Despite the on and off rain, riding the 138 east of Montreal towards Quebec is a beautiful ride.  It was turning out to be a fantastic start to our trip until Jenny ran out of gas.  And got rear-ended.

Now that we have your attention, everything is Oh-Kay at the KOA.  We managed fo find a few minutes between rain showers to set up the tent and cook a can of spaghetti from the general store.  And drink a 6-pack of Stella.  Quebec is awesome for it’s beer-selling policy, but the drivers suck at not driving into you.

Gas Story:

By the time we got to Trois Rivieres or whatever, we were pretty hungry.  Jenny thought that a St. Hubert would be a pretty Quebecish place to have lunch, so we plugged it into the GPS and headed over there.  The food was good, but the service was pretty sad.  The bathrooms were a definite highlight though – they had projected moving fish in the sink while you washed your hands.  If you’re a woman.  Men get zippo.

We had last fueled up in Casselman – just outside of Ottawa – so Jenny’s bike was getting low.  We picked out a Petro-Can on the way out of town and it let me pump a whole $0.04 worth of gas.  Later on, we might have found out that this was enough, but unfortunately I started with filling my bike and not Jenny’s, so score one for Murphy.  After trying another pump and getting some obscure error code, we decided to just stop at the next station.  There’s always a gas station at the edge of town, right?

The edge of town turned out to be the edge of another town 32km away, but we only made it 31km.  When Jenny said her bike was chugging then stalled, we had to pull off the 40 at wherever we were.  After a quick assessment, we decided I would ride ahead to the next town and grab a Jerry can and come back.  10 minutes later we were on our way again, and now Jenny has a new little red friend riding pillion.

No big deal, right?  Ran out of gas, got gas, on our way.  Yay.

138:

The 138 between the place where we got gas (I’ll have to check the receipt to see where we were) and Quebec City is fantastic.  Decent speed limit, no traffic, great scenery and lots of gas in the tank.  Good times.

Quebec City:

My GPS doesn’t say stuff like “veer left – No RIGHT, wait. No. Hang on.  Yeah, up there.” but it should because it would have been more helpful.  We ended up missing an exit to get to the campground and had to run around an offramp/onramp to get going back in the right direction.  Unfortunately at the top of the offramp, Jenny dropped her bike.  Sort of.  With help from a Pontiac Sunfire.  Though she didn’t realize it at the time, the Sunfire had bumped her just enough to knock her off balance, and the bike tipped over to the right.  Luckily the brake pedal softened the fall before shooting off into the gutter.  The rest of the impact was absorbed by her brand new side case we just had replaced under warranty after waiting about a year for the dealer to come through for us…

We picked up the pieces from the intersection (good thing I brought a tube of super glue), and continued the last 800m or so to the campground.  I figured since we were wet, and Jenny was a little upset, I would upgrade from a basic tent site to one of their Kozy Kabins.  Except the people who pulled in in front of us got the last one.  Stupid other people in the world.  So we headed off to lousy T-4 and set up our tent in the drizzle and had our Spagetti-O’s and 6 beer and this is where we’re at.

Tomorrow I’ll add some pictures to this post and see if I can find a stick or a piece of dog poo to make a brake pedal out of…