Adam Hooper (the blog)

It's raining.

It's always raining in Canada's maritime provinces. Rain dive-bombs from above, it sloshes under-wheel and it materializes out of thin air—or, to be more literal, out of thick air. Waterfalls don't send up mist because there's no space for mist in this air. There's only space for me, curling over my handlebars to make myself hydrodynamic.

The sun peeks out one day in New Brunswick. Its heat makes my camera lens so foggy I fear I've lost my window to the world. Life returns to normal soon enough: the lens and rain restore themselves simultaneously.

It's drizzling. This dreary Friday morning, I'm munching fruit leather near Saint John River. The Trans-Canada Highway isn't far and there's a bridge beside me. Haze silences all.

Suddenly, music emerges from an invisible portion of the river bank. It's Rebecca Black's “Friday.”

It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday....

There's plenty of time to think on a bicycle, but it's not useful thinking. I start a typical morning with plans to ponder my future, but soon my mind follows the circles made by my feet.

Party party yeah, party party yeah, fun fun fun fun....

It begins to rain, so I disagree.

My mind—fun—revolves—fun—around—fun—that song—fun—all week.

It's sunny and I've reached Moncton, New Brunswick, my last stop before the Atlantic. I eat a vegan wrap and drink a smoothie and a fair-trade cappuccino on a healthy-restaurant patio. Two waitresses are taking turns serving me. They speak French with English accents and English with French accents and I decide I like this part of Canada. This is Acadia, a region which formerly belonged to France.

They bring me inside to consult their cyclist coworker for campground suggestions. He's a native French-speaker, I think, because the waitresses switch to French when they speak with him. His French sounds more English than his English does. He says the coastal campgrounds near Moncton are expensive and uninspiring.

“I was thinking of going to Murray Beach,” I say in English-sounding French, and I point at my map. Murray Beach is a provincial park.

Their eyes pop. All three swoon. It's decided.

Murray Beach is sunny. There are many campers and no trees. Hundreds of us are camping on the grassy slope beside the ocean. An aging cyclist from the RV next door befriends me and we compare bicycles and stories. He surely has more of both, but he prefers listening.

It's neither sunny nor raining. I'm on Prince Edward Island and the state of the sky is crucial. The royals are visiting. Local news stations talk about how the weather might affect Will and Kate, over and over and over again.

It's drizzling and the royal pair is shaking hands a few easy kilometres away from me. I stay put. I'm the only person in the province who isn't excited.

A familiar-looking house sits beside the ocean on the northern side of Prince Edward Island.

It's sunny for three days and a breeze is behind me the entire time. This is Nova Scotia, and the fortuitous weather convinces me to detour for three days along the Cabot Trail, a winding road with the toughest hills and grandest scenery since the Rockies.

I climb for hours and careen for minutes, day in, day out. I meet cyclists, enjoy their company and eventually pass them. I watch silhouettes of hikers walk the mountaintops. I stop to chat with tourists and locals at lookout points and gas stations.

Coves line the roads all over Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

The sun is gentle and the ocean is relaxing. I sleep at the best campground in Canada. It's in a village called Meat Cove. The dirt road is long and steep and loose. I skid when I brake and my wheel spins when I stand up to pedal.

Meat Cove has the best campground in canada. Yes, that's a tent on the part of the campground that juts out into the ocean.

The air is cold when I arrive near sunset and it's colder when I leave near sunrise. Cold is good for hard exercise.

It's the rainiest day yet. I'm in Newfoundland. The province is known as The Rock and I believe its people must be rocky, too, or the constant weather would whittle them to naught.

A lighthouse greets visitors who ride the ferry to Channel-Port aux Basques, on the western side of Newfoundland.

The sun has abandoned me and I'm cold. A beastly wind hammers at my helmet and daggers of rain swoop up under my visor.

I find a diner and order a hearty late breakfast, plus a plate of pancakes with “syrup.” I'm always skeptical of “syrup,” but today's syrup is in fact maple syrup, which is the only syrup, really, so I'm relieved.

Another cyclist walks in. I met him last night in the campground. He'd been talking on the phone with his wife on the only patch of ground where he could find signal. He was soaked then, too, because it was pouring then, too. He's a native Newfoundlander who lives in Ontario and cycled halfway across the country. He crashed thrice during his trip. He showed me the bruises.

He's sopping wet and shivering, as I was 15 minutes ago. He sits with me and orders the same breakfast I'm eating, minus the pancakes. The waitress asks if we're father and son. She eyes me and blushes and fills my water bottles and shows me where the bathroom is. I leave forever to battle the elemental rock as my could-be-father stays and chats with her about things only Newfoundlanders would understand.

