Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – A Parting of Ways
Clear, the morning starts at freezing and is slow to warm, as I ride into the jagged boundary between Alberta and British Columbia. The ying to Newfoundland’s aged, rounded and spare yang, the Rockies complete Canada’s parenthesis of spectacle. Climbing the 93 into gray skies we reach Continental divide, the split of North America’s lopsided [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Alberta
It’s the West, home’s backyard, and Alberta feels like an old friend. The border between provinces continues to be startlingly accurate. Behind me is the wide sky and roll of the prairies, ahead the dinosaurs, oil and ranches, the Rockies, British Columbia and finally home.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Finding Forget
The sign for Saskatchewan is a harbinger of prosperity. Pump-jacks line the roadside fellating like 50’s cartoon mosquitoes pulling congealed crude from the earth. David & David’s “Welcome to Boomtown” drifts through my mind. If there is a place to let your mind roam while riding, this is it, a wide openness painted in blue [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Holland… Manitoba
Pickups charge down side-roads towards the highway, plumes of silica fog hanging in their wake. They are driven with the impunity of those who know they will never come across an unexpected corner. Those drivers are right. Welcome to the prairies. The gentle rolling wave of the prairies is in full effect now. Pointed toward [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Finding the North Star
My original plan was to push through Winnipeg, but my blind servitude to the Garmin Zumo GPS carries me into the downtown core. Then architecture grabbed me, the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank, the Via Rail station. A rail hub and the former central point of the fur trade Winnipeg has maintained a sense [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Jennifer and Joezs Dream
Just for reference, Ontario is large enough that when the provincial government decided to protect 222,000 square kilometers (56 million acres) of boreal forest from development in July of 2008, comparisons were drawn. For example, 222,000 square kilometers is equal to the entirety of the U.S.’s road-less areas, half the size of Texas, or the [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Signs of Travel
That’s the last Inukshuk, Highway 17 has been lined with them the past two days. These human forms, some classic in design and others more avant-garde, have been my constant companions as I cross Ontario. Whenever I’ve been feeling a bit low I glance up the highway’s stony embankments, and there is an Inukshuk. My [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Marathon
Sometimes a ride is just a ride, there’s no deeper meaning or context to be provided. These are the rides magazines never show you, the hard slogs. Magazines are all about peak experiences, not the troughs. Leaving Sault Ste. Marie, Highway 17 hasn’t been what I expected. I was told to brace for mind numbing [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – The Man in the High Castle
Mattawa, Ontario – At the Valois Restaurant and Motel, in Mattawa Ontario, churchgoers have flowed in, nearly filling the restaurant. Worship done they sit at tables craving cold meats on over-processed bread, served with a side of fries and consumed with a dash of Sunday morning righteousness. They are looking askance at the stranger in [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Community
Heading out of Trois-Rivieres, the Ducati Multistrada and I arc slightly south and skirt the edges of Montreal. The morning starts with something novel and surprising for a wet-coaster like myself, a new type of rain. I thought I’d seen it all, but Quebec serves up something new – a cool, penetrating drizzle. I’m not [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – On the Run
On the back roads of New Brunswick, the fall colours are gathering; greens transforming to oranges, yellows and golds. They would make a tremendous backdrop, except right now they’re making a tremendous blur. The road quality is horrendous; we’re diving between potholes, ruts, wallows and severe frost heaves that compress the rear suspension and the [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Transitions
Nova Scotia is built for motorcycle touring. I’m sure of it, provided you hit the right speed to skim over the roads of the Sunrise Trail, which run from smooth to brutally potholed. They are gently winding and combined with late fall light and a warm day the ride makes for motorcycling satisfaction.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Meet the Smallwood
Under pallid florescent light and surrounded by clinical décor, people pace; sallow, tired, arms folded and tense. In the corner a man braced against the wall rocks to-and-fro. Elsewhere, another sits on a metal bench, staring blankly forward at nothingness, his legs in a sewing machine jiggle. At a table a woman works through a [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – The Irish Loop
This is the Newfoundland you’ve seen on every postcard ever sent, craggy red rock coasts, crashing blue waves, white foam, and seabirds mid-glide…
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Cape Spear, NFL
This is it, the end of the road. Literally. After 4801kms of travel from Toronto, the Multistrada is the eastmost motorcycle in North America. Cape Spear is (arguably) the most easterly point on the continent. In the mute of the overcast it is also barren, peaceful and contemplative.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Sepia and Purple
Sepia tones of sunset have given way to the purples of dusk, casting the rugged moraine into subtle relief. One hundred and seventy kilometers from St. John’s on the highway one, Newfoundland becomes a heartbreakingly and beautifully desolate terrain of glacial erratics and tolts.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Leif Ericson
Channel-Port-aux Basques, NL – In the deepening dusk light, women shaped like baking-powder biscuits look on disapprovingly, while children on bicycles wave and give a thumbs up. The Multistrada’s basso exhaust note reverberates through the tight winding streets, which serpent across each other in a tangle never un-knotted by city planners.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – The Cabot Trail
Thwack! Something hits me in the neck, hard. Happens all the time riding, whatever it was probably just bounced off. Three minutes later the rain starts, and I hunch my shoulders against the onslaught and “sting”. Not just “sting”, the kind of sting that sends you careening to the shoulder. The sort of sting that [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Hot and Cold Running Llamas
After a while all the hotels blur together. Amenities begin to lose definition, as long as accommodations are clean, dry and comfortable they serve a purpose. Some are nicer than others, but after a while the running down Deltas meld with the aspiring Days Inns while Best Westerns roam the wilds of variable conditions and service. So, what do you do to stand out? How about hot and cold running llamas? Stonehame Chalets in Scotsburn, NS has it sorted.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Histories
I know the man’s voice with its lecture hall delivery and resonance. His white hair, with a hint of wild to it. His jutting lower jaw. Here in PEI, nearly the other side of the country the odds of running into an acquaintance should be slim. Yet, despite probability forcing doubt on recollection, I know [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Confederation Bridge
Not even I should be able to get lost on PEI. At 224km long and 64km wide, lost takes a lot of doing on PEI. And yet here I am, subject of my own refusal to u-turn, on a red dirt road that the GPS shows as “almost” connecting to the 13? Or was it the 2? Or the 225? So then, the Ducati Multistrada isn’t an adventure bike… PEI’s dirt roads, a vivid surreal clay red that V. van Gogh would approve of, say otherwise.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – On Roads
Percé, Quebec, no bones about it; this is a tourist town like so many others, save for coastal splendour that would make a landscape painter weep with frustration at being unable to capture its grandeur and subtlety, and an amazing driveway…
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – The Foam on the Bang
Gaspé Peninsula — Between hotelier Evelyn Pouliot of “Saint-Maxime Petit Hotel” and I, we’ve worked out the literal translation for her restaurant recommendation here in Mont-Louis – “The Foam on the Bang.” Some things sound better in the original we decide, “La Broue dans l’Toupet” is one. Figuratively, it’s a restaurant term for freakishly busy, [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – The Saint Lawrence
In 1535, as part of his second trip to Canada, Jacques Cartier became the first European explorer to sail the inland part of the Saint Lawrence. Later, in 1613, the river served as the primary route the exploration of North America’s, pioneered by French explorer Samuel de Champlain. Those facts from social studies never had [...]
