Pat and Caro Cycle Home: Day 70: Bath to Fredericton (T.D.: 121.4km; S.T.: 6h40min)

I’ve lived in New Brunswick pretty much all my life, and travelled between Bath and Fredericton countless times. I had never realized, however, until I looked at a map in preparation for today’s ride, that the St. John River runs almost entirely north-south between Bath and Woodstock, and then makes a sharp 90 degree turn east towards Fredericton. The highway, moreover, follows the river – and while this doesn’t matter much to someone in a car, it carries significant implications for a couple of long-distance cyclists. Anyone familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem can tell you that it would be much quicker to cut a diagonal line between Bath and Fredericton rather than follow the main road along this right angle route. Fortunately, there is such a diagonal line, and while the low speed limit and spotty pavement conditions keep drivers off this road for the most part, we thought we’d give it a try. It would, after all, turn an ambitious 145-km-day into a more reasonable 120-km one.

Not a bad idea in theory (thanks Pythagorus!), but we’d forgotten that while highway speed limits don’t much matter to us, spotty pavement conditions do. It wasn’t long before we’d hit some dusty dirt roads which, with our thin tires and weighty saddle bags, caused us a fair bit of grief.

Today was not a day to dwell on the negatives though – we were on the homestretch, quite literally! We battled up hills (another thing neither of us had ever seriously considered was just how darn hilly NB is – worse even, than Western Ontario), against headwinds, and in the face of more angry dogs – all the evils of cycle-touring that we’d encountered throughout the trip wrapped up into a single-day journey, and still managed to enjoy ourselves fiercely. This trip has been one where the negatives could easily overwhelm your body and mind if you let them. But never in the 6000+ kms did sore bums and tired legs get the best of us – kind of amazingly. I mean, when we started planning for this trip, we envisioned a real nightmarish “character-building” sort of experience filled with rain, mosquitoes, torn muscles, flat tires and cranky significant others. We still wanted to give it the ol’ college try though, and we’re glad we did, because it was WAY better than we expected. Even the most punishing of days ended with an amazing meal and a blissful sleep, the most dependable rewards of a hard day’s work. Even the time spent in the saddle, pedaling away – which most people view with a kind of befuddled bewilderment (“surely you must get BORED!”) – offered us a kind of zen-like meditation on both inner and outer landscapes. What some see as the monotony of long-distance cycling can, if you surrender to it, become a rhythmic routine where life’s main problem, getting from point A to point B, is solved beautifully by a “just keep going” mantra. It all sounds kind of new-agey when you put it on a page like this, but it’s true. Our only responsibility was to ourselves and each other, to not kill ourselves with carelessness, to keep going to the next stop, and maybe to blog about it later – and the simplicity in all of this was super refreshing. We were asked a few times whether we’d ever think of repeating the trip. Now that a little time has passed, I think we’d both answer “definitely”.

Not that we were thinking about all of this, particularly, as we lunched in Millville, NB sometime near mid-afternoon, but you get the picture. From Millville it was more hills and valleys to the Mactaquac Dam – a superstructure on the St. John River that we’d only ever crossed by car on the way to the golf course or the beach.

Here, we called mom to alert her to our presence within the city limits (knowing full well that she’d likely already “sensed” that we’d arrived). Did some jumping jacks at the “Welcome to Fredericton” sign and then cruised into the increasingly familiar territory of Silverwood, the Bucket Club, the Woodstock Road, etc., before turning onto the gravel path that would lead us home. Here, we met, in a moment of shining splendor, none other than the matriarch who haunts these pages herself: Ann Brennan. She’d dusted off her pink CCM, strapped on an ill-fitting helmet, and rode out to meet us. Not 5 minutes later did Father Brennan arrive too, equally comical in his bike helmet and work apparel (like I’m one to talk – at least it’s clear that I came by it honestly). A family reunited, we pedaled home leisurely, where more welcomes, high-fives, and most importantly, hamburgers, awaited us. It’s good to be home.