The tour this year was not ambitious but had everything needed to satisfy the itch.
Last year I rode a section of the TQT solo but abandoned it after a week for a few reasons. For one, I found it a little lonely. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised his protégé Franz Kappus that he had to be comfortable “walking through hallways of solitude” if he wanted to become a good poet, and I’m pretty comfortable with my own company, but hours and hours of riding alone through forest did get a little boring. It’s also not that safe. It’s not advisable to ride solo off-road, particularly in remote areas. I also had a bike that wasn’t starting reliably, and it was also top-heavy and difficult to lift fully-loaded on my own. Added up, I was riding with a constant low-level stress detracting from the enjoyment of the tour.
This year I changed all the elements that were holding me back. I swapped the 500 lb. Tiger 800XC for a 330 lb. Honda CRF 300 Rally, and best of all, I was riding with a buddy; my friend Riley from The Awesome Players Off-Road Club was interested in doing some of the trail. He was on his Norden 901 Expedition, a bike 3x the size of my Honda, so we were looking a little like Laurel and Hardy as we headed off down Highway 10 toward Magog. We had decided to pick up the TQT there and ride it as far east as we could in the five days we had.
The trail east of Magog is easy concession roads passing through farmland, with horses and cattle grazing at the sides of the road and crops extending over rolling hills to mountains on the horizon. Just east of Stanstead, we dropped down and road along the Canada-US border for a few kilometres. The road was in Canada but the ditch was in the The States, and I couldn’t help thinking about the current tariff war that is dominating the news, and how our good relations with America have soured during President Trump’s current term. We are into a war of words now, but despite what the politicians and talking heads are saying in front of the cameras, most Canadians are united in staying the course and not capitulating to Trump’s demands by signing a deal under threat that isn’t good long-term for Canada.
The world’s longest undefended border. You can see the cement markers along the fence-line.
Soon we were ready for a break and took the diversion to the Mont Hereford Lookout, which now provided a view out over Quebec and south to Vermont and New Hampshire (banner image above). We were so high, we could almost spit or whiz onto US soil, not that we would ever want to do that!
Our next stop was at the Tim Horton’s in Lac Mégantic to borrow their WIFI and charge up with caffeine. After a quick stop at the memorial and site of the 2013 rail disaster, we continued on, determined to put as many miles as possible in before the light faded. The best riding of the day was during the golden hour that took us along the Chaudière River to 2 Rivers Campground.
2 Rivers is a classic RV park and not really my cup of tea, but when you’re putting in long days in the saddle, you’re just thankful for a site, and in my case, one with a couple of trees for my hammock. They tucked us in the tenting section, which predictably was empty so we had a lot of privacy to drink and listen to music. There was some competing music coming from somewhere and late in the evening we decided to take a walk up through the park, and as we approached a large tent I realized the music was live. I guess we caught the season-end party and the band was really good! Unfortunately, despite having a working knowledge of French (Riley’s is better than mine), neither of us could understand a word of the French vocals, making us feel like the minorities we were and just how separate the two solitudes of Quebec truly are.
The next day took us into our first ZEC and where I had split off the previous year, not feeling comfortable venturing into these regions alone. What is a ZEC? It’s a Zone d’Exploitation Contrôlée, poorly translated as a “controlled exploitation zone”—hunting, fishing, and other ways one can exploit nature. I’m sure there are more than a few environmentalists who cringe at this naming. These are “gated” regions requiring a permit to enter, even if you aren’t going to kill anything, and there isn’t much in them but animals to kill and the odd hunter. You wouldn’t think that nature reserves and motorsports go well together, but if you’re on an adventure bike, the trails and forest access roads that cross ZECs make for good riding.
Normally, you have to stop and pay an entrance fee for each ZEC or risk being fined $500, but this year Marc Chartrand of Ridaventure has managed to negotiate an agreement between the TQT and the ZECs. You buy a sticker at a cost of about $57 and it grants you unlimited access during the calendar year to the 25 ZECs the trail crosses. Not only is this a lot more convenient for riders but it’s also a pretty good deal because the individual entrance fees can be upwards of $40.
As you can see, we were among the first to use this new system, and let me just say that some of the wrinkles still need to be ironed out. We arrived at our first “gate,” which was an unstaffed electronic kiosk, and Riley spent 20 minutes filling out online forms, similar no doubt to the ones we filled out when we ordered the TQT sticker (i.e. name, address, make and model of bike, licence plate number), only to discover there was no option for Ridaventure, only other options with more charges. The cheapest of these had something to do with gathering (presumably berries, or such?), but since we were only gathering mud, that didn’t apply. We decided to risk it and, with stickers clearly visible, ventured bravely into the controlled zone. If this is sounding like the language of 1984, Logan’s Run, or some other dystopian story, that’s a little how it felt.
