Quebec Day Nine

Start: Saint-Jean-Port-Joli
End: Riviere du Loup
Mileage/cumulative: 63.05 / 445.42
Elevation Ascended/cumulative: 1,696’ / 9,623’ 
Weather: Start – Sunny 43 degrees / Finish – Sunny 52 degrees
Flat tires (entire group) day/cumulative: 0 / 4

We’ve reached Rivière du Loop, our furthest northern point on the eastern shore of the St. Lawrence River. Getting here required riding through yet another day of headwinds, most of them a steady 15-20mph, for the entire 63-mile route. There was no stopping for a boulangerie. There was no stopping for lunch. The only reason to stop was to get a momentary break from the torturous wind before venturing back into it for seemingly endless miles. Bev said that she wouldn’t have stopped even if there had been a herd of baby goats handing out tacos. It was that bad. Oh, and then there were the hills at the end. It was not anyone’s best day on the bike.

In the plus column, it didn’t rain and, what the heck, we were riding in Quebec watching the St. Lawrence River get wider and wider as we rode north. Most people may not know that the St. Lawrence actually begins as the outflow of Lake Ontario and leads into the Atlantic Ocean in the extreme east of Canada. This means that as we’ve headed north, we’ve actually been following the river’s flow toward the Atlantic. It provides the primary drainage of the Great Lakes Basin and collects 1% of the planet’s total rainfall. An estuary forms on the river just down stream from Quebec, where salt water from the ocean begins to mix with the fresh water of the river. As the density of salt water is not the same as that of fresh water, two layers of water are created, with the more buoyant salt water rising to the surface. This phenomenon is called upwelling and the result is a wide array of marine life. The water reaches full salinity at the head of the Laurentian Channel, near Tadoussac, where we are headed for Day Ten.

Shortly after leaving Quebec yesterday, we entered the St. Lawrence Estuary, one of the largest and deepest estuaries on the planet. As we rode along the shoreline today, the river suddenly smelled more brackish. The river has become so much wider that what was a five minute ferry ride in Quebec two days ago will now be a 70-minute ride to return to the western side of the river. We begin Day Ten with that ferry ride, followed by a short but difficult ride to Tadoussac with a lot of climbing. With any luck, the cursed wind will die down.