Amherst, Nova Scotia

 

A second wintry blast of cold air dropped the temperature to below freezing once again and this one brought some snow with it.  It was no fun biking in wet, sleety flurries that soaked into my leggings.  It came in mid-morning and fortunately only lasted an hour.  There was no escaping it out in marginally settled Nova Scotia.  Though it had me shivering, once it passed I quickly dried out and warmed up and regained the pleasure of being on the bike. 

It wasn’t so easy to stay warm the next day when I began riding at 7:30 with a temperature of thirty-two degrees that never got warmer than thirty-seven, not warm enough to melt all the lingering snow from the day before.

I stopped after a couple of hours for a slice of pizza and didn’t remove a single garment, not even my wool cap and helmet, in the half hour I spent out of the cold.  My hands at least gained full feeling and having been fully thawed managed to stay warm after I resumed.  Though I slipped into my tent the night before when it was thirty-nine and was able to ward off the cold with a candle, raising the temperature in the tent to fifty,  I didn’t care to retreat to a tent after a day of borderline warmth and a predicted night time low of twenty-three, so availed myself of a hotel for the second time in three days.  I was lucky I had a cluster to choose from in Amherst after sixty-one miles for the day just as another wave of flurries came through.

 Booking.com revealed accommodations at an Indian-run Holistic Healing Center in the middle of the town.  Nothing on the front of the building advertised that there were four rooms on its second floor available for lodging.  The proprietor said he originally made them available for out-of-town clients, but began advertising on-line for others.  With a shared bathroom his rate was less than half of other nearby motels along the Trans-Canada Highway, also known as the Highway of Heroes and Miners Memorial Highway.

He’s happy if he manages to rent one a night.  That’s enough to cover his daily expenses and helps supplement his healing income.  He moved here two years ago from Toronto to escape the “concrete jungle” and his heavy overhead.  There he had ten or more clients a day.  Here he is lucky to get ten a week.  Amherst has a population of eight thousand, though he attracts clients from as far as Halifax and Sydney, mostly the elderly with aches and pains that if they went to the hospital they’d have to wait twelve hours or more to be tended to.   And they could wait days if they wanted an appointment with a family doctor.  He does acupuncture as well as massages and herbal remedies.  Most of his clients are referrals.  He doesn’t expect to see a client a second time, as he likes to think he can heal them in one visit. 

I was hoping the psssword for his Wi-Fi would be something exotic, but it was merely Guest123. As in Burlington, Vermont, he warned me to lock my bike as there were a lot of drug addicts in town.  There were none hanging around the library or out and about in the wintry weather.

The temperature will be back into the fifties by the weekend, but the nighttime lows will still be dipping into the low thirties and twenties.  I may have to avail myself of Amtrak in Bangor.  I’ll have ridden over two thousand miles by then, my usual fall quota.  I’d hate to forego a string of Carnegies in southern Vermont and New Hampshire and a visit with Laura and Ken in Williamstown in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, but it’s November, later than I’m usually touring.  They can await another tour that will include Carnegies in Schenectady and the northeast corner of New York.

I should be able to cope with the cold a little better in the US with small town libraries and franchise food outlets more plentiful as places to warm up.  Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are so sparsely settled I can go all day without any such refuge.  Small, isolated homesteads are scattered here and there.  If anyone had been out in their yard yesterday evening I would have been tempted to ask if I could pitch my tent in their barn and maybe borrow a blanket for extra insurance against the cold.  My sleeping bag proved adequate enough that I didn’t need to put on leggings or extra layer on my torso. The extended head flap was all I needed.

No one has expressed concern for someone biking in such harsh conditions.  Those carving out an existence in the semi-wilderness would think nothing of it.  They may regard me as one of them.  I haven’t been inflicted with any belligerence from passing motorists, not a single get-off-the-road blast of a horn, just an occasional friendly, affirming toot, most often from vehicles coming towards me.

When Rick of Lansing bikes this way next summer he’ll have a fine time with the long days and warm temperatures.  It will be hard to stop biking.  I’ve done just fine in less than optimum conditions and am glad I didn’t heed his warning to stay away in October.  Thankfully he didn’t go on to tell me how much worse it would get in November, as then I might have been deprived of this wonderful experience.  As it is, I have put in seven or eight hours a day on the bike in the little over ten hours of light available to me to limit my overlap with November.