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Thank you so, so much to all of you who emailed me and left posts to congratulate me on the end of my journey: it was so lovely to hear from you all! After a couple of wonderful weeks of R&R with my Mum (see a few photos below), I’m now back east, temporarily residing with my very kind former host in Lachute (just a little way outside Montreal) while I sort out what will happen next in my life.

The exact details are still being finalized (keep watching this space!), but one thing that I can already confirm is that I have started writing the book of my journey! It will not simply be a modified version of these blog posts: I’m writing entirely new material, so it may take a little bit of time (as might finding a publisher!), but I will certainly keep you all up to date with how things are progressing, and of course, you are all more than welcome to register your interest in pre-ordering a copy at any time!

First, Mum & I took the train from Toronto to Vancouver, so Mum could get an idea of the scale of the country I’d just traversed…

Then we headed over to Vancouver Island and hung around in the trees for a couple of nights, just for the novelty…

After that, we moved on to Tofino: one of the few places in the country that I hadn’t been to before either…

Tofino is quite famously rainy, especially in November, but as you can see, we had almost completely unbroken sunshine while we there: we almost felt cheated! Almost…

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Yup: after two years, five months and 22,300 km, I cycled up Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday morning to finally finish this grand (and possibly slightly insane) odyssey I’ve been on for SOS Children’s Villages since June 2010!!

It’s all been a bit hectic since then, as both my parents came to Ottawa to meet me, but I promise this isn’t the end of the blog: I will write more as soon as I get the chance, but for now, I’m concentrating on spending a bit of quality time with the family I haven’t seen in a long, long time…

In the meantime though, here are the final few stats, for those who’ve been following them (has anyone been following them?!):

Sherbrooke to Cowansville:
Distance: 98 km
Ascent: 1078 m
Cycling time: 6 hours, 45 minutes

Cowansville to St-Jean-sur-Richelieu:
Distance: 53 km
Ascent: 197 m
Cycling time: 3 hours, 45 minutes

St-Jean-sur-Richelieu to Salaberry-de-Valleyfield:
Distance: 98 km
Ascent: 314 m
Cycling time: 6 hours, 25 minutes

Salaberry-de-Valleyfield to Lachute:
Distance: 70 km
Ascent: 390 m
Cycling time: 4 hours, 35 minutes

Lachute to Pointe-au-Chêne:
Distance: 59 km
Ascent: 303 m
Cycling time: 4 hours, 45 minutes

Pointe-au-Chêne to Gatineau:
Distance: 98 km
Ascent: 409 m
Cycling time: 6 hours, 20 minutes

Gatineau to Ottawa:
Distance: 16 km
Ascent: 101 m
Cycling time: 1 hour, 10 minutes

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Saint-Pascal to Montmagny:
Distance: 98 km
Ascent: 411 m
Cycling time: 6 hours, 5 minutes

Montmagny to Sainte-Marie:
Distance: 121 km
Ascent: 760 m
Cycling time: 7 hours, 40 minutes

Sainte-Marie to Thetford Mines:
Distance: 55 km
Ascent: 615 m
Cycling time: 3 hours, 55 minutes

Thetford Mines to Victoriaville:
Distance: 82 km
Ascent: 602 m
Cycling time: 5 hours, 55 minutes

Victoriaville to Sherbrooke:
Distance: 104 km
Ascent: 805 m
Cycling time: 7 hours, 15 minutes

October was shaping up to be the biggest cycling month of the entire journey, but thanks to hurricane Sandy (which didn’t actually make much of an impact on my little corner of Quebec in the end anyway…), my Halloween ride to Sainte-Marie ended up happening on November 1st instead. Nevertheless, at 1421 km, October was still only just in second place behind last June (1465 km), and with less favourable weather conditions to contend with as well, I offer that as my excuse for why you didn’t hear very much from me last month!

