Distance: 132km
Cycling Time: 7 hrs 4 min
Average Sped: 18.5 km/hr
Terrain: Never-ending HILLS
Weather: first 50km was gray and muggy (typical Newfie weather), 50km+ was sunny and beautiful!
Mechanicals: 1 flat tire
After filling up on breakfast at Jim and Barb's, we set out for Day 2. The skies were gray and cloudy, and if I was in Calgary I would have thought that rain was imminent. However, Sean explained to me that this is "typical Newfie weather", and he was right - we didn't get a raindrop all day!
The first few km were beautiful - we rolled through the small town of Freshwater; with it's historic buildings on the "main street" I felt as if I were at Heritage Park! Then we started to climb....and we didn't stop...for 25km. UGH! North of Carbonear we started heading west across the peninsula and it was literally one massive hill after one massive hill with hardly a downhill in between! Now and then we would get a brief flat section that was more like a tease than anything else. Needless to say we only did 30 km in the first 2 hours.
Once we got to the west side of the peninsula the terrain became more fun - still very hilly but it was rolling hills, not straight up hills. We started to pass through some towns with endearing names like Heart's Content, Heart's Delight, Heart's Desire and Dildo, to name a few....I loved rolling through these little towns, with cute and colorful houses dotting the road. In Whiteway there was the most interesting rock out in the bay (Shag Rock), it looked like a spiny-backed dragon floating in the water! Just passed Dildo we could hear singing and a concert of some sort, and further down the road outside of a church there was ahuge crowd of people in the parking lot and on the road listening to a band and choir play - everyone from all the surrounding towns must have been there. We enjoyed a brief sample of the tunes as we rolled on by.
Today I smelled the ocean. We were riding along the water for most of the day and that wonderful sweet, salty, fresh breeze was tickling my nose the entire day. I hadn't really had a good taste of it in St.John's or during the first day, but somehow that sea smell always immediately relaxes me....probably because I only smell it when I am on vacation!
After a very long day, with a bit of biking in the dark that we hadn't planned (our decision to get off the T.C.H. and on the coastal road proved to add a few more kilometres to the day than we had expected, along with a flat tire just a few kms from the campsite - pretty sure that Murphy's Law dictates that a mechanical will always happen at the worst possible time!), we arrived at Bellevue Beach Campground! Wow were we ever relieved to see that sign! The couple that was running the place must have either taken pity on us for arriving so late, took a liking to Sean because he turned on the "Newfanese" and/or wanted to be extra nice to the "mainlander" because not only did they hook us up with the best campsite in the entire place (surrounded by dense, knarled trees, up away from the road, running water right on the site and in close enough proximity to the beach to hear the waves crashing) but they also gave us a big plate of trifle which she had made earlier that day! Now that is some really great Newfie hospitality! Needless to say, the trifle was long gone before the tent was even out of our panniers....
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