Moncton Bike Ride

 "Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride" (John F. Kennedy)

   I really enjoy cycling in Halifax, there is an abundance of urban terrain to cycle over and a park or recreational trail is never too far away. Every so often though, it is fun to get out of the city and cycle in a different backdrop, last weekend I got this opportunity by cycling in Moncton. While also a city, it differs significantly from Halifax in that it is flat and considerably more condensed. In the process of biking across town I covered a variety of backdrops and settings. Hold on to your butts faithful readers! We’re going on a trip across Moncton and this blog post has it all! Excitement! Intrigue! Family Values! A twist ending! 

   The trip starts off from relatively suburban Moncton, or at least as suburban as it gets. Where Moncton is really a mutant being made up of two cities and a town, none of it is particularly suburban as everything is smooshed into the core along the Petitcodiac river. If you had to pin it down, Moncton’s North and East ends have that suburban feel, along with Riverview, and my dad happens to occupy a house in the East end of the city. Starting from his house it was only a hop, skip and a jump away from a multi-use recreational trail behind his subdivision. 

So suddenly you’re going from a scene of this:

Don't let the idylic nature of this picture fool you, this neighborhood is hard core suburbia

To this:

Look at those ducks! They make it hard to imagine you're still in the city! ... Just ignore that overpass over there.

   In my opinion it’s pretty awesome. If you ever are feeling down and want to escape the oppressive sameness that are subdivisions you can just jump on your bike for five minutes and suddenly you’ve returned to your roots. I particularly enjoyed the fact that the trail borders the Trans-Canada highway, so at least to the right side it will always been nice and wilderness-y, at least for 100 metres until it becomes a four lane highway. 

   From the neo-primitive utopia we crossed the street and biked along a creek, stopping along the way to attempt to take a picture of a partridge. I was unfortunately not able to get a picture of the bird, not because it flew away but because this partridge was like the Special Ops of birds, as soon as it saw us biking past it waddled into the tall grass, never to be seen again. 

   From there we emerged into the downtown core of the city. When I was still a wee lad, around when I was in Kindergarten my family lived in Moncton in the core. We lived in the upstairs of a house that had a sweet sunroom where I always used to hang out for hours on end. I have especially fond memories of when we had a box full of packing peanuts for whatever reason, but I couldn’t get enough of it. In my memories it was a big red house, but a succession of owners vinylized the side of the house so it looks completely different now. 

That's right, it had a fully enclosed second floor porch, that meant that you could yell at kids to stay off your lawn in all seasons!

   What was awesome about the house was that it was only a block away from school, so I was allowed to walk to school by myself which I don’t know about you but made six year old me feel like the baddest mother around. Little did I know was that from the sunroom, the entire walk to school could be observed, so really it was just an elaborate ruse of independence. 

   My old elementary school violently burned to the ground, but it was before my time. What does stand there as a reminder is the original entrance to the school on the side of the grounds. I was always intrigued as a small child, since I didn’t really understand the concept of a building burning to the ground I always thought it was a really fancy entrance. 

Alternatively it was a Magicians style gateway to a Magical University

   From there we cycled up to the Moncton Castle, which I discovered what for sale. It’s already incredibly dilapidated and last I knew they were trying to convert it into a condo development, but for a price of all the money, you could be the newest owner of a Castle! That’s something you can’t say every day. 
The Moncton Castle was originally built as a children’s home in the early 1900’s and was used as a Catholic School and a nursing home over its 110 year lifespan. Despite the fact that it probably needs a gajillion dollars in repairs, for the low, low price of$985,000 it could be yours. While that might seem like a fair chunk of change, keep in mind in a place like Vancouver that might get you a 2 bedroom condo, in Moncton it gets you a friggin’ Castle!

For One Million Dollars you could buy it and live the life of Maritime Royalty, that's right you could start buying both kinds of lottery tickets AND a place to park your Snowmobile

   We did a bit of a u-turn from the Castle and cycled out over to the middle of town, where we biked along the waterfront and the newly reinvigorated Petitcodiac River until we got to the new Vaughn-Harvey Gunningsville Bridge. Cycling under it, we came across a really neat pedestrian bridge that took us further into the river area. 

That tiny blue blip is Dad, he usually didn't realize I had stopped to take a picture :P

   Biking over the bridge also gave a nice view of the muddy mess that feeds into the Petitcodiac River, although at the time it wasn’t looking too impressive.

It was hard not to get sucked into its muddy oppulence

   From there we ended up biking on a big mound in the middle of the river area that gave a really nice view of the city and of the river once you crested the top. It was a mound that held a terrible secret however. 
As it turns out, this mound and the whole area was once a city dump, where all the waste of the Moncton region ended up sitting right beside the river. Amazingly when the dump was closed, the city buried it under tones of fill and converted the whole space into a multiuse recreational trail, the only thing that would give any indication it was anything other than a nice place to bike over are a collection of methane pipes that release excess gas. It’s pretty amazing what twenty years can do for an area, even if there are underlying health issues with the new plan to return the river to its previous flow patterns.

Downtown Moncton, now with three office buildings!

My ride was immediately ruined when I realized I was probably 10 feet away from 40 year old rotting animal carcasses

This picture is like the wheres waldo of methane pipes. To be honest I don't even know if I captured it in this picture.

   From there we biked across the infamous Moncton Causeway (That being the very thing that messed up the flow of the river in the first place) and paid a visit to my Aunt in Riverview.

It's eerie, it's all giant ready to go river on this side, and on the other side it's an itty biddy trickle

We had a good chat and were ready to head on our way after I snapped a picture from her house. 

My aunt didn't want to get internet famous among by 10 readers, so she opted to stay inside

    The cycling fates were not so kind however, after ironically discussing how the bike I was riding (which was notorious for getting flat tires) was having a pretty good season; I got a flat on the front tire. Where I was just visiting and this wasn’t supposed to be a relatively short ride, I didn’t have any repair parts. What’s worse was where it is a road bike, it has presta valves, so you can’t just jerry rig a car tire inflator to pump it back up. I was left to wait at the gas station for a lift home. 

Boooooooo. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

   So that was the twist, I didn’t actually get to complete my ride, but I do have to say that Moncton has an impressive ability to offer a variety of settings for a bike ride. You can go from suburban to nature to urban to residential and if you really wanted to you wouldn’t be too far away from the rural rides of the Salisbury road. Moncton basically has it all in terms of biking, I will definitely be trying to get more rides out there (If I can convince Dad to improve the reliability of his guest bike).