Thoughts on how we travel

September 8, 2020

It feels good to have made it to Prince George. Anything is possible after all. We are settling in for about a week to enjoy the comforts of home and have a long overdue visit with family.
We had many motivations to head out on our tandem for a cycling tour in BC this year. The first one is obvious..we were going a little stir crazy. We keenly miss our annual European bike trip exploring new places, living the joy of being self sufficient on 2 wheels and pushing ourselves to tackle any challenge we may face. COVID obviously made that impossible for this year, and it’s anybody’s guess when that will change.
Secondly, we wanted to visit Mary Ellen’s sister in Prince George.

I know it is obvious, but we both love to be out in the world any way we can. Canada offers so much and in recent years we haven’t been able to give it the time it deserves. So, now is a good time to head out. But how will we cope without breweries and bakeries every few km? We figure it is character building.

Oh, the pastries of Europe. It is the stuff dreams are made of. This incredible bakery restaurant, Niederegger, the home of marzipan, is in Lubeck Germany.

Italian Eis is another reason we love to travel by bike. Yum.... If you eat as we do on a cycling trip, and were drivIng a car, the pounds would pile on.

Black vanilla ice cream (Poland) -delicious. Barry is a satisfied customer.

Our options to get to Prince George which we gave brief consideration to.....drive our car (never a good option for us as we prefer to bike and using our car is our last resort), take a plane (not thrilled about being so close to strangers on a small plane) or ride our bike. Well, that didn’t require any debate. The bike it will be.
Up until the last minute we had the tent and all of our camping gear ready to go. This would have been essential if we had returned via Jasper, the Icefield Parkway and riding across BC through the Okanagan and the Kooteneys. Since we have decided to return on Hwy 97 through the Fraser Canyon, we can find accommodation within reasonable distances, so the tent stays home. We will miss camping, but a lighter load for us and Screamer is a good thing. The only time we would have needed the tent was when we had a less than ideal situation in Woss. So that’s ok.

Then the route....riding the length of Vancouver Island is an easy choice. We both love all that Van Is offers and we have explored it extensively with our car/tent and a camper when we had a truck. We have done some shorter cycle tours in BC and the Pacific Northwest and we highly recommend the loop riding up Vancouver Island to Comox, taking the ferry to Powell River and returning south on the Sunshine Coast. Another getaway we like is taking the Anacortes Ferry to Washington State, riding through Port Townsend, Sequim, etc and then returning to Victoria on the ferry from Port Angeles.
But we have never ridden our bike north of Campbell River. Yeah! That solves the first leg of the journey...plus it satisfies our wish to explore the Inside Passage on the ferry.
To avoid the long stretches without services and cellular coverage, the UHaul will take us the 750 km to Prince George and then we’ll ride down the Fraser Canyon to Abbotsford for another family visit, then on to Tswassen and the ferry home to Saltspring Island.

Georg, our good friend in Germany, is a like minded cyclist, and he approves our plan!

It’s no surprise to us, but the two days driving the truck made us more tired and sore than the most challenging days riding our bike. The older we get, the more we recognize that being sedentary is not good for us. The more we are active and riding our bike, the better we feel.

Who knows the answer to this, but we have realized that our approach to travel may seem a bit backwards, or maybe we have simply “seen the light” as we have gotten older. In our youth we travelled around the Pacific Northwest by car or truck with our camper and we’d take our bikes along for fun rides at our destination. But now that we are older and retired, we choose, as our first priority, to travel by bike and use a vehicle (like the U-Haul) as a last resort. And on that note, the ride from Rupert was doable, but would not have been fun due to the heavy construction, lack of a shoulder in some areas and spaces of 150 km without any services or cell service.
We may be getting older...and quirkier, but maybe, we are getting wiser too? After all, it’s all in the eye of the beholder, and we’ll go with that.

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