Newfoundlanders certainly don't understand me.

One day is gray but almost dry. “Yer crazy,” says a stringy construction worker holding a stop sign. His accent sounds rural-American. He swears often, and each curse thuds.

He shakes his head. Thud. “Yer crazy, man.” Shake. Thud.

The next day is gray and dry again. “Oh my sweet, lovin' Lord,” says a waitress after I eat my pancakes and tell her how far I've come.

The Trans-Canada Highway misses most of the ocean along Newfoundland, but it passes countless lakes.

It's so rainy I only see horizontal streaks of wet. The wind rocks me from side to side. It's my grand finale—my last day.

Gusts ambush me. I veer a metre to the left or right each time to compensate. I can't avoid being swept into traffic.

I laugh and cackle and yawp and the rain tries to muffle me and it can't. I am equal to the wind, the rain, the Rock. When they roar, I roar back and pedal harder. I'm like them—pure intensity.

“Come on, hit me with all you've got!” I shout. “Yeeeeeah!”

You have to be mad to ride a bicycle in weather like this.

I'm in a diner. Customers shiver as they enter and wince as they leave. I pee my final pee in a crowded men's room. I'm in the stall, and a man at the urinal is talking to a man at the sink in a Newfoundland accent that sounds Irish.

“Glad to see the weather's back to normal, eh?”

“What's that?”

“I said, glad to see the weather's back to normal.”

A chuckle. “Oh, yeah.”

Soon I'd turn northeast and the wind would push me. For now I was climbing my last hilly, gusty challenge, 50 kilometres from St. John's.

How would I feel when I ended my ride? I hadn't been sure for the first 88 days of my trip. I pondered the question one last time—and I figured it out.

It would feel like finishing a great book.

I recalled the characters as I pedalled. The motherly cafe owner in Newfoundland who gave me a discount on breakfast and made me a free sandwich for the road. The chill bike-shop employee in British Columbia who directed me to a fantastic cappuccino. The cook who lived beside his traincar restaurant in New Brunswick and ambushed me with a plate of strawberries. My Grade 6 teacher who brought me breakfast and lunch in Nova Scotia in return for a poetry recital. Friends and family who said the right thing, always.

Hundreds of people had swirled around the protagonist, and the book wouldn't be complete without each one.

Obstacles vanished as the end approached. Our hero's chain wouldn't snap, his tires wouldn't deflate and nobody would steal his bicycle.

It once seemed like a book without resolution, but that changed.

The protagonist hadn't accomplished most of his goals. He hadn't sold stories on the road, he'd never applied for jobs and he'd barely finished the tracking website he'd intended to code before his trip began. He hadn't even thanked all his donors. He hadn't thought through the life issues he'd meant to think through. He hadn't discovered himself. His future, which had started as a to-do list, seemed even less predictable than before.

This book didn't have a stale moral like “tend your future” or “manage your tasks.” The message was the opposite.

Live one day at a time.

Relax.

Trust your impulses.

These are hardly epiphanies, but I gained a new perspective. I'd been whipped by wind, submerged in rain and subjected to the words of strangers, whims of road crews, mistakes of other drivers and fatigue-hewn gaps in my own alertness. And I made it anyway. This final-day chapter summarized the entire book.

The road turned like pages as I sailed to the end, letting words and ideas and gusts flow through me. You don't need to focus on every word at the end of a book, because the words are mere shadows of the deeper meaning. A final chapter is like a goodbye kiss, reminding you of everything important, why it mattered and why it's okay to let go.

It lasted hours, but it could have been seconds.

I arrived in St. John's.

I closed the covers and paused in the bliss between a perfect book and an untamed library.

The Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia is a cyclist's paradise with leg-defying climbs and brake-defying drops.

I'm fewer than 600 kilometres from finished.

Please be patient while I enact my new strategy: bike like mad. Once I'm done, I'll tackle my queue of blog topics:

• Finishing
• Atlantic Canada
• Trains
• My equipment
• What I've learned
• A summary of my trip

The Adam of Canada Day was in a foul mood.

For one thing, there weren't enough nice people. When a friendly old man chatted with him after second breakfast at a diner, the conversation turned to politics Adam had to hide his anger. The man disliked New Brunswick's requirement that government employees must speak French. Adam thought, but didn't say, that the policy seems reasonable because a third of New Brunswick's population is natively French-speaking. Adam made three polite attempts to extricate himself from the discussion: first by donning his gloves, second by walking over to the counter to pay for his meal, and finally by riding away and shouting goodbye over his shoulder.