And things aren’t letting up in the final days either: in previous winters, I’ve tried to keep my rides somewhat shorter, in the hopes of reaching my destination before my toes freeze completely, but even though I’ve now had two snowy days on the road, and the temperature is generally hovering around freezing (and sometimes below!), I’m still clocking up the miles as you can see from the stats. Fortunately, I’ve reassuringly discovered that, despite neglecting every exercise other than cycling just recently, I’m still flexible enough to get my foot under a (hot-air!) hand dryer, and after so long on the road, I’m certainly brazen enough to no longer care what the staff of Tim Hortons think I’m doing in their washroom for so long…

And talking of the final days: it’s less than ten days until I get to Ottawa now, so this is a reminder that you are all cordially invited to join me for the celebrations, on Thursday November 15th!! I’m still waiting for confirmation of the timing of events in the morning, but I can confirm that there will be a reception at the Heart & Crown in Byward Market at 5pm. If you’d like to attend this, please let me know, as SOS need to know numbers by November 12th. Hope to see you all there!!!

This part of Quebec is on the migration path for the great flocks of snow geese that are very sensibly making their way south at the moment: this was my first glimpse of them, outside Montmagny…

… and then again, at rather closer quarters, in Victoriaville

… and yet again, as I failed to make it into Sherbrooke before dark!

Being back in Quebec also means being back in the land of lots of decent, paved, cycle paths – yippee! This was in Lévis, just across the river from Quebec City

With all the beautifully muted colours around at the moment, I just couldn’t resist playing with my soft focus… This is the Chaudière River, just outside Lévis

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Edmundston to Rivière du Loup:
Distance: 121 km
Ascent: 784 m
Cycling time: 7 hours, 45 minutes

Rivière du Loup to Saint-Pascal:
Distance: 53 km
Ascent: 261 m
Cycling time: 3 hours, 5 minutes

The countdown to the end of the journey has definitely begun now! I’m back in Quebec again, the last province I will travel through before the ‘grande finale’ in Ottawa, and it’s now just a race to see who will get there first: me or winter! I’ve already had my first morning with frozen gear cables: when I left Edmundston, it was -6ºC, and I didn’t regain use of my chainwheel until almost 10.30! Overall though, I’m still being very lucky on the weather front, and I even had a bit of a tailwind on the way to Saint-Pascal! I’m guessing that the St Lawrence must have a moderating effect on the climate, as I was still able to enjoy a fair bit of autumn colour as I travelled along the river – in contrast to northern New Brunswick, where almost everything was virtually bare already.

I can’t deny that, after almost 2½ years on the road, I’m certainly starting to get ‘quite tired’ now (typical British understatement there – I’m clearly still not fully assimilated into the North American mindset… ), and the sudden return to francophonie is giving me some extra mental exercise as well, but I’ve been very happy (and relieved!) to notice that I still wave my arms around and jump up and down as much as ever when someone offers me the opportunity to talk about SOS Children’s Villages. It was the children who gave me the motivation to do this journey, and they are still motivating me now: if you still haven’t checked out SOS’s website, do it now, and see why I’m still so excited about the difference this amazing organization is making in children’s lives!

There were still a few leaves left in Edmundston, and they set off these statues outside city hall quite beautifully

Part of my route from Edmundston to Rivière du Loup took me on the bike trail alongside Lake Temiscouata. I could actually have followed the trail pretty much all the way, but as it wasn’t paved, it would unfortunately have been well after dark by the time I finally got to my destination – the trails are beautiful, but they’re definitely not the fastest way to travel!

Not just the autumn leaves, but even the odd flower was hanging on along the shores of the St Lawrence!

In Saint-Pascal, my hosts took me along the Sept Chutes (seven waterfalls) trail: this was the only waterfall it was possible to see up-close, but the whole trail was very pretty, and certainly made an interesting change from cycling!

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Saint Stephen to Waasis:
Distance: 137 km
Ascent: 1255 m
Cycling time: 8 hours, 10 minutes

Waasis to Fredericton:
Distance: 25 km
Ascent: 207 m
Cycling time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Fredericton to Woodstock:
Distance: 98 km
Ascent: 709 m
Cycling time: 5 hours, 25 minutes

Woodstock to Perth-Andover:
Distance: 104 km
Ascent: 868 m
Cycling time: 6 hours, 25 minutes

Perth-Andover to Grand Falls:
Distance: 43 km
Ascent: 454 m
Cycling time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Grand Falls to Edmundston:
Distance: 67 km
Ascent: 457 m
Cycling time: 5 hours

Oh dear! Things just aren’t slowing down, are they?! It’s been so long since I last had the chance to catch up, I don’t even know where to start now! I have so many people to thank for so many things – maintenance for Ranger, treats for me, donations for SOS Children’s Villages, and more – that for fear of inadvertently missing someone out, I’m afraid I’m going to go for the cop-out option of simply saying, “You know who you are, and I’m INCREDIBLY grateful to you all!!”

