Day 2: Gananoque to Portland

After the horrid downpour of Day 1; we were quite hopeful that Day 2 would fare much better.  Weather forecasts indicated rain, but nothing too outrageous.  While we woke up pretty early, it took us much longer to eat breakfast and pack up than we expected.  We weren't on the road until about 9:30am, already a good hour behind schedule.

Within 30 minutes of pulling out of Gananoque, we were (surprise) riding in the rain.  The next several hours were a mixture of drizzle, rain, or outright storm.  Imagine being a wet sock flapping in the wind, that's pretty much what we felt like.  At about 2 or 3pm, the skies finally cleared up and we even saw the first glimpse of sun.  Even though we were still soggy sock puppets, boy, did that ever feel good.  The remainder of the day remained clear and we managed to roll into Portland at about 9:30pm.  By then, we had even mostly dried!

We were so beat at the end of the day that neither one of us managed to finish our well deserved beers.  What a crime, are they going to take our citizenships away for this one?

On to some pics...

Day 2 route:

Bikes after a good night's rest:

Bikes are packed, Cess clueless about the pain about to ensue:

Ferry at Plattsburgh:

Day 1: Would you care for a bath?

The first leg of our trip was quite short; Toronto to Gananoque.  Easy 275km, right?  Well, the first 100 or so km were in fact easy.  The remaining distance was spent riding in either an outright downpour or just hard rain.  It came in waves and every few minutes we'd have to slow down to about 80km/h or so; just enough that transport trucks could pass us spraying us some more!

Needless to say, we got to try out our rain gear on this leg of the trip.  The verdict is that the gear certainly works and it made things more bearable; but we got soaked regardless.  After a *cough* excellent dinner at McDonald's (hey, walking distance from the hotel and we went to eat at nearly 11pm...) we're spending the rest of the evening... blow drying our gear.

Update on Friday, July 24, 2009 at 12:59AM by Cess

Day one was a trial by water.  Yes, we were totally soaked.  I shudder to think how much worse it would have been if we didn't have rain gear ... eww eww eww!!  When we finally hit some rain, we pulled over and put on our rain gear and put the storm covers over our bags. 

So what did we learn today?  The Scala communicators held up despite the crazy downpour.  The storm covers for our luggage really do work ... unless they are installed incorrectly and then start collecting water inside of them.  Our waterproof gloves were soggy messes.  The Frog Togg rain jacket and pants were pretty easy to get into.  We were doing pretty good until it was raining so hard that the rain started running down our necks.  By the time we arrived in Gananoque, our shirts were soaked from the neck down to the waist.  You can imagine how torturous it was to feel the wetness creeping down, ever so slowly.  And lastly our boots eventually became little wave pools, sloshing around with every movement of the boot (yes, shifting made the water move out of the toe of the boot towards the heel). 

Miraculously, it was dry in Gananoque when we arrived.  But then I got bitten by two mosquitoes as soon as we pulled into the HoJo's parking lot and I finally took off my helmet.  Yup, I swelled up immediately.  Blood sucking mosquitoes!  I got nailed in the forehead and my right ear. =(  Good thing I brought allergy medication. 

Back to quality time with the hair dryer and then off to bed!

12 days, 5000+ km

We're now getting to the wire - 4 days until the trip.  Just some minor details need to be ironed out before we're on our way.  This trip in many ways is a must-do for any proper Canadian motorcycle rider (at least, those that are about more than posing with their bikes at their local Tim Horton's...).  It certainly has that "epic" feel to it and we're getting pretty excited.

The basic route we're taking is as follows (you can click the image to get to a larger one...):

The details break down sort of like this:

• Toronto to Gananoque
• Crossing over into the US, making our way through the Adirondacks and arriving in Portland, ME
• Taking the ferry to Yarmouth, NS
• Riding along the southern coast of Nova Scotia into Cape Breton
• Cruising the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton
• Heading northwest along the Northumberland Strait through New Brunswick into Québec
• Riding along the Gaspé coast
• Eventually heading home southwest through Trois Rivières and into TO