May 16th

Milepost 4

I feel like a spoiled brat. Sitting in business class on Amtak means you get to detrain first which made the customs wait…nonexistent. Anant was awesome and came to pick me up instead of having me ride to his place, ~10mi. “There’s quite a slope at the end…” and it was sprinkling. (Narrator: there turned out to be several slopes!) It was basically a very deluxe landing that could have been gross if I had to look for a hotel at 11pm (vancouver does not seem to be a late night town), and lock my bike outside and and and. Anyway, yay!

Anant was quite curious about the logistics of my trip. He asked a bunch of things that might be of general interest, so since I have a comfortable place to sit and type, I’ll recount a few:

So, how does customs work?

I know you get to skip the huge line of cars on a bike! I think they just ask you some quick questions and send you through. (Feel the foreshadowing!)

What will you eat?

Whatever I come across. I have a few pounds of food that Canadian customs asked a few questions about, canned fish and jerky and almonds and stuff. A meal if it has to be but more intended to be sufficient snacks between meals. I’ll try to plan for days that I know have minimal services to bring better food like cheese and fruit, but I didn’t want to “pack that” over the border and carry it; it gets funky quickly in the bike bag and while I care less about food quality while I’m biking, best to start that “timer” when I actually intend to eat some of it soon. (I turned out not to eat anything I had with me during today’s ride, but since it’s all shelf stable, it’ll be there tomorrow, and the next day…)

How far will you go every day??

No firm plans, want to see how far I feel like going and feel empowered to stop if it’s pretty or I’m tired without worrying too much about meeting a schedule. I estimate 50 miles a day being average. I have definitely done 100+ mile loaded days, but I rarely enjoyed it. 80’s about as much as is fun in case I’m with motivated friends, so on this trip, I’d only do that if I needed dinner and dinner was at the end of 80 miles. But that’s not a very smart way to ride so I don’t intend to. I do have enough food to survive overnight as long as I don’t mind eating a lot of almonds and peanut butter (I also have tortillas and granola and clif shots and stroopwafels and banana chips).

I bet you need thousands of extra calories to power your ride.

Yup, I can definitely eat whatever I want. But usually that’s just a milkshake at lunch AND dinner, not two entrees. I will perhaps lose a bit of weight, and will definitely flush some stress and toxins out of my system just by sweating a lot and working out consistently and sleeping better and longer. (my sleeping bag is VERY comfortable. I hope. Big Agnes brand, but I did just replace the bag with a down bag; reusing my two sleeping pads as they fit it well. We’ll see how it goes!)

Aren’t you carrying a lot? This is heavy!

Yeah, I have a lot. But I am carrying stuff to sleep in, stuff to eat, stuff to wear (I don’t anticipate frequent laundry stops, so I have 5 pairs of undies and socks for instance. But I’ll wear my dirty pants several days in a row. Oh and I needed my laptop and battery pack and a spare tire and…well…I’m Prepared. But not Matt Picio level prepared - 2 laptops and at least one large cast iron pan!

I am, however, very much my own dork. (yes, that is a rearview mirror attached to my sunglasses).

…the next day…

Awoke after an extremely restful sleep! Anant’s wife Amanda had a bed made up and snacks waiting when we rolled in at almost midnight. I felt very welcome to my very temporary home, and it was nice to sleep inside and shower in a leisurely fashion within a few feet of my stuff. I still woke up at “normal for me” time, before 7am. (I go back to sleep on the weekends, but I generally wake up by 6 without an alarm because my brain is like OHSHITWORKTODO which I am hoping to train it out of for awhile on this trip!) I got to do my last minute gear shakedown and ride prep inside, with a clean bathroom - it was divine. Also gave me a great chance to forget all the things - almost left both my phone charger and eyeglasses behind.

They happened to have a scale which we don’t at home, so I checked and 215 is starting weight.

Had morning coffee and a breakfast sandwich at a cute coffee shop with a leisurely French-accented barista with Anant, talking Nimbyism even 400-odd miles from home. I love thinking about the politics of placemaking! It’s a shame that they are only usually on my mind when something goes horribly wrong.

