August 1, 2024. Deschambault to Trois-Rivières, Quebec

   Our motel provided breakfast to its guests at the restaurant that was attached to it, so you picked from a menu of 4 breakfast combos. It was quick, a bit different from the usual hotel breakfast, and tasted great.

It has been getting warmer and warmer. We heard there is a heat dome for the next few days and there are heat warnings posted for the next city we are staying at. We have been drinking a lot of water to stay hydrated and took several longer breaks today in the middle of the day. 

                     Snack Time!

The most fun thing today was a tourist information center with a small museum attached to it in Sainte-Anne-de-la-Perade. The Ste Anne river goes through the town and we learned that in the winter time a small fish, the tom-cod, returns to the river from a certain salt water area of the Saint Lawrence River to spawn. A huge fish shanty town springs up on the river ice, 650 or more, and people catch hundreds of the fish at a time. They are supposed to be good eating, too, but unfortunately there are none around this time of year for us to try!

We also visited an old building out in the country that is now a small museum. It had started out as a Catholic rectory, but then had various other inhabitants after the church was relocated to the village. 

We have continued to be amazed by how each village, no matter how small, has had a large Catholic church building. We stopped at another one in Champlain when we noticed the doors were open, and again it was amazing to see the beauty inside. This building has been rebuilt four times. The first one was a small wooden one built in 1666; the current building was built in 1879.

  When we got to Trois-Rivières, it was a much bigger city than we expected and it took us much longer than we figured to cross it and get to our warm showers hosts on the far side. Early on, we passed a huge church building that was different from what we had been seeing as it was octagonal in shape. We wound through the city and out to the waterfront, following the Route Verte 5, which took us along bike lanes, small city streets and an occasional separate path. As we transitioned from a path onto a small residential street, Jim walked his bike over the curb. As he started off again, all of a sudden his steering wasn't going the direction he wanted it to, and he ended up on the ground on his right side. Thankfully, he just damaged his dignity as far as he could tell. So no broken elbow on the right to match his old injury on the left. What was puzzling is that his handlebars were no longer aligned with the front wheel, and had to be straightened out before we could go on. He thinks the stem gradually must have loosened up and there was enough torque with the weight in the front panniers that the steering twisted as he turned the handlebars sharply to balance. 

At our warm showers hosts, we had a tasty meal that included salmon cooked on the grill and a mixed berry pie with ice cream. She is a nurse at a high school, and he is a quality controller for a large construction company. Although they were Francophones, he used English working various jobs in English-speaking parts of Canada, and we had pleasant conversations about jobs, family and of course, bicycling. We got to ooh and ahh over their stable of bikes, too.