[414 km, 4 days, Vancouver to the Okanagan Valley]
Encouraged by a dear friend
to give bikepacking a chance,
I thought to possibly cycle across Canada.
As a start, I decided to cycle first from Vancouver
to the south Okanagan before deciding if I wanted to go further.
Being frugal, I bought no new kit,
managing to outfit my mountain bike
with kit I already had on hand.
It worked like a charm.
There were no issues with my choice of kit or the bicycle itself.
Grateful for that.
However, long-distance cycling
is clearly not my passion.
I’ve decided I’m up for shorter cycling trips,
but I can’t see my poor butt surviving
sitting on a bicycle seat for three months straight.
Bikepacking is okay,
but for me there is not a lot of joy.
I thought to find my mind wandering to creative things
while I was cycling.
Perhaps I would have time to write poetry
and to read a book.
But that is not what happened.
Instead, while cycling,
I could only think of how many hours or minutes I had left
before I could stop and rest.
And when I was resting,
my mind would not wander to my creative place
and I couldn’t concentrate on the words in my book.
A journal note for the four-day trip reads,
“Another hard slog pushing my bicycle up
a seven percent grade in 31C heat.”
That’s right – I humbly admit that
I pushed my bike up many a hill.
(Dammit Jim, I’m a hiker, not a cyclist)
There were good times, of course,
but only three come to mind –
downhill coasting is fun (although hard-earned),
easy flat-road riding is tolerable
if I have a tail wind and I can
ease the pressure on my butt
from time to time,
and the best times were when I was stopped
and stuffing my face with ice cream
or a good meal at a family restaurant on the route.
The final 14 kilometres were mostly downhill
along a forested road.
While I was coasting at 55-60 km/hour,
a black bear appeared in the road ahead of me.
Knackered as I was, I just yelled,
“Bear! Get the hell off the road cause I ain’t stoppin’!”
And he ran off into the woods.
I hadn’t even laid a finger on my brakes.
A day after the event, I am still sore all over,
but I’m glad I had the experience.
It cost me almost nothing to see
if a cross-country bike trip was in the cards.
Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Nope!
