Day 35 June 10, 2011 Courturier to Riviere de Loup/St Andre 51.2km
10 Jun
New people to run with!
We had spent the night before in a small field by the side of the road where I stopped. We were cold overnight because we haven’t really been able to figure out how the heating in the MCC works. Sometimes the generator has to be on, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it comes on by itself, rarely does it work when we need it to. So we were cold and it was nice to get up and get warm.
After listening to I Am Number 4 I downloaded another audiobook entitled The Host. Mike ran with me for part of the morning. I felt good and the weather again was great. Our pace was the fastest so far this trip. My legs are starting to get used to all this running…. finally. By 30km we had entered Riviere-du-Loup and stopped just under an overpass.
We drove to a diner for lunch and encountered a woman whose French was completely incomprehensible to any of us because of her accent. We weren’t really sure what we were getting for lunch other than poutine. At first it didn’t look like Majid got the burger he had ordered, but then we found it submerged in a pool of gravy. He refused to tell us if it was good or not because we made so much fun of him eating it.
Bert, my physio from Edmunston arrived at the diner and told us of a better route that I could be running, one that went along the water. So we drove back to the underpass I had stopped at and Bert led us off the highway and onto route 132, my home until Quebec City. He ran with me for 10km and told me about how he was helping to spread the word in Edmunston. The route along the water was beautiful and the houses huge.
After Bert left Mike began running with me. Mike had run a lot of the way today. Majid had run 6km himself during the morning (the most he's ever run he says!) but other than that and the 3km he spent in the MCC taking pictures while I ran with Bert, he had run the rest of the way with me. As we ran along the river we decided to run to 51.2km so that Mike would have run 42.2km, a full marathon distance; his first marathon. Next, I’m going to get him to run it all at once and maybe I’ll have him converted to long distance running!
We had the next day off and Mike and I had been planning to drive back to Riviere-du-Loup to find a parking lot to spend the night in but Majid had other ideas. While we were running he was calling hotels in the area and decided to put us up in a B&B in St. Andre, the town we had finished running in. That means a real shower!!!!!
Dinner was delicious, although I’m not sure exactly what it was; some sort of meat I think. We were the only ones at the B&B that night and so we pulled one of the other tables close to us and watched the Canucks win game 5 on my laptop during dinner. My mother would not have been impressed I don’t think!
Tomorrow I was planning to spend time working on catching up on my blog and photocopying documents for my research study but I think Majid may have other ideas.
One of those ideas… whale watching!