I’ve now cycled over 21,000km, and Ranger finally has his first new tyre! The Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres that he’s been sporting ever since Whitehorse have kept me puncture-free for over two years now, so needless to say, I replaced the finally-nearly-bald rear tyre with another Marathon Plus! I am definitely a happy Schwalbe customer! I am also now on my third chain and gear cassette: 10,000km seems to be the best one can get out of those… which is still pretty good, I reckon!

The winds are definitely getting autumnal (ie stronger!) now, and of course, Murphy’s law states that they’ll always be going in the opposite direction to me, but overall, I’m still doing pretty well weather-wise, I think. From now until November 15th, though, I will simply count every dry day above freezing as an additional blessing on this journey…!

I didn’t see any wildlife that I was able to photograph for ages, but just recently, there suddenly seem to have been a lot more opportunities…

We were a bit concerned by this little fellow’s lack of quills, and his complete lack of interest in running away from us, but he did seem to be eating very healthily – just a few feet away from me!

This feisty chap obviously didn’t realize I had his best interests at heart when I tried to nudge him off the tarmac, and he put up a very impressive show of baring his fangs at me… despite his head being no bigger than my little finger nail…!

It’s amazing what you sometimes find when you pop into the bushes for a quick ‘comfort break’…!

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Alberton to Bedeque:
Distance: 117 km
Ascent: 505 m
Cycling time: 6 hours, 35 minutes

Bedeque to Moncton:
Distance: 118 km
Ascent: 547 m
Cycling time: 7 hours

Moncton to Sussex:
Distance: 86 km
Ascent: 825 m
Cycling time: 5 hours, 25 minutes

Sussex to Saint John:
Distance: 84 km
Ascent: 898 m
Cycling time: 6 hours

Saint John to Saint Stephen:
Distance: 120 km
Ascent: 1099 m
Cycling time: 8 hours, 35 minutes

Ironic, isn’t it? The more there is to write about, the less time there is to write about it! There may only be a month of my journey left to go, but the pace certainly isn’t letting up, so this is just a ‘holding’ entry to let you all know that I’m still fine, I’m still pedalling away, and I’ll write a proper entry just as soon as I get a moment!

We’re finally getting a bit of autumn colour, so here’s a little something to keep you going until the next entry!

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Montague to Souris:
Distance: 49 km
Ascent: 329 m
Cycling time: 3 hours

Souris to Charlottetown:
Distance: 94 km
Ascent: 526 m
Cycling time: 6 hours, 50 minutes

Charlottetown to O’Leary:
Distance: 117 km
Ascent: 923 m
Cycling time: 7 hours, 45 minutes

O’Leary to Alberton:
Distance: 14 km
Ascent: 72 m
Cycling time: 55 minutes

Another milestone reached! As I cycled to Charlottetown, I cycled my (drum roll please)…. 20,000th kilometre! Yes, if I’d been going in a straight line at the equator, then by now, I’d be more than half way around the world!!

And rather wet.

Fortunately, however, I’ve actually managed to stay miraculously dry since my last posting, despite several fairly spectacular downpours which all very considerately happened while I wasn’t on the road. They did, however, make the Confederation trail rather heavy going…

The Confederation Trail is another former railway line that’s been turned into a multi-use recreation trail: it runs right across the island, with branch lines out to most of the larger towns (of which there admittedly aren’t that many on Prince Edward Island!), but sadly, it isn’t paved. In fact, in some places, the surface was really pretty poor indeed. I stuck with it for a fair chunk of my journey to Charlottetown, just because it was so pretty – and so wonderfully relaxing to be away from all the traffic – but in the end, I had to give up in favour of actually getting where I was going before bedtime… I had planned to take the trail to all my destinations on the island, but after Charlottetown, I rerouted onto Highway 2: full of traffic, but fortunately equipped with a nicely paved, rumble-strip-free shoulder. And it’s just as well I did, or I might still have been out there now! As you can possibly tell from the length of time it took me to cycle to O’Leary, I wasn’t moving very fast anyway, on account of some very unhelpful headwinds; if I’d been having to battle with the cycling-through-treacle-ness of the Confederation Trail as well, it would have been a very long day indeed…!

