The Bikes and Blues Festival is back for its second year! Join us in Elora-Fergus for a day of cycling, music, food and family fun.
On Saturday, August 24th from 10:00am to 5:00 pm (rain or shine), Water Cycles Expeditions and partners will host a community event with guided bike tours in the morning, local blues favourites in the afternoon, and a variety of children’s activities, community booths, and more.
The event is rain or shine and…if it happens to rain, we’ve got you covered with the museum’s Heritage Barn to keep you dry.
The day starts with free community bike rides for various levels:
Explore the hidden wonders (and tasty treats) of the Upper Grand River with bike rides for all levels from a 10-15km family ride (age 10+) along the smooth and forested Elora-Cataract trail to a 30km exploration along Irvine Creek to the Shand Dam vista and the mini epic, a 100km all-surface ride (gravel or hybrid bikes) that weaves across the bridges of the Grand and take in the majestic Luther Marsh.
I’m one of the volunteer ride leaders for this year, as I was last year. The venue has changed (it’s a little closer to KW this time!) and it promises to be a fun event.
The rides aren’t meant to be super-fast or competitive; rather, they’re meant to re-establish our relationship with water. The longer (100 km) route goes around Luther Marsh, which is an important headwater pond (lake?) for the Grand River.
This event combines two of my biggest passions: cycling and water! In fact, I have a blog for each of those topics!
I’m leading the 90-100km ride. Since it is an adventure ride we will not be going super fast, so I imagine we will average 22-23 kph. There might be a group of people riding faster but I’m aiming to lead an intermediate pace for this ride.
As I mentioned, we’ve got rides of 10, 30 and 100 km and we’re looking for more ride leaders (specifically for the 30 km, but we could always use more for the longer ride!).
If you want to lead a ride, let me know! Rides won’t be fast!
.
