Off The Beaten Path is a blog for Bicycle Quarterly magazine and Compass Bicycles store. I’ve never bought anything from Compass because it is high end stuff I am not really the market for, but I savour the Bicycle Quarterly magazine from cover to cover. I like this magazine, and by extension the blog, because the articles combine detailed bike reviews with somewhat romantic descriptions of scenery in which the bikes are tested; “The choice of hydraulic brakes becomes obvious on this trail – oh look, hoar frost!”. The writing glorifies what I like most about biking, it is about visiting interesting places on well thought out machines. The downside of Bicycle Quarterly is that it is a very narrowly defined. This is good when the two of the reviewers can ride the same bike since they are roughly the same size and ride in similar style. However, you have to take the opinions expressed with a grain of salt, if your build or preferences do not match. I would love to have one of the Bicycle Quarterly jerseys you can buy at the store but they are only offered in men’s sizes!

Anyhow, my randonneuring season started last week, but I will not bore you with that. In the spirit of visiting interesting places I will talk about this March Break’s edition of the yurt trip.

On Friday night we reached the yurt a little later than we planned. The night was extra cold and it took a while to heat up the stove so we opted for a quick snack instead of a full dinner before bed.

We woke up to a sunny and crisp Saturday morning.

The chickadees are very well trained.

Our yurt was on Lac Phillippe, and we walked over to Renaud cabin for lunch.

Renaud cabin was filled with sunlight and skiers.

Our lunch included delicious grilled cheese sandwiches.

It was an unusually cold weekend for such a mild winter. We hiked to Lac Renaud and then by a slightly different route back to our yurt by the way of Lac Phillippe. We stayed outside as much as we could, but the cold was serious and we had to be careful not to overdo it.

The boys had a great time building things indoors.

Markus still occasionally lies down on the ground when he wants to get his way. It works so well we all decided to adopt it. We considered falling into _every_ _single_ footstep hole we could find, the way Owen does, but it seemed like too much work.

Time to start planning next year’s trip!