Weather Watch
I am about one week away from our trip to Nova Scotia and several other of the Maritime Provinces of Canada. We will be flying from San Diego to Halifax, Nova Scotia via Toronto on Air Canada. Five years ago, before the COVID Pandemic, we had planned a family trip to Krakow, Poland and I had booked our flights from San Diego to Krakow on Air Canada for some long-since forgotten reason. WIth the COVID travel debacle, Air Canada took its sweet time, but eventually sent me refund travel coupons for those flights. What would have gotten us to Krakow in 2020 would now get us as far as Halifax in 2024. This trip was the result of one of our motorcycle friends, a big-time politician, browbeating me to plan another motorcycle trip even though I had decided to hang up my motorcycle trip planning spurs. Naturally, after setting the trip in motion and making all the arrangements, he had to cancel and we are left with four couples that are still planning on going. It’s been a long time coming, but we are here now and looking forward to the trip despite the broken play nature of the arrangements.
I have never been to Nova Scotia before, so I did my research and figured out what looked like the best highlights to hit on a one-week tour. It was harder than I thought to find a place to rent motorcycles, and I certainly figured they would be most available in Halifax, but I had to resort to a rental place about 45 minutes north in Truro. The place is run by a retired helicopter pilot who seems to know what he’s doing, so fingers are crossed that all will be well for our trip. Since we are going for a week, I figured out an itinerary that would focus our attention at the start of the trip on the Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island, clearly the most famous and scenic part of Nova Scotia. We will spend three nights there, the first in Port Hawkesbury at the southern tip, then in Ingonish Beach way up north and then a last night in Louisbourg on the eastern shore. That should give us plenty of time and breadth to see well that there is to see on Cape Breton Island. From there we will head to the ferry that goes from Caribou to Prince Edward Island, the home of Anne of Green Gables, the 1908 acclaimed novel of a young orphan girl raised in the remote countryside of Price Edward Island. We will stay the night in Charlottestown and in the morning head out over the Confederation Bridge that spans the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
We will drive down the coast of New Brunswick, our third province in the Maritimes (we are passing on visiting Labrador and Newfoundland, which are simply too remote and distant to the north to be practical for visiting). To be totally accurate, we will be visiting all three of the formal Maritime Provinces. Newfoundland and Labrador are actually considered Atlantic Canada rather than part of the Maritimes. They only joined the Confederation of Canada in 1949 after many years as a part of the British Empire, but not linked formally to Canada. Our New Brunswick target destination is the capital of St. John on the Bay of Fundy. From there we will take the 2 hour ferry ride back to Nova Scotia’s northwestern shores to see what there is to see on the western end of the island. We will overnight in Yarmouth, which my ex-helicopter pilot friend tells me is a very boring town for some reason.
Our last day of riding will have the men go the northern route back to Truro while the women drive the southern coast back to Halifax. The whole loop through the three provinces covers about 1,300 miles and will take seven leisurely riding days. There are many side roads and coves to visit along the way and much will be decided enroute and based on the weather of the day. At this time I have visibility on my weather app on the first half of the week. The weather in Nova Scotia in September is supposed to be quite good with an average on only 5 out of 30 days of rain. That 17% chance of rain statistic compares with what the weather app is showing me at the moment to be a daily temperature range of 57 to 73 degrees with about a 24% chance of rain. As we all know by now, that is not a strict probability of rain, but rather a chance that 24% of the territory being covered by the app surrounding whatever city you put in will experience some precipitation that day. I’ve thought about that a lot and still don’t really know how to adjust my thinking to that calculus for purposes of the odds of getting wet on the motorcycle. The truth is that we should be OK and dry for most of the ride, but might get rained on once or twice for what will hopefully be no more than short periods of time.
An interesting observation to me is that during that same time period, this hilltop back here in San Diego will have weather that is only about 10 degrees warmer in the daytime highs, but will have a low single digit humidity probability. The way I interpret that is that it will be more like being here than not, with perhaps a bit less warmth, which seems better for riding anyway. I am not planning on taking lots of foul weather gear, but will have one pair of rain pants and few extra pairs of gloves in case mine get wet.
I have ridden through pouring rain in Italy and Croatia, but most often on these rides in September, the weather is fairly cooperative and more often than not, we get clear skies and dry roads. Of all the things that we might encounter that can go wrong on a motorcycle ride in Nova Scotia, I am thinking that weather may be the least of our problems. Our average age is somewhere around 70-72, so I always worry more about rider error than weather. We are all getting older, but the four of us riding on this particular trip are all pretty experienced and competent riders, so I suspect we will be fine. That said, I predict about a 50% rate of bikes ending up at some point over the week with the shiny side down and the rubber side up. We will all be riding smaller bikes than we are used to, so that shouldn’t be due to inability to handle the bikes, but rather the normal array of mindless errors that distracted older gentlemen encounter along the way.
We will have no chase van for this ride and only one carful of wives that will be carrying all of our collective luggage from place to place. I expect that most of the way (the possible exception being the last day), the car will be following us, so there will be a car to help pick up the pieces. I have downloaded the recommended maps.me app on my phone and will endeavor to learn it before we go. These trips are supposed to have some element of adventure to them, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t prefer to be prepared and to wish for good weather.