TDC Revisited Day 8

Mississauga to Ottawa

Continuing to trace my 2013 Tour du Canada cross country cycling adventure, we ended today in our nation’s capital, Ottawa. The legs from my 2023 blog posts covered by today’s drive are:

• Mississauga to Nestleton
• Nestleton to Carrying Place
• Carrying Place to Ivy Lea
• Ivy Lea to Ottawa
• Ottawa Rest Day

While we ended the day in Ottawa, our journey there was not quite as planned, for two reasons. The first was technical issues, and the second was scheduling issues.

The technical issues related to creating, saving, and using Google maps. The route through this part of Ontario involved numerous twists and turns on a vast array of roads. To enable driving the route, I had created a series of Google maps and saved them. Google allows you to create and save maps with a series of waypoints on them, but to a maximum of about 10 on each map. As a result, I had to create a number of maps to show the route from Tottenham to Ottawa, which in 2013 involved 4 days of riding. In using these saved maps for the first time, for the first few map changes, I changed to a new map too early. As a result I completely missed some of the locations that we should have driven through.

One of the wonderful memories I have of TdC 2013 occurred not long after we left Tottenham. Parked on the side of the road was an SUV with it’s back open and two little kids holding signs. We stopped and were offered some Tim Horton Timbits. Their father, Ryan, had ridden TdC 1996 when he was 17 years old!

One of the first sites that we did come across, that I remembered from 2013, was the Sharon Temple. It has a rather interesting story behind it which I’ve included in the second photo below.

After a rather confusing morning of driving, due to my issue with jumping to the next map too early, we stopped for lunch in Newcastle. We found a very nice picnic area next to the marina. By this time, I had finally figured out how to properly navigate through a series of saved maps, so the process was becoming smoother.

Driving through this part of Ontario, we saw lots of corn fields. They reminded me of a story from 2013. We had left Newcastle, after stopping for coffee where Louise had joined us. While riding along, Louise commented that she would like a photo of her next to the corn to show that the stalks were taller than she was. So, of course, we stopped and took a number of photos, including the one below.

While we were having our lunch in Newcastle, in looking how far we had yet to go to reach Ottawa by the end of the day, I began to appreciate that I had tried to include too much of the route in one day. At any rate, I decided to carry on and re-evaluate our progress later in the afternoon. By the time we got to Brighton, it was clear that if we continued to follow the route, it would be very late arriving in Ottawa. I made the decision to abandon the route and take the shortest path to our hotel in Ottawa. Unfortunately, it meant that we would miss wine country in Prince Edward County and the drive along the Rideau Canal. As it was, we were on the road for nearly 12 hours by the time we arrived at our hotel.

Tomorrows planned route was definitely going to take some re-evaluation!