We emerged unhunted and rode into Pohénégamook, a place I have only now learned how to pronounce let alone spell. The name comes from the Indigenous Abenaki word ponegamikw, which translates to “winter camp.” Local First Nations set up camp around the lake in winter to . . . you guessed it, hunt. It’s geographically an odd little town nestled right on the Canada-US border right at the northernmost tip of where Maine juts up into Canada and near the New Brunswick border.
Unfortunately, the next day the weather turned on us. Riley was in an MSR Xplorer ADV Suit which kept him cozy and warm, but I had risked wearing my Klim Traverse jacket. I knew the Gore-Tex weatherproofing was vulnerable—I’d been caught in rain before while commuting—and it wasn’t long before I was soaked to the skin. My Carlsbad pants generally held up, but I have to contact Klim about the Gore-Tex lifetime warranty on the jacket. Hopefully they won’t say, as someone once joked, “you have outlived the warranty.”
Rain aside, the riding was great! We crossed two more ZECs, which offered more challenging riding. At times we were routed onto some 2-track snowmobile trails and I was happy to be on the little Honda, and another time two moose crossed the trail in front of us. I wasn’t filming at the time so didn’t catch much of them (watch until the end).
Sorry about the rain droplets on the camera; I have to remember to wipe it more often. We popped out at Amqui and found a site at the municipal campground there.
This was the first real tour on the Honda with the Enduristan Monsoon 3 bags, and overall I was very happy with them. I had to remove my passenger pegs and replace each with a fabricated nylon strap with grommets to use as a tie-down point. The built-in elasticated ROKstraps of the Monsoon 3s ensure the bags don’t flop around, and each bag takes 30L for a total of 60L. A little wet-dry bag on top was all I needed for all my camping gear, including a little food.
After nearly two full days off road, we were ready for some asphalt and headed up toward the coast. Riley had never ridden any of the 132 and I knew how awesome it is after riding it around the Gaspé peninsula en route to Newfoundland. We asked Kurviger to come up with an interesting route to the coast, and Kurviger never disappoints. My phone wasn’t charging from all the water of the preceding day, so Riley led with his wireless charger. It’s always a fun challenge trying to keep up with him, especially on the little Honda.
The Honda keeps up just fine in the corners but I have to downshift to 5th and wring its neck a bit on the climbs. That flashing white light on my display at 7,000 rpm is telling me to upshift but 6th is an overdrive gear that doesn’t do well climbing, especially with the bike fully loaded. I generally try not to go above 7,000 for prolonged periods of time but I do to pass other vehicles as needed. It’s all part of the trade-off of having a bike that weighs 330 lbs. This is not a bike for highway riding but trails and maybe some secondary highways. I can see taking this bike across Canada on the TCAT someday. I would have confidence doing that on it, knowing how capable it is off road, how light it is to lift, and how reliable it is as a Honda.
Suddenly as we crested a hill the air turned cool and I knew we were approaching the river, or as they like to call it along the gulf, la mer (the sea). That naming is mostly for tourist dollars but the river here looks like the sea and smells like the sea, and if you surrender to the idea it can feel like the sea. The mountains on the opposite side of the road are dramatic. The 132 never disappoints and I could ride it all day. In fact, that’s pretty much what we did. We didn’t want to stop and the views kept drawing us further east, although we knew that each kilometre further was another kilometre we’d have to ride to get back to Montreal the following day.
We were looking for food and, after an impromptu peanut-butter and syrup sandwich at the lighthouse, we found some fish & chips in Mont-Saint-Pierre. This was our turnaround point and, now powered up, we headed back along the 132, stopping for the night at Camping Chalet La Luciole in Sainte-Luce-Sur-Mer.
We weren’t permitted to have a wood fire but the campground has propane fire-pits to rent, which was a good alternative. The fire and the last of the Crown Royal warmed us from the cold air coming off the water. As the name suggests, Sainte-Luce is right on the sea, and we could hear waves breaking on the beach from our tents, no sleep app needed.
I slept like a baby in my hammock and was up at dawn. I went down to the boardwalk and took in the beach, the wood sculptures, and the colourful homes. Sainte-Luce-sur-Mer is a pretty little town worth a stop if you are passing through.
On our final day, we continued along the 132 as far as it was interesting, which is to say, until La Pocatière, stopping in Kamouraska for a coffee mid-afternoon before the big push. 4+ hours on the highway on the Honda was the price I paid for having a trail bike in the ZECs and riding into Gaspésie, but it was all worth it. As I pulled off the highway into my little village on the West Island of Montreal, I noticed people on the street with their phones out, photographing something behind me. Once I pulled into my driveway and turned off the bike, I saw it was a massive, brilliant, double rainbow. It was an appropriate ending to a short but colourful tour through south-eastern Quebec.
