Bike trip to Montreal - Day 1: Tire puncture, murder and hypothermia.

Carrying load. With sleeping bag and tent. Total weight about 30lb.

Taking the bus to meet Adam.

Our bikes together in MEC.

Adam buying the spare inner tube to fix his bike.

Gloomy first day.

Biked till the sun don't shine no more.

Our sleeping tent. Luckily we didn't get killed.

Today I set off on a bike trip to Montreal with my friend Adam. The journey will be similar to the one I made while in Korea. It will take about 6-7 days and we will be doing around 600km in total.

This time around I bought a nice road bike along with rear panniers to carry my gear. The last trip has taught me that planning goes a long way. We will be sleeping in a tent that I brought along the way as well as with couch surfers and hosts. Couchsurfing is an amazing website that lets you find locals to stay with or host others who are traveling to your city. The best part is that it is all free!

Right now I am on the bus to meet up with Adam at the most eastern part of Toronto. Then we will start our journey. Our plan is to do about 100km a day. Our first stop planned is Couberg, a tiny town right above lake Ontario. There we will set up camp and rest up. The other stops are: Belleville, Kingston, Smith Falls, Ottawa, and finally Montreal. In addition to Couberg, we also have to stay outside at Smith Falls and another stop in between Ottawa and Montreal. Kingston and Ottawa I have friends who will be able to let us crash at their houses and Belleville and Montreal we will meet up with some couchsurfer hosts.

The weather has dropped in temperature since the start of the week. It is about 11 degrees and light rain has descended Northern Toronto. Hopefully the rain will pass when we start.

2:21

We are finally on the subway after an eventful morning. Adam's back tired punctured as he was riding to meet me. So we had to stop by the bike shop and change his tires. After that we grabbed lunch downtown and are finally off officially on our trip. We were annoyed at first with the tire change and the freezing rain. But on the flip side it was good his tired popped here in Toronto where we can find the replacements readily. Plus because of this we learned how to changed tires and bought back up inner tubes should this occur again on the road.

Part 2

We have had some really colorful characters on this trip. Some self righteous university students in Toronto, missionaries in Port Hope and murder warnings from a Chinese restaurant owner in Oshawa.

The first night we set up tent in Darlington provincial park. This was after a warning from the Chinese restaurant owner in Oshawa. Originally we wanted to set up camp in a city park in Oshawa, but the owner said the area was full of drunks and someone actually got murdered from camping in that area. So we decided to push past our pre-planned destination and bike in the night. We found Darlington park and set up tent. Right away we met two guys who were drinking and walking into the park. Since the murder warning from the restaurant we were on edge, this new development didn't help.  After setting up an SUV drove toward us and stopped. It was about 100m away from us. We quickly cut off our lights fearing for our lives and our chance of sleeping in the tent undisturbed - this is because you are not suppose to camp in parks, park ranger will usually kick you out or give you a fine. But of the two scenarios we were definitely hoping for the latter since we don't like to die.........

Luckily for us when we came back to our tent it was still in one piece. But the two drunk guys we originally saw were walking on the trail again. So we asked them if they knew who the SUV belonged to.

"The park rangers, he kicked us out." They said.

Breathing a sigh of relief we climbed into our tent but lost sleep due to fear of being caught and thrown out of the park, and the freight train that passed by our tent every 30 minutes. We passed the night talking and had about 3 hours of sleep freezing our butts off - the temperature had dropped down to 5 degrees and my tent was not insulating nor was our sleeping bags.

In the morning we woke up early (6am)  to avoid being caught be the park ranger. It would seem our fears of being caught were unfounded, however, as the car gate blocked the ranger from patrolling in our area unless if he wanted to walk.

End of first update.