Canada?

[e.e.cummings]

I don't know if you have already started travelling but I will throw in my two cents.

I live in Montreal and it is a great cycling city. There are bike paths everywhere. It is particularly fun to end up on the Gilles Villeneuve race track (where Formula One used to race) and take a good spin on the bikes. You have a lot of great references in the posts already. Get yourself a good guide to the Route Verte, which runs throughout the province.

We want to try the Petit Train du Nord in the Laurentians this year. We just bought our hybrids yesterday and this will be our first big trip on them. It is about a 200 km ride.

Have fun - if you have specific questions, I would be more than happy to help!

[bikerbarb]

So...we rode the green route for 9 days, starting in Sherbrooke, up to Quebec City where we spent 2 days and circling around through Three Rivers and around through Magog and back to Sherbrooke. I have to say it was not what I expected. Most of the riding was off road. Closer to towns the bikes paths were paved, but other than that, they were not. Crushed gravel, slow going, esp. with gear. There were lots of places where you had to be really careful. When we were on the road, it was often not pretty riding--such as the day out of Quebec City. Highway riding that was not interesting.

The small towns were nice and so were the people, but I have been--in Canada, the US, France and Japan--on much more scenic rides. Lots of the time I was just getting through it. The guide book was helpful finding places to stay, but it didn't have descriptions of the places we were going. It's pictures were misleading. I kept wondering where the found the idyllic scenic place to take a picture of a biker on a nice road bike--not one that would survive the rough trails. I also thought that the native bikers knew better and were all on other roads, not on the official green route.

The consolation to all of this was that this past weekend I did an MS 150 and was incredibly strong and fast from the 'training' of slogging through the trails with 40+ lbs of gear in the weeks before!