Day 8 Cornwall to Riviere Beaudette

We made it! And we have the medals to prove it, handed out at a ceremony at Chez Bob, an eatery just over the Quebec border. The first Great Waterfront Trail Adventure has come to an end and the cyclists are dispersing to heal and meet the next challenge.
Day 8 began with a breakfast announcement of new signs and a kiosk to be placed at the Ontario-Quebec border, officially marking the juncture of the Waterfront Trail and the Route Verte. We left Cornwall under cloudy skies, an earlier drizzle of rain having ended. It was cool but pleasant as we headed out on what we were told would be a 31-k ride to Riviere Beaudette at the border.
It's not a trip I'd particularly recommend, being boring and bumpy, much of it parallelling Highwy 401. Unless, like us, you want to be able to say you went from border to border, or, much better, unless you're headed for Montreal - there's a wonderful stretch of trail leading to that city.
Anyhow, according to some bicyle computers, the distance was 48 k. And on the bus back from the border to Cornwll, cyclists compared notes and did some recalculations, concluding that the real distance covered since Niagara-on-the-Lake is 770 kilometres, not the 680 we've been led to believe. In fact, many expressed the suspicion that we've been consistently given under-estimates of the distance we were going to cover each day, in order to spur us to ever greater effort. Hmmm. I can't say, not having any technical equipment, but I promise to get to the bottom of this with the folks from the Waterfront Regeneration Trust, and will advise.
As you can infer, this won't be my last diary entry. I interviewed several people on their thoughts about the experience and will be posting that in a day or so. And I think I shall follow up on a couple of other issues that have arisen en route, such as the situation with the Murray Canal roadway, and is a big chunk really going to be taken out of Oshawa's waterfront for an ethanol plant?
For now, a brief summary of the last 24 hours of our trip. There were some magical moments. After 7 days of grime and sweat, we were all pretty amazed to arrive at a dining room in the Cornwall arena on the evening of Day 7 to discover beautifully laid tables, clean linen, properly served food and the possibility of buying wine and beer to go with our lasagna dinner.
The evening was one of great camaraderie, and the Waterfront Regeneration Trust staff who have worked towards this event for several years - Marlaine Koehler, Vicki Barron, David Arcus and Petrina Tulissi - quite properly got the recognition they deserved. Heartfelt applause greeted tour director Ian Lobb who, with his band of yellow jersey volunteers, ran a thoroughly professional tour.
"It was awesome organization and awesome execution," cyclist Jim Best said to me. "You can have good organization but without good execution it just falls apart. They had both."
After dinner we headed over to the Cornwall balloon festival, for music, dancing and, apparently, balloon rides. Before that, Anna Biro and I had a heart-stopping moment. We'd left our bikes at the top of the stairs leading down to the arena's lower level where dinner was held, lashed together with bungee cords. Who would want these old things, we told each other. But when we came back, they were gone. And the previously empty building was teaming with people. We didn't panic. Much. We took our plight to security guard Pat Chartrand and - oh joy! - she revealed she'd moved the bikes to a safe place. Big hugs for Pat Chartrand!
We all had varying degrees of misfortune during this trip -some minor, some more serious. One with a fierce streak of bad luck was 14-year-old William Thomson, who had 7 flat tires (or was it 9?), brake failure (off to the nearest bike shop) and then finally a spill in the road construction area at Iroquois that resulted in a painfully sprained wrist curtailing his participation. Still, he was on hand for the last day and full of praise for the event. "I really enjoyed the ride," he said "It was good. Maybe I'll be luckier next year." And with that he was driven to Riviere Beaudette and mounted his bike to cross the line with the rest of us. That's the spirit, Will.