The bad day began with a rotten night before. Adam had chosen to treat himself to a motel room, which the owner offered to cyclists at $69 instead of $89. As he showed Adam the room, the man had complained about cyclists demanding cheap fares. He'd pointed to the second bed in the room and told Adam that if he so much as touched it, the fare would rise by $20. Ditto for the second towel in the bathroom. Adam had fantasized about peeing on the second bed and stealing the towels, but in the end he'd done nothing.

Grand Falls, New Brunswick, has some grand falls.

He'd washed his clothes in the sink and the air was too humid to dry them. He was cycling in cold, wet clothes. The sun hadn't shone all week.

Well, not exactly. The sun had shone for about five minutes on the motel day. Adam had been on the phone with a journalist. Jeff, the cook at a now-a-restaurant Canadian Pacific traincar a few kilometres back, had suddenly appeared and offered him a styrofoam plate of strawberries and maple syrup. Jeff was the first acquaintance Adam had seen twice while crossing Canada.

That's what sunshine feels like, Adam thought.

It hadn't lasted.

For one thing, he realized in Fredericton he'd probably dropped the key to his bicycle lock at the motel. He felt stupid lugging a heavy chunk of useless metal for hundreds of kilometres, hoping his effort was less stupid than throwing away the lock and then finding the key.

And in the morning somebody had blared Friday, the annoying faux-pop YouTube song, near the road. It was stuck in Adam's head all day.

Most campgrounds in Canada are parking lots. Thousands of campers park in these sites every day, often paying $30 or $40 per night. It's something to fume about.

He'd encounter the coast the next day, but his trip was far from over.

Maybe that was it. Two friends had asked, in the past week, if he ever felt like returning home. In the Prairies the idea hadn't occurred to him. Now he had crossed the continent and he wanted more Montreal bagels. The rest of the trip seemed pointless.

The wind was behind him and he vented to himself all day. He fumed as he gulped delicious ice cream. He stayed dumb when two nuclear parents answered questions from their two nuclear children about his bicycle.

Normally Adam could mute his frequent flips from happy to depressed and back. His mood usually swayed with the winds and his impatience rose with the hills. Today he was stuck on one emotion.

Finally, before nightfall, the clouds parted.

The ocean lay a day ahead.

He camped alone with the mosquitoes.

Happiness lay a day ahead.

The sun returned as I reached the coast. I re-entered French-speaking New Brunswick and my route was lined with the Acadian flag.

A family walks beneath a setting sun in Murray Beach Provincial Park, New Brunswick.

The 12.9-kilometre Confederation Bridge links New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island, where this picture was taken.

Quebec is the best province yet.

This is only partly because it's my home. The language perked my ears even before I entered the province, a French with such a unique accent we call it Quebecois.

I crossed a bridge into the province, and wham! A bicycle lane greeted me at the first intersection.

Quebec is the only province I've seen so far with road signs for bicycle lanes. The signs and lanes make up a huge network, called the Route Verte. Signposts led me from Hawkesbury, Ontario to Edmunston, New Brunswick.

Montreal is the best part of all. It's replete with rent-a-bike stands holding dozens of new-age bicycles, called Bixi bicycles. Detach one whenever you need it, ride it wherever you like and drop it off near your destination, all for $5 a day. It's far cheaper if you pay $78 for the entire year, or even $19 if you already bought a yearly bus pass.

There are hundreds of Bixi stands in Montreal.

Five years ago, pre-Bixi, Montreal was an adequate cycling city with modest lanes. Now there are lanes every few blocks and Montreal drivers are careful around cyclists.

Montreal is also famous for its bagels. I've seen St. Viateur Bagels bagels on sale in New Brunswick and New York.

Two of Quebec's major bicycle routes follow the St. Lawrence River toward the Atlantic Ocean. I took both, crossing by ferry at Quebec City.

Chateau Frontenac sits over the river in Quebec City. Quebec is Canada's first city, founded by the French where high banks would deter attacks. Today those same hills make for furious exercise.

These routes are usually wide shoulders on service roads. They do stray from the main road sometimes to introduce cyclists to river vistas, farm towns and the occasional monster climb up a steep St. Lawrence bank.

The Route Verte takes a detour towards a tourist village on the river.

The French settled Quebec in strips so each farmer could access the road and river. It's easy to tell a land's history from an airplane: English Canada has square lots and French Canada has rectangular ones.

The final bicycle route, southeast of Riviere-du-Loup, is actually part of the Trans-Canada Trail, made for walking and cycling. The hard-packed gravel is great for sunny days, and free campsites await every few dozen kilometres. I didn't trust my road bike to make it through in the rain, so I reverted to the Trans-Canada Highway on my final day. The enormous shoulder led me safely to New Brunswick.

I saw dozens of long-distance cyclists in Quebec. And no wonder: this is the perfect place to go for a ride.