Montreal - Route Verte Discovery

One of these days, I am going to deeply and thoroughly comprehend the fact that nothing is as it is portrayed on the web. One of the Quebec province's crown jewels of cycling is the Route Verte. Hundreds of kilometers of bucolic, safe bicycling. Sort of like this picture from one of their websites. Isn't that lovely? So, we hauled out the map and went looking for a leg of it that's south of Montreal and not too far from the RV park. Silly Americans!


This was our first clue that we would not find a similarly idyllic bike path. It's a shared use trail, with snow mobiles.


It's not paved. Skinny bike tires need not apply here due to fairly deep gravel. While it is nice that tractors, cars, ATVs, motorcycles, dogs and horses are banned, it would also be nice if the mapping could differentiate between paved and not paved sections. So, we were fairly disappointed. On the other hand, now we know and we will not factor in the presence, or lack thereof, of the trail in travel planning.

We went to a Canadian Walmart today to get garbage bags and stuff like that. It's very different than than US stores, particularly the newer ones, which are actually not awful. There's no fresh produce, food there is limited to frozen and packaged items, aisles are narrow. There is more of an emphasis on home dec items, towels, curtains and clothing. It was interesting to observe the differences.
So, tomorrow the weather is promised to improve so hopefully we'll be riding the local bike route up the St. Lawrence Seaway.