And another benefit of being on the number 2 was that it made it very easy for CBC to find me! Yes! Finally! My first real interview on CBC TV! They even asked me to do the intro to the show (they apparently get a ‘civilian’ to do the “You’re watching Compass on CBC” bit most evenings), so I was able to get a mention in for SOS Children’s Villages right at the top of the main evening news programme: Yay for SOS!

Unless you’re genuinely colour-blind, it really would be quite hard not to notice that PEI has a bit of a thing about red; whether it’s the rocks…

… or the blueberry fields…

… or the evening sky, red is everywhere here!

In fact, about the only place where there hasn’t been much red yet, is on the trees! PEI apparently has a fall colour season just as lovely as Cape Breton, but the exceptional summer we’ve been having doesn’t seem to want to end! (btw, this is a shot of the not-very-trike-friendly Confederation Trail, outside Souris)

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New Glasgow to Pictou:
Distance: 30 km
Ascent: 248 m
Cycling time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Pictou to Montague:
Cycling distance: 39 km
Ascent: 323 m
Cycling time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

A couple of baby rides this time, that brought me to my final new province – Prince Edward Island! With several presentations to Rotary clubs about SOS Children’s Villages, several more media interviews, and an energy level that’s seriously starting to look like that of someone who’s been on the road for more than two years, though, I was quite happy to be in an area of reasonably closely-spaced communities for a while!

There are two ways to get onto Prince Edward Island (unless you count flying or being born there, of course…): by ferry to the eastern end of the island, or over the Confederation bridge to the west end. In neither case is there a charge for getting onto the island… you only have to pay to get off PEI! I didn’t actually know this when I was planning my route, nor did I know that the bridge toll is less than half the ferry fare, but I was certainly very happy when I found out! So I made full use of my hour-and-a-quarter free ferry ride – and fell asleep! (Or at least, did my best to: the seats on the PEI ferry are even less conducive to restfulness than those on the Newfoundland ferry, but hey – adapting to, and making the most of, whatever circumstances I find myself in is far from an uncommon occupation on this journey!)

My first stop on the island introduced me to the first funeral directors I’ve stayed with: another fascinating insight into a world that I suspect most of us generally prefer not to think about. A lot of the roads on the island have no shoulder, but the traffic seems quite quiet now that the tourist season is pretty much over, so hopefully I won’t be requiring their professional services any time soon…!

One of Pictou’s unofficial attractions is the huge number of cormorants who have taken up residence on and around the old bridge pilings next to the causeway. There are ‘no stopping’ signs approximately every 2ft (or so it seemed!) along the causeway, to discourage people from blocking the traffic while they take photos, but I reckoned I wouldn’t get in the way too much…

Thanks to my host in Pictou, I enjoyed a fascinating visit to the replica of the ship Hector, which brought the first wave of Scottish immigrants to this part of Nova Scotia. Rather made my journey look like a walk in the park, and certainly made me very, very grateful for web cameras and email!

Another point of interest in Pictou that I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed without my ‘local guide’ was the only building in the whole world (apparently) with a window in its chimney!

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Inverness to Mulgrave:
Distance: 91 km
Ascent: 852 m
Cycling time: 5 hours, 35 minutes

Mulgrave to New Glasgow:
Distance: 119 km
Ascent: 1255 m
Cycling time: 7 hours, 40 minutes

By all accounts, this has been an exceptional summer. I don’t think there was a single person in the whole of Newfoundland who didn’t mention to me just how wonderfully and unusually sunny it’s been, and the same has been true throughout the Maritimes. I, of course, am not complaining! I appreciate that it has given me a thoroughly unrealistic impression of what this season is normally like around here, but I’m certainly thanking my lucky stars for every single sunny, bug-free ride I’ve had! (Apparently, according to one of my hosts (who works in environmental health), hot, dry summers might be great for keeping the numbers of mosquitoes down, but they do also tend to lead to swarms of house flies instead. This is slightly depressing for anyone dreaming of a bug-free summer, but since house flies don’t seem to congregate in the bushes that I periodically have to frequent during long days of cycling, and aren’t in the habit of biting through my cycling clothes as if I were naked, I’m happy to have flies… )

