Embarking on a long-awaited adventure ride before they paved paradise.

It was almost 500 kilometres from my house in southern New Brunswick to the Riviere-du-Loup ferry; I worried for nearly the entire ride. And I had good reason. I was heading to do the Trans Labrador Highway before it was totally paved, but my last trip north had ended ignominiously with a hole in my radiator when I was barely two hours from home. Instead of an adventure, I’d had an all-day wait at a gas station until my friend picked me up in a truck.

With some help from an expert welder, I was back on track a week later, and headed north again. This time, I had no trouble, as I stuck to the back roads. My Yamaha WR250R was a bit weedy for the Trans-Canada, but eventually I had to leave the two-laners that run along the St. John River and steer toward the multi-lane highway that took me to the St. Lawrence.

“When you have a small bike, you don’t need a bigger bike, you just need a smaller road,” my old co-worker Ernie had told me years ago, and he was right. But sometimes you have to be on a big road, like it or not, and the WR was definitely stuck in the slow lane as I hauled against the wind, up and down the big grades as New Brunswick turned into Quebec. I kept a careful eye on the oil levels and the now-patched radiator; I’d only owned the bike a few weeks and didn’t know if I could trust it.

I made the boat in plenty of time, despite my weak single-cylinder powerplant, and scoffed down a barbecue chicken poutine while I waited to board. Quebecois cuisine; please, never change.

North Side of the St. Lawrence

The next day started off easy, as I loafed in my hammock listening to whales tootling their way up and down the river. After crossing the St. Lawrence, I’d flogged the little Yamaha up Route 138 from Saint-Siméon to Les Escoumins, where I’d stealth-camped by the town’s ferry landing. 

I had worked this coastline in the springtime for a few years, on a sea urchin fishing boat based out of Tadoussac, and was keen to see it again in summer greenery. Alas, the road’s gentle curves, built by generations of locals working their way around the geography, were being straightened out. Instead of a landscape defined by the surveyors of the seigneurial system, the two-lane was now being transformed into something more wide and boring. The constant road construction machinery left the landscape looking like Mordor, with a dusty, apocalyptic haze in the air.

Ah, progress. But at least Quebec’s constant roadworks up north meant a smooth paved ride all the way to Baie-Comeau…