A big hand at our backs

Happy to be halfway up

The first bicycle trip that Benoit and I took was to tour the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton Island. It's a loop of about three hundred kilometres and lots of hills. Cycling hills was a brand new experience for me and a scary one at that. One of the mountains we had to climb was called Smokey. I wrote all about our trip in a daily journal.

Here is an excerpt:

I was watching cars struggling to begin the climb of Smokey and the more I watched, the more I began to panic. I started thinking that I didn’t have it in me to climb Smokey. It looked steep, wayyyyy too steep. (Going counterclockwise, you climb the steep side of Smokey for about 2 km and then have a long and gentle descent for about 6 km on the other side.) Travelling the Cabot Trail counterclockwise, you ascend the steep side of Cape Smokey (the grade on some sections is rated at 17%). My heart started to race and I felt like I couldn’t get a proper breath. B suggested that we do like the climbers of Everest – just set small goals, such as “let’s make it up to the first bend in the road”. So that’s how we did it. One little steep climb at a time with lots of breaks. At one point, the wind pushed us up a very steep section. It was like having a big hand at our backs.

All the details of this Cape Breton bicycle trip are in the pdf version of my blog (bicycle log) at Box.net:

• Cape Breton Island 2006: 17 pages, 374 Kb: bretonblog2006.pdf

Clicking on the link above will take you to a Box.net web page that says that the file has been shared with you. Click on download and enjoy.