PEI Tour - Day 6

Friday, July 4, 2014 - Victoria - 99 km

I got up at 05:00 with a spattering of rain on the tent. It never amounted to more than that though as I sat outside in the picnic shelter for a couple hours reading and enjoying a relaxing morning. The sun came out as Katharina got up and we packed up and hit the trail by 08:00. We rode into Wellington where we stopped at a grocery store, re-supplied for the last time, including refills on the water bottles. We stopped in at the tourist info place, which was also a bit of a museum. Two bored looking youths here were glad to have something to do when we arrived, got us a weather report; rain this afternoon and a chance of a hurricane overnight and into Saturday. Ah well, there has been too much sun this trip anyway. We left the trail and pedalled south all the way to the coast, pushing a mild headwind, which turned tailwind once we were at the ocean. A huge church appeared and a teenager in a Led Zepplin t-shirt beconned us inside. Very impressive place. If I was a religious man, this would be the church I would choose to hang out in. We pushed on to Summerside, took a very windy break in some shade at the waterfront park and then got a coffee (gross one) at a place downtown. We also picked up a bottle of wine on our way out of town. Now we rode in fairly heavy traffic and onto the 1A highway, but there was a good paved shoulder so this was not a problem. We turned off on a side road as soon as we could and then zig-zagged down the back roads, fighting the wind as we zigged south, and running with it as we zagged east. It was bloody hot now (again), and not a cloud in the sky had me seeking shade as I scooted ahead and waited up for Kat who was now getting tired. We stumbled across a children's memorial garden which turned out to be a great place to eat our lunch and then continued to Kinkora where we picked up the Confederation trail again. We followed this almost all the way to the Confederation bridge and then took the coast road towards Cumberland Cove campground. A section of the road was closed due to a bridge repair, but we managed to squeeze our bicycles through without any problems. Fortunately so, since the detour would have been long and nasty. We arrived at the campground which was deserted, but we did locate the owners. They were closing up shop because of the pending storm, but said we could stay for free if we were willing to brave through it. Katharina was pretty tired so we decided to stay and the owners left us with instructions to lock the place up when leaving the next day. We started to set up camp, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about this. I convinced Katja to continue on and we would either find a hotel room along the way or simply get back to our starting point which was less than 50 km from here. It was 17:00 as we locked up the campground and pushed out. I left a note for behind for the owners with our thanks and intended plans. We had to ride on the Trans-Canada highway for a few km, which was ridiculously busy with everyone driving substantially over the 90 km/h speed limit. Fortunately there is a good shoulder so it is just a noisy ride. At one point though, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw a pickup truck sliding sideways down the highway, spanning two lanes, while a huge camper trailler was log rolling behind it along the shoulder. I shouted to Katharina to ride as hard as she could and for a moment we felt like Indiana Jones being chased by a booby trap boulder until the trailler ended up stopping in the ditch, a twisted wreckage 100m behind us. I walked back to see if anyone was hurt. Fortunately it was just a single vehicle accident and the driver was fine, but very pissed off. As there were lots of other people stopped and helping at this point, we continued on without further adieu as we needed to get this ride complete. We found a really fancy BnB in Victoria where the woman gave us a deal on a huge family suite as we were only two people. Had supper at the local pub and observed some scary looking weather approaching from the south. The forecast seems to indicate that tonight and tomorrow are going to be pretty miserable. We will have to see how we are going to get back to the car tomorrow, but fortunately it is only about 30 km away at this point.

Another day starting on the trail.