Today, a Saturday in early November, we had a spring-like sunny day with temps of 19 and a mild westerly wind. The air was soft--not a word often used to describe Ottawa's weather in any season--but it was all so beautiful that I went with my cycling buddy, Dave, across the river and into the hills to sit on the verandah of "Café Les Saisons" with a coffee in Chelsea, Qué. (I took my derailleur bike so I could stay with him on his old-but-still-sound Klein touring bike.)
We do see mild temps in early November from time to time, but usually no more than 10° at most. Today's conditions seemed almost freakishly fine, but were no less delightful for that. Of course we were not alone: the parkways in the Gatineau Park have been closed since mid-October, and with no snow on the ground, the roads and bikepaths were chock-full of cyclists of all kinds, with runners on the grassy/softer verges, and skiers young and old training on their inline skates.
Everyone, it seemed, had a dazed can-you-believe-it? grin, and more than one person said, "It feels like spring!" or, "Maybe we've skipped winter?!"
The landscape has changed dramatically from what appears in the photos I posted in late September. The brilliantly coloured Bliss-Carman-like hillsides of hardwood trees are now a mix of dull greys and browns, with only the various conifers, mostly on the northern slopes, offering us some green. OTOH, with the hardwoods stripped of their foliage, the woods are now full of light, and we could easily see runners and mountain bikers on the trails; up until the end of October, those trails were hidden from sight.
("Bliss Carman" you say? A lifetime ago, I came to Canada as an eight-year-old, and finished Grades 5 - 8 in a one-room schoolhouse in the woods near Peterborough, Ontario. For a kid leaving the groomed countryside of Surrey, England, it was impossibly wild and exotic. We had a big thick reader full of stories and poems that I forever associate with those days. The latter included examples of Bliss Carman's charming harmless verse, full of iambic quadrameter and the like. Di-da' di-da' di-da' di-da', thus:
Along the line of smoky hills,
The crimson forest stands,
And all day long the blue jay calls,
Throughout the autumn lands.
My kids had to put up with that sort of things as they grew up, as well as longer bits of Robert Service's Canajan magical realism, such as "The Cremation of Sam McGee". Have to say he managed it brilliantly well for a bank clerk from Preston, Lancs.)
But back to the thread. Just a month ago, our back yard in the city had arboreal scenes like the one below--today, we contented ourselves with downhills free of motor traffic, and whipped past hillsides that would have stopped us immediately just weeks ago.
Instead, we basked in the springlike warmth and midday sunshine at Les Saisons, chatting with some of the dozen or more cyclists doing the same. One fellow told me he'd just finished 35 kms on his inline skates--he was training for his cyclocross season, which typically runs into the snowy-cold-and-wet of of early December. I congratulated him on All That, saying I'd never quite understood the appeal, but hey! whatever turns your crank, eh? He laughed, and complimented me on my derailleur bike, saying it looked like a capable touring bike, and was it an early ti-framed Eclipse? I said that indeed it was, and told him some of its 20-year-old history, and my seemingly endless search for a functional derailleur with usable ratios--resolved, happily, in the last few years--and my decision to join the Church of Thorn-mit-Rohloff bikes for loaded touring.
So there we are -- not many better ways to spend 3 or four hours on a November Saturday
The fine weather is forecast to last into the early part of next week, with Tuesday temps s'posed to reach
21, if you please, so maybe I'll get another run into the hills before the winter closes in.
