Hey y’all,
If anyone’s interested in riding some long distance we have a full schedule of Waterloo starts lined up this year with the randonneurs club. The DW routes are part of the “devil’s week” event where we do a whole series in a week. The DW 300 is a special ride, not just for the devil’s week, but it’s the 100th anniversary of 300km brevets so there’s special swag. New rides for this year include a nice tough gravel grinder (I’m taking name suggestions for that one) that’s sitting around 2000m of climbing, and a wicked 600k that goes east to the edge of the Ganaraska forest and the hilly country south of Peterborough, should be a fantastic ride. Aside from the gravel grider, they’re mostly quiet paved roads with reasonable distances between services, so one can pack light if desired. Tandems and recumbents are totally welcome too!
Saturday May 07 Queen’s Bush 200
Saturday June 11 DW Nassagaweya 300
Sunday June 12 DW Queen’s Bush 200
Tuesday June 14 DW Beaver Valley 400
Thursday June 16 DW Ports, Points and Sandhills 600
Saturday June 25 Beaver Valley 400
Saturday July 09 Ganaraska Forest 600
Saturday August 06 Gravel Grinder 200
Saturday September 10: Sandhills 200
All the signup stuff, club history, rules for brevets, etc. can all be found on the club site and I’m happy to chat about randonneuring if anyone is curious. If you have 2022 OCA insurance, you can do one ride for free! I’ll be at the start of each ride to hand out the control cards and will be riding.
edit: forgot to mention, they are timed events, overall maximum speed works out to around 30km/h and the minimum is 15km/h, so there’s a lot of time to finish the rides and folks are free to ride at their own pace or work together.
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Cool, that gravel route does look nice and the timing is reasonable for the “Dusty Nostril” a few weeks later. @KevRidesGravel 's Ontario Rift route went out that way and I had hardly realized that there were roads and climbs that cool in the vicinity, so that route should be worth it even just to ride from here and climb up The Grange. I’ll try to keep it in my plans.
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The climbs on sideroad 27 on the way to Hillsburgh have some great views. I found this one back in 2013 on a tour, when I decided to check out the roads instead of staying on the Elora-Cataract trail… quite the little climb with panniers and touring gear. There’s a great view at the top too, it’s the highest point of land for quite a ways.
(this pic was from 2018 on a ride to the Grange sideroad)
There’s also a great gravel 200 out of Ottawa, I rode it back in 2019 and it was a bit more climbing than this one with some rougher roads and beautiful rail-trail. Deliverance was a lot of fun. Gwen came with and we had a blast, even though a tornado was chasing us to the finish.
If you’re ever travelling and looking for some nice roads the route archives are public and full of great quiet roads.
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Yeah, that climb on sideroad 27 is great. I think I stumbled up on it in spring 2020. It’s a great one.
Here it is nearing sunset, and with a few of us descending:
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Bumping this in case anyone is interested in riding any of the brevets next week! The Queen’s Bush 200 on the 12th is a beautiful route that has mostly great pavement and quiet roads. It’d be a great first 200 
If you want to register for the ride, please use this site: Who We Are The free trial ride just needs you to join the club on CCN, it won’t charge you any money to do so… gotta make sure the insurance is on the up and up, y’know. Then pick your ride here: Register for a ride and that’ll let me know to print a control card for you!
If you’re not sure you can do a 200, we’ll have a couple more in the summer; a gravel one in August and a personal favourite, the Sandhills 200 in September.
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Charlie and I rode the Vintage Father’s Day Ride today.
We talked about his Brevet. Sounds very interesting.
Let’s see if this makes makes timing sense for our gravel group.
Alain
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In a way brevets don’t make any sense, but then ya do one and it makes perfect sense. Plus you can buy a little medal that will arrive months later whenever we get them from France.
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Is anyone from the club signed up for the Granite Anvil? @charlie-horse?
I believe it’s now full but wondering if there will be a WCC contingent (besides myself).
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I’m signed up, but I’m doing the first pre-ride that starts august 6th. It looks like it’ll be a great course this time around. It was a big loop when I did it in 2017.
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Cool, well I signed up for the Gravel one this Saturday August 6th. Start is 7 am at the A&W near the St Jacob’s Outlet, but I should show up at least 10 minutes before then. I have a reflective sash and tape for my fork and seat stays. Are there any other aspects that would be different from a group ride other than the checkpoints?
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Bring a pen/pencil to sign the cards, sometimes cashiers don’t have one handy.
If you haven’t taped your forks I wouldn’t worry about doing that, it’s technically in the HTA but I don’t think it’s something that is ever enforced or really does much from a safety standpoint. Only have to wear the vest if it’s dark and/or low visibility like heavy rain, but we hopefully it doesn’t rain on us.
If you haven’t, sign up with the CCN site to get the trial membership: https://ccnbikes.com/#!/events/randonneurs-ontario-membership-2022 so the OCA knows you’re insured with our club for the trial ride, it shouldn’t charge you anything, just gotta jump through the same old hoops with insurance.
If you want to join the randonneurs ontario rwgps club, you can download the route for offline use and it’ll have all the premium features like voice navigation, can be handy if the head unit is on the fritz. Also might be worth printing a cuesheet if you’re into analog directions.
Also worth syncing the route tomorrow to ensure it’s the most recent version. I did change a couple turns in Elora but nothing major.
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Just a bump about our last Waterloo brevet of the seasons, Sandhills is a nice route and a good use of all that sweet summer fitness! Come on out for a fun day on bike.
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