
