Adventure Part Two!

After 5 days of resting and visiting with many friends we are finally feeling ready to begin the second phase of this journey. We are feeling stronger each day from our bad water experience and figure the further away from the polluted St. Lawrence we get, the healthier we will be. Many people ask us why on earth we are doing this. One man has even called our trip "very strange". Sometimes we agree, but after wandering around Quebec City and sleeping in the same place more than once...we are antsy. Even with all the challenges we have faced, our desire to continue on and keep discovering is no smaller than it was over a month ago. Tomorrow we go, into the heart of Quebec leaving all english behind. All we can ask is for Canada Post to stop their strike so that our food boxes can be mailed to us. Eating is nice afterall! We have added more pictures to facebook and our Picasa account, just look for an album called the first 23 days. Over and out from Neuville, QC.

Quebec City at Last!

It's official, we've finished the rowboat portion of our trip! We are safe and sound enjoying a day of unpacking, organizing and cleaning before going to our friend Edith's house to rest. We are very proud of ourselves and underestimated the sense of satisfaction we would have from such an accomplishment. We've dealt with storms, huge waves, water poisoning for both of us, poison ivy, conjuntivitis, crazy locals and constant mental stress about moving forward. No expedition wouls be complete without all of these things! We owe our finishing on schedule to our good friend Dan Rinard who drove up from maine to row with us when dave was sick from the bad water. Thank you Danno! Life is good, we are happy to be finished for a few days to rest and recharge before saddling up the bikes. Looks like it's back to being sore in different muscles we never knew we had! Look for more photos and videos soon once we get to a computer in the city. Thank you all for following and supporting us so far, it means the world. Over and out for now. Dave and adrien.

C`est la vie sur la bon piste!

And here we are....MONTREAL!!  Taking our first rest day of the whole trip, and it sure feels good.  We are at our good friend Noe`s home enjoying a BBQ, a washing machine and going out for breakfast.  Bacon is king.  Our dreams of rowing our way through downtown Montreal to the old port were dashed at 9 AM yesterday when the Lachine canal operator informed us we would not be allowed to use the canal. 
   The reason.....too much rain the night before overloaded Montreal`s septic system and they pumped the excess raw sewage into the canal.  Wonderful! This means no non-motorized boats for 72 hours.  Motorboats, being the main money producers are fine for some reason.  AKA, the city wouldn`t want them to know their dirty little secret!  We waited 2 hours for them to call every person they could think of to finally say no.  Permission for this, permission for that, blah blah blah.  So, finally, we portage, one more time, 14 kms along side a perfectly good canal to the dock where the boat is waiting patiently for tomorrow.
   The irony of the ordeal being the banners all along the bike path, now portage trail exclaiming ``30 ans sur la bon piste verte!``  Surely a 30 year old environmentally friendly bike path offsets the raw sewage that goes into the canal with every rain storm. However, Noe met us halfway and kept our spirits up, getting a real glimpse of the silly people and things we deal with every day, all day long.  Cèst la vie!  We are happy, enjoying the sun and looking forward to good weather tomorrow when we shove off into the last 10 days of this section of the trip.  Next stop, Quebec City!

Technology Goes Bunk.

Contrary to public belief, libraries are not always up to date on tech matters.  We pulled into Morrisburg, Ontario today at 1:30 to pick up food and upload some photos/videos.  Unfortunately the computer doesn't recognize our camera software and can't handle HD videos from the camcorder.  Bummer!  We promise we're taking lots of pictures and will make a video as soon as we can to show you all what we're seeing.  Life is good, the sun is out and the St. Lawrence finally has current!  Signing out for now.  Adrien and Dave

More Observations From the Field

Our last message consisted of interesting things we had noticed so far. It would be unfair to neglect one of the most prolific and entertaining creatures we encounter: the human being. Far from elusive he pops up at the most awkward times, when dave is peeing out of the boat, when we've just sat down to our first meal in hours or when we're so exhausted we can hardly hold our heads up. They all mean well, some are simply more intuitive to what we can handle at that moment. There are incredible behavioural patterns that the motor-boat driving human tends to exhibit. Firstly: driving way too fast for their proximity to us, as if we're slowing them down. They will cut us off, some do circles even! Secondly and slightly in contrast to the previous observation are the dear people who don't want to swamp us in their cruisers so they slow right down. They don't realize that they're putting more of their boat in the water when they come out of plane thus displacing more water giving us a giant roller to forge through. Many people have offered us goodies and places to charge our phone and camera and we are endlessly grateful. However what we are most grateful for is when we ask a questio the human honestly says "I don't know" instead of the customary head scratch, hemming/hawing, throat clearing, guessing, spouting random thoughts and finally calling someone on their phone to arrive at the conclusion of "gee, I don't know." It's always in the spirit of helping, so we can't fault anyone there. Our daily interactions with these creatures never fail to amuse us and give us things to chat about in the many hours a day we spend in the boat. For that we will always love human beings.

All Things Big and Small

In just the 9 days we have been out so far we have been fortunate to see many wonderful sights. It's amazing when you spend lots of time outside how many more
Encounters you have with creatures! It's easy to forget that all these critters are always outside moving around, we just have a hard time accepting that animals, plants and insects don't
Suddenly appear when we set foot outside the door. We've seen lots of species of fish and birds. Perhaps most striking are the great trumpeter swans. Since arriving onto the Bay of Quinte
Which is quite a large body of water the number of huge carp that we see has exponentially increased. There are many turtles, deer, and cycles of insect. We've seen clouds of shad flies live out their
Ephemoral lives and this yeats fresh crop of canadian goslings. This vast tract of canadian landsape that we will are crossing is unbelievably productive. One lake, in particular Rice Lake is said to be the most densely populated
By fish lake in all of Canada! Everywhere you look 8 lb bass are jumping out of the water and thousands of perch, pickerel and sunfish swarm under the boat. We've never seen so many herons in one place ever before, it's just stunning
How much life one lake can hold. Each and every day we see something, learn something, that we haven't experienced yet. Even in the small-scal ecosystem that has developed in the water in the boat there are developing mayflies, life stages of various critters and snails.
Even when we clean up, something moves in over night, it's a fact of life. This is why we choose to travel the way we do...it's a speed that allows us to keep up with the countless miracles great and small happening every day around us.

Day 4 and feelin' fine!

Greetings all! Here we are in our little tent as the rain is starting to fall feeling very good with our progress so far. We've seen some wicked weather, been windbound for 18 hours,have several new blisters and the locks have closed down because of high water. Yep! All this amazing infrastructure so you can go hundreds of kms without getting out of your boat and we have to portage around every single one! We did 10 kms straight today because it was faster than unloading/loading the boat 6 times. But we're still making our distances and having the time of our lives. Life is pretty simple and we're settling into the trip pretty quickly. Somehow tomorrow is day 5 already! Other than being a bit red in the neck, sore on our seats and stiff in our shoulders, we've never felt better. We love you all! Over and out.