pivot vers la belle province

👋🏼 bye Atlantic Canada 🌊 // bonjour Quebec 😘

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry (Robert Burns, 1786).

I had such good plans for walk 2.0. Thirteen resupply boxes carefully prepared, route mapped, a 30k a day pace planned with plenty of wiggle room for field trips and rest days and making it home before snowfall. Coast to coast under the belt, was the plan!

But Atlantic Canada has been a practice in pivots. Covid, a broken foot, a destroyed resupply box, a trip home for a dying Bobcat… and fun pivots, too: hopping aboard a lobster boat, a trip to Twillingate, 400k of trail on bicycle, a trip to Fundy, soaking up rest time with good friends in Nova Scotia, and a last minute whale-watching excursion along the St Lawrence to name a few. Rerouting, remapping, recalculating the timeline: “If I zig here, and skip this zag, and push through here, and sail past there, I can make it home as planned / with a few adjustments / by end October, with a good hard push / by mid-November, with a little cold discomfort.”

By the time I went home for Bobcat, completing the trail this year was off the table. “PEI-and-then-some” was the new goal, but Hurricane Fiona blew through and uprooted that plan, too. I was set to cross the Northumberland Strait on the Friday that Fiona rolled in, but rerouted to Cape Breton to weather the storm. A few false starts and it was over to PEI a week later only to find PEI’s trails absolutely trashed. Impassable, even for a very stubborn and determined cat.

Surveying the damage to PEI’s Confederation Trail after Hurricane Fiona

But I still had some walk left in me! I like this time of year — the challenge of colder weather, of rain and moisture, of toughing it out and being rewarded with sunrises and sunsets and wildlife readying for the winter. So it’s a pivot to Quebec, la belle province, for a mountainous and soon to be snowy push to Quebec City where I’ll probably pack it in this year.

I’m nervous and excited and so very grateful to walk and walk and walk. I’m exactly where I love to be.

🌊⚜️✨

Walking the ocean floor at Hopewell Rocks, NB