In Montreal each spring, an epic bicycle festival demonstrates how 25,000 people can let the good times roll without bumping into each other too much.
In Quebec City and its hinterlands, cyclists plunge into a history shaped by French explorers, the Roman Catholic Church, aboriginal culture and British conquest – plus a quite unexpected taste of Teddy Roosevelt on a trail into the wilderness.
In Charlevoix, an island provides a perfect loop for lovers of quiet roads, gentle hills, flats along the water and eye-candy vistas of mountains you don’t have to climb.
Then there is the south shore of the St. Lawrence, where the panorama of river, sea, sky and flowers defines the magic of bicycling in Quebec in ways that words cannot.
Those treats are mostly thanks to Route Verte, Québec’s gift to the cycling world. It’s a vast network of trails and bike-friendly byways that is about to get another growth spurt. Quebec’s “green way” is a gift to the natural and cultural worlds, too, stitching together wild places, pristine villages and a few buzzy cities in a rich, French-flavored tableaux.
It’s the masterwork of Vélo Québec , the publicly and privately supported bicycling association and Route Verte’s steward.
Sprawling over 5,300 kilometers or 3,300 miles, Route Verte is a handful to get to know, requiring more time than most people have and more legs than are under me.
And the network, a quarter century old next year, will be undergoing its largest expansion in a decade with an announcement coming from the government, detailing the addition of 900 kilometers, said Louis Carpentier, director of development for Route Verte.
Montreal’s cycling culture turns into a rolling party the first weekend of June. The Go Bike Montreal Festival is anchored by two family-friendly rides that close downtown streets to traffic and take over the city-island. The premier event, Tour de l’lle, typically draws 25,000 people on bicycles and countless more cheering them on from neighborhoods along the 30-mile route. Music, dance and acrobatics (Quebec, home to Cirque du Soleil, specializes in the circus arts) are part of the mix.
Before the Sunday ride comes Tour la Nuit, which launches some 10,000 cyclists at sunset May 31, many with tricked out bikes strung with decorative homemade lights. This year, the cyclists will enter and circle Montreal’s Olympic Stadium for the first time since “Chariots of Fire” greeted their arrival in the 1980s. “It’s the wow moment for Tour La Nuit,” says Joëlle Sévigny of Vélo Québec.
Sévigny, who calls Montreal the “Copenhagen of North America” for its cycling passion, has managed the festival rides for decades and seen them become an impetus for newbies to make cycling a regular thing. “Tour de l’lle is a real incubator of the cyclists of tomorrow,” she says. “It’s to give the taste of bicycling to people again.”
Nearby, the offroad P’tit Train du Nord rail trail runs 140 miles between the Montreal outskirts and Mont-Laurier on Route Verte #2. About half paved, half smooth crushed stone, the “little train of the north” trail offers well-spaced amenities, intriguing inns and a shuttle service to drop cyclists and their bikes at the northern end or places along the way. It can take your luggage to that night’s auberge, too.
Veloroute des Bleuets circles Lac Saint-Jean, a lake so big you might think it’s the sea. In late summer it makes good on its promise of wild blueberries for trailside scavenging. The lake circuit runs for 160 miles on trails, quiet roads, village pathways and occasional paved shoulders. Signed as Route Verte #8, it meets the standards that are the hallmark of all designated routes in the network: Inns with Route Verte accreditation must offer healthy food choices, safe storage for bikes and tools for repair while campgrounds must make room for cyclists even if full.
The route is perfect for self-supported touring. But it’s also part of Vélo Québec’s summer extravaganza this year, the Grand Tour, a week of fully supported cycling that unfolds in a different part of Quebec each year.
The 2019 Grand Tour, with an option for inns if camping’s not your thing, runs Aug. 3 to 9, covering 400 or 870 kilometers depending on the route chosen. People can also sign up just for the Aug. 3 to 5 weekend.
Quebec’s historic capital, like Montreal, has extensive bicycle paths for commuters and several of prime interest to visitors. Starting at the ferry terminal, the Promenade Samuel de Champlain path going west borders the riverfront for 12 kilometers, looping onto a narrow walkway on the bridge crossing the St. Lawrence and joining with another trail in the town of Levis. The Levis trail offers a spectacular view of Quebec City and a chance to return on the ferry, closing a 30-kilometer loop, or to go longer. Another trail runs out to Montmorency Falls, a higher-than-Niagara waterfall and recreation area with zip lines and via ferrata climbing.
Nature is nearby. The Jacques-Cartier trail outside the city runs more than 80 kilometers on stone dust through forest and meadow with several towns along the way.
It was there that Paule Bergeron from Quebec City’s tourism department, while guiding my companion and me on a ride, led us to a trailside plaque at Saint-Raymond commemorating a visit by Teddy Roosevelt in 1915. Six years after his presidency, he came on a hunting expedition into the Quebec wilds.
The man who once led the Bull Moose Party found himself confronted by a real bull moose. Although protected by Quebec hunting laws at the time, the animal, like Teddy, was not one to back down. According to a newspaper story, the moose bellowed, pawed and charged the hunting party and Roosevelt “dropped him with a bullet to the heart.”
The plaque, in French, shows Roosevelt posing with the antlers and pays tribute to his devotion to nature and his creation of national parks in the U.S. It says he capped his trip by handing out chocolates to children at the local train station.
This is where I always go back to, no matter where else I go.
On Route Verte #1, spread over more than 1,200 miles cyclists can go along the south shore of the St. Lawrence for days, a week or more, seeing the river widen going eastward into the wild beauty of the Gaspe Peninsula until the far shore disappears and the sea, somewhere, begins.
My hotspot is a day ride from the river road at Notre-Dame-du-Portage to Kamouraska and back, about 70 kilometers in all. In this wide panorama, the sky seems always etched with drama, as stormy sheets of rain and shafts of sun sweep over the mountains on the other side, the river churns in hues of brown and blue, and mist half swallows islands. The canola fields surrounding Kamouraska make for a brilliant yellow carpet and village homes – a kind of folk art in themselves – are lined with gardens. Sunsets are routinely extraordinary.