Pickups charge down side-roads towards the highway, plumes of silica fog hanging in their wake.  They are driven with the impunity of those who know they will never come across an unexpected corner.  Those drivers are right.  Welcome to the prairies.

Heading out of Trois-Rivieres, the Ducati Multistrada and I arc slightly south and skirt the edges of Montreal.  The morning starts with something novel and surprising for a wet-coaster like myself, a new type of rain.  I thought I’d seen it all, but Quebec serves up something new – a cool, penetrating drizzle.  I’m not…

This is the Newfoundland you’ve seen on every postcard ever sent, craggy red rock coasts, crashing blue waves, white foam, and seabirds mid-glide…

This is it, the end of the road. Literally. After 4801kms of travel from Toronto, the Multistrada is the eastmost motorcycle in North America. Cape Spear is (arguably) the most easterly point on the continent. In the mute of the overcast it is also barren, peaceful and contemplative.

Thwack!  Something hits me in the neck, hard.  Happens all the time riding, whatever it was probably just bounced off.  Three minutes later the rain starts, and I hunch my shoulders against the onslaught and “sting”.  Not just “sting”, the kind of sting that sends you careening to the shoulder.  The sort of sting that…

Not even I should be able to get lost on PEI. At 224km long and 64km wide, lost takes a lot of doing on PEI. And yet here I am, subject of my own refusal to u-turn, on a red dirt road that the GPS shows as “almost” connecting to the 13? Or was it the 2? Or the 225? So then, the Ducati Multistrada isn’t an adventure bike… PEI’s dirt roads, a vivid surreal clay red that V. van Gogh would approve of, say otherwise.

Percé, Quebec, no bones about it; this is a tourist town like so many others, save for coastal splendour that would make a landscape painter weep with frustration at being unable to capture its grandeur and subtlety, and an amazing driveway…