Day 7: Ganges to Sidney

October 18, 2021

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Just out of Ganges a sign encourages cyclists to take the "quieter" route to the ferry terminal at Fulford Harbour. Usually at this point there is a herd of cars stampeding by, and we have always taken the suggestion. The only thing, the quiet road has lots of brutal hills, and we have just seen a map that shows the main road to be much flatter. Maybe next time.

Hilly or not, the road to Fulford is lovely, with fall colours and water views, and this time in honour of the season, some wild turkeys.

Fall colours on the road to Fulford Harbour

You guys missed (Canadian) Thanksgiving but Christmas is coming!

With the temperature at 7 degrees to start, my fingers were suffering a lot of pain. I am going to look into heated gloves if we intend much more shoulder season cycling, which we do!

Except for the cold hands, swooping down into Fulford Harbour was lots of fun. Just at the harbour is a cluster of buildings with coffee and groceries. Of these, the one pictured below is our favourite, because they have home baking and lots of other interesting stuff.

This time they had a map that shows all the bike rides on the Island, with elevation profiles. Despite the traffic on the main road, it is worth coming back to Saltspring to ride all the back roads.

This lady has cycled all over Saltspring, and documented the rides in this map.

Though not large, the store does have this functional bakery with a great oven.

In Europe a display that looks like the one below normally contains Ritter Sport bars. But here it's Island Bars, with flavours like "One Sailing Wait"!

The ferry arrives, on glassy early morning water.

Can you spot four sea stars on the rocks below?

There are many islands in the Salish Sea, on our route to Swartz Bay.

Directly off the ferry at Swartz Bay, you are immediately in the care of the Lochside Trail. This A#1 trail of about 28 km joins the 55 km Galloping Goose trail in Victoria. Between these two, and a lot of other local bike routes and lanes, Victoria and surroundings have become quite a bike friendly environment.

Super quality Lochside paved lanes here do become gentle on-roads or gravel later, but overall its a great and really famous route.

On the way to Sidney town, which is 6 km from the ferry, there are nice views of the water, known as the Salish Sea.

Signs describe some of the local wildlife. There is a major natural history museum for the Salish Sea in Sidney.

Rolling into Sidney we found the sun shining, and the pleasant shops and restaurants of the main street. It ends at a pier with a fish store and a restaurant.

Sidney is directly adjacent to the Victoria Airport. The airport has a fairly new, paved bike path all around its perimeter. The call it the "Flight Path". All along this path are plaques with well researched historical information about agriculture, environment, train history, aviation history, military history, etc. of the airport area. It's a very pleasant and dead level 10 km spin, frequented by quite a few cyclists. We enjoyed seeing an old couple (like we're young!) pedaling around on brand new Bike Fridays. Later they loaded these into their semi-vintage VW camper, and we thought how sweet that they drove out to do this. Of course for all we knew they were world travelers just out to break in some new Schwalbe tires!

Along the "Flight Path" we spotted an apparent cyclists' stop - reminiscent of "radler treff's" or beer gardens in Europe.

This hawk kept watch over us. "Red tailed hawk"?

Half way around the "Flight Path" and not spotting a bench we took advantage of this concrete divider for a lunch stop. In the background are the main airport buildings. From the signs, YYJ prides itself on all the development and improvement it has done over the years, but it remains small and pleasant compared to the giant concrete and traffic choked airports of any major cities.

Around the back of the airport, in an area we had never visited, was "hospital hill" - a spot where once stood a military hospital. Now it hosts a memorial for fallen military flyers. The bits that look in the shot like poplar trees are metal and represent hawk feathers, each standing for a fallen flyer from the Victoria area. The entrance pillars formerly stood at the hospital.

Back in Sidney we see that Chemainus does not have a monopoly on murals. This big one near our motel depicts a kind of ocean dream, with several themes.

The mural starts with a celestial navigator and unformed earth

This portion depicts scientists hauling instruments from the sea

A child and sea star ends the mural with an eye to the future.

So quite early in the day we returned to our centrally located motel, which is in a very historic spot:

Our motel by the pier is on the site of a historic hotel.

Tomorrow we will head down the Lochside to Victoria. That is now for us an extremely well worn route, but we never tire of it.

Lochside probably owes part of its right of way to historic rail lines here. In the mid 1800's people in Victoria would generally not have ventured so far up the Saanich peninsula as to reach the vicinity of Sidney.

Today's ride: 33 km (20 miles)
Total: 350 km (217 miles)

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Jacquie GaudetOn our last visit to Saltspring, in August 2020, there was an information board for cyclists at Fulford Harbour. It suggested things to do while waiting for the car traffic to clear before heading up the road on your bike. One was to fill or top up your water bottle(s) but it didn't suggest where you could do this. There were no water taps to be seen, and when we asked at the café where we bought lunch, they told us they had no water to spare. At the ferry terminal washrooms, the water is posted as "not potable." It makes me think that Saltspring really needs to get its act together.
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3 years ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesTo Jacquie GaudetYikes, that's quite a story. We ran into something similar at the Crow and Gate where we went with the Prices. The water was highly sulphurous, forcing us to order bottled water. Then that got wrecked by the added sulfur ice cubes. Staff's attitude was "Oh, yeah".
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3 years ago