Rolling with Montreal’s night riders
Festival atmosphere envelops Tour la Nuit ride through streets of majestic city
MONTREAL— I was sitting on the tiny terrace in front of the Maison des cyclistes, overlooking Parc La Fontaine, still beautiful as an urban park as when they grew the city’s flowers there. I was waiting for dusk, which is when I presumed Tour la Nuit, Montreal’s annual mass nighttime bike ride, would begin.
There are always a lot of cyclists on the well-delineated roads here, but they were getting really thick on the ground. I started to notice more tiny bikes than usual, kids cycling en famille.
And though Montreal cyclists always seem to have a little more fun with their rides than Vancouverites (who are always more interested in heart rates and Strava stats) and Torontonians (who just want to get to where they’re going already), there were more helmets with streamers and T-shirts with sparkles and capes and Tron-themed body lighting than usual.
By the time I realized what was happening and hopped on my bike to join the flow, the flow had stopped. I was in my first bicycle traffic jam. I was pleased in a way, but only in theory. I liked how many people were out for this ride, but was in an increasingly Torontonian (read: foul) mood by the time, 45 minutes later, I finally reached the starting line, just two kilometres away on Avenue du Parc.
The Tour la Nuit is part of the annual Go Bike Montreal Festival, which also includes the Tour de l’Ile, a much longer daytime ride. It’s all done by Vélo Québec, a combination event organizer, bike advocate and travel agency that may be the best thing about this event — and cycling in Canada.
Every year, in addition to these monster events — the 18th Tour la Nuit on June 3 drew 15,000 cyclists and Tour de l’Ile on June 5 attracted nearly 25,000. Vélo Québec organizes multi-day tours around the province that involve thousands of cyclists. They also do bike trips to the Caribbean and Europe.
Founded in 1967, the year everything Canadian was in Montreal, Vélo Québec maintains that ambitiously celebratory spirit the rest of the country seems to have chucked into the bins along with their souvenir View-Masters as they exited the Expo turnstiles to return to the provinces.
The crowd at the starting line was gargantuan and the mood downright Rabelaisian. People had figured out how to hook food and drinks to their bikes and there were cyclists in costumes, some elaborate, some vestigial, but few store-bought.
I had drinks with a native New Orleanian once, who tried to explain to me the difference between real Mardi Gras and tourist Mardi Gras was the costumes. The fancy ones were for the tourists — and the cameras — while the real ones were proudly put together out of the contents of one’s closet and cupboards, and mostly used to parade from one friend’s house to another, rather than up and down Bourbon St.
That’s the feel of Tour la Nuit. It alters the route from year to year, but emphasizes neighbourhoods over attractions.
This year, it quickly left the Plateau and went into less trafficked areas such as Rosemont and Ahuntsic-Cartierville, a combination of light industrial and residential neighbourhoods where people put their lawn chairs out on the street to wave and cheer as we cycled along the 23-kilometre route. Children danced and screamed, neighbours blasted music off their balconies, blew toy horns in their front yards and some handed out water and popsicles.
Having 15,000 cyclists stream past your house one evening could easily go wrong, but these people — cyclists and residents — didn’t let it. There were signs and volunteers flagging you to turn right here, left there, so riders could concentrate on return- ing the smiles they were getting.
As we pulled back into Parc Jeanne-Mance and a perky volunteer handed us a chocolate milk before we locked up our bikes, plugged our phones into the free charging station and mingled among the happy thousands in what had become a temporary fairgrounds to which the entire city had been invited, it was hard to think of Montreal as anything other than the best cycling city in the country. Bert Archer was a guest of Vélo Québec and Tourisme Montreal, neither of whom reviewed or approved this story.