That being said, though, fall has begun (Happy belated Equinox everyone!) and although my two most recent rides were still mainly sunny and warm and pleasant, they were windy. In the case of the ride to New Glasgow, very windy, and for most of the almost 120 km journey, in my face too – to the extent that I was actually having to ride with my face turned to the side, watching where I was going out of the corner of my eye, since even with my super-duper cycling glasses in place, the wind was strong enough to make my eyes water if I looked straight into it. On the bright side, however, for the one big downhill of the day, the wind was actually at my back, which helped me nudge my personal speed record just another fraction higher: it now stands at 75.6 km/h!

More than a month after coming across the causeway onto Cape Breton island, the mainland of Nova Scotia finally came back into view again

The Cabot Trail may be the ‘famous’ place to see the fall colours in Nova Scotia, but I bet this stretch of the Trans-Canada highway outside Antigonish looks every bit as spectacular… if you’re not there just a couple of weeks too early…

It rained almost the entire time I was in New Glasgow, but fortunately, it stopped just long enough for me to be able to enjoy a very pleasant walk with my host along the beach in front of her house

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St John’s to Placentia:
Cycling distance: 52 km
Ascent: 449 m
Cycling time: 3 hours, 20 minutes

Placentia to Sydney:
Cycling distance: 48 km
Ascent: 472 m
Cycling time: 2 hours, 55 minutes

Sydney to Baddeck:
Distance: 86 km
Ascent: 888 m
Cycling time: 5 hours, 45 minutes

Baddeck to Inverness:
Cycling distance: 33 km
Ascent: 382 m
Cycling time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

I may have finally turned round to start the ‘home stretch’ back to Ottawa now, but the pace certainly hasn’t let up at all. Several more back-to-back days of cycling, with several formal and informal presentations thrown in for good measure as well, have all been enjoyable and beneficial for SOS, but have left minimal time for anything else, including catching up on the sleep I almost entirely missed out on during the ferry crossing back from Newfoundland. It’s my own fault of course: I completely forgot the Canadian attitude towards prohibitions, so when the safety video said I wasn’t allowed to sleep on the nice, comfy, padded benches in the bar area of the boat, like a good Brit I believed them and instead tried unsuccessfully to find anything even vaguely resembling an acceptable sleeping position in the ‘reclining’ seats whose designer was clearly a double agent commissioned by the airline companies to make their seats appear comfortable. The Canadians, of course, all slept in the bar…

Happily, though, I have cause to devote most of this entry to some heartfelt thanks towards several businesses whose generosity brought a few moments of personal enjoyment into my busy schedule just recently:

First, there was Philip’s Café in Placentia: not only did Philip not raise any objections to my shamelessly sitting at his counter and hooking into his wireless network to check my emails before boarding the ferry, but when I explained what I was doing, his assistant insisted on giving me a chocolate brownie for the journey as well! Did she know they were my favourite?!

Then, when I got to Inverness, I found that my wonderful host there had been busy rounding up some lovely local support: not only did she persuade the Mull café and deli in Mabou to provide me with a complimentary meal (funnily enough, that involved a chocolate brownie too… ), but she also arranged free entry for me to the regular Sunday afternoon ceilidh at the Celtic music interpretive centre just down the road in Judique (well, it is ‘just down the road’ if your host is also kind enough to drive you there – by bike it would have been about three hours!). Many readers of this blog will doubtless be entirely unaware of how much I love to dance since it’s one of the many things that I get almost no time or opportunity to do on this journey, so this was a rare and very precious treat for me.

And of course, as always, there is my unending gratitude to all the people who have hosted me and who have made donations to SOS Children’s Villages since my last post – thank you all!!

This is the view from Kelly’s mountain, outside Sydney. At 240m, it’s possibly one of the smallest, gentlest passes I’ve been through, but Nova Scotians do seem to be very proud of it, so I didn’t like to say too much…

I knew I would be a little early for the autumn colours in Cape Breton, but my ride through the highlands between Baddeck and Inverness was still beautiful

A beautiful end to a beautiful afternoon at the ceilidh