Day 97- Shining silver roofs

Day 97 Friday, August 13, 2010 Distance 103.92 km. Time 5 hr. 39 min. Total so far 6909.40 km. We left our stealth spot by the closed bar or restaurant at 7 am. It was another sunny day with the wind on our back-certainly a nice way to enjoy Quebec. This is great farming and orchard country with lots of stands selling corn, and other vegetables and apples and berries. We went through Grondines, Sainte Anne de la Perade. Steeples still dominate the landscape. There are many houses with silver roofs and upturned edges on the roofs. They are beautiful especially with the sun shining so strong on the silver. Batiscan has big square built houses with 2 or 3 floors that probably housed the big 8 - 12 + children families of bygone days. We had to go over a metal bridge that was very tricky to ride , especially on Silver with the wheels sliding back and forth on the metal. On the walking part of that bridge, there was a line of people following one another with singing and carrying a cross-sort of like a pilgrimage. At a government park we met a motorcyclist and his female partner on their way to Nova Scotia. A bicyclist going from Montreal to Quebec in one day also joined the conversation. We had our photo taken by them. Today, we saw freighters going up and down the river. In Champlain, I noticed many of the homes have these nice stairs that turn circular near the top. Most are metal and I haven’t noticed them before. We stopped at the entrance of Trois Rivieres for lunch and I talked with two men in their 70's outside the store. Foy had a long career on lake freighters so he has been up in Lake Superior a lot and also in some bad storms. After that he was a painter and now he is retired and spends 6 months a year in Florida. He was riding his bicycle. His friend was on a little motor scooter. Afterward we got miserably lost because of a detour sign. We wasted about an hour riding around and to top that, just as we found the way to cross a certain busy highway, there was an extremely loud pistol sound and I looked down while riding on the side of this busy road and my back tire was flat. I had filled it that morning and I think with the heat of the day the tube that was really meant for my 25 cc. tire but was on this 23 cc tire had burst. I did the repair all by myself except turning the bike over and from now on I will put less pressure in that tire tube. We were a long time after that getting out of this big city. We hadn’t expected that. The road deteriorated with no edge in some places as we headed back into the countryside. I wanted to camp in the town park of Yamachiche but Dave didn’t because he thought there might be baseball or soccer games that night. We went on looking here and there. I wanted to stop at a trailer sales place but Dave said it was chained and there was no one to ask permission. Much to my dismay, we rode all the way to Louiseville and Dave saw a lot for sale but when we asked permission at the motorcycle store which was very busy with a sale, the owner said he didn’t own that property but the one next to it and we could sleep on a little patch of grass behind a truck parked there. So we set up there and Dave went off to buy some food to appease my sour spirits because it wasn’t the best of places. The road was noisy and it had been a long day!