My intention today is to ride the ~45 miles across the border, to be back in America by dinner. Not because Canada isn’t awesome, but because it’s only 45 miles back to the US..

Milepost 67

It turned out I was in Canada for almost exactly 16 hours if you count the hour I spent in customs as being in the US. Not sure who owns that part of that land, the Canadian and US facilities are next to one another, in a line with the border AFAICT so maybe it’s NO MAN’S LAND?!

The bike ride was great, and tiring. I got a bit of sun on the face but my sunsleeves kept my short-sleeved arms from getting any. My legs rarely burn and today was no exception. Didn’t do any wardrobe changes, just stayed in street shorts/boxers/wool tshirt/sunsleeves from departure until arrival. It threatened to sprinkle but never did, mostly just quite pleasant weather and the main wind I noticed was tailwind.

Anant was right - there was a slope. I ended up accidentally speeding downhill right out of the gate “ah, speed limit 35 here, no problem, I can go that fast” but of course my speedometer is in mph and the signs were in kph. Oops! I think I did that twice before I realized it. Both in North Vancouver.

Didn’t remember to add the 10mi from Anant’s house back to central city into my mileage plans, so today was a bit long at 63 miles. Tiring but promising (I seem to be in reasonable shape for doing basically 0 training and just relying on my cardio fitness and occasional mountain bike rides with Lori) start to the trip!

(Today I learned that I need to take Some Care while making panoramas if I want them to look any good.)

The heavy bike makes climbing hills hard. The biggest uphills were bridges until I made it fairly far south of Vancouver. I walked a few stretches, usually in the 1 to 4 block range. Usually on the sidewalk but also in a dead-end culdesac that connected to an off-street MUP. One of the hills was long enough that I took a few breaks going up to sit and huff and puff and sweat. Lucky thing there was a sidewalk on that stretch, as there hadn’t been one (or even a shoulder) on the road for approx 8 miles before then, which was the worst stretch to ride on today as far as car traffic. The second worst stretch was into the campground since it was 5pm by that point, but I was also tired and hungry so maybe I felt worse than it did, not sure.

I forgot Canada has cool bike infrastructure! I miss it already. Some of the things I saw:

• a street sweeper very much working in the bike lane, on (the other side of) a highway. Cars thought “gee I can go around him” but I thought “gee, he did this side first, it is so clean!” and was thankful

• hanging MUP’s off the side of existing bridges all over the place. I went over a half dozen sizable bridges today, scaling to very large by my standards (longest one was over a mile!. About half of the bike access was a (well done!) bolt-on “sidecar” that just hung off the side of the bridge. We do that in Portland, mostly on the Steel bridge and maybe the 205 path is what I can come up with..but not often enough. I-5 bridge to Vancouver could use one, Ross Island could use one, and even Fremont would be cool if not super practical. THE RAILROAD BRIDGE IN NOPO! THAT WOULD BE BAAAADASSS since there is no connector near there. Anyway, MUP’s on so many bridges! But Vancouver has more bridges than Portland, yo, so maybe it’s just force of necessity and it happend to be convenient for me but I saw them all and the rest are naked? Not sure!

• copious well signed bike routes. I once switched from one to another one that was 2 blocks to the left. Accidentally used a connecting bike route between them even, though it was just the street when I realized I’d missed the intended turn, also on a bike route, 1 block before. Overall, BC seems to believe in frequent well-signed bike routes (EVERY route corner has a bike on the street sign, there are frequent route markers with names, though not as ultimately useful as Portland’s “mileage to destinations xyz” signs). Oh, and diverters on the routes I rode at major streets instead of minor ones like Portland does. Like, I probably went through 12 in the ~100 blocks on that one bike route across Richmond from East to West.

I bonked on an uphill that was rideable but long and making me cranky in Surrey, BC. I saw a Little Caesars pizza shop and it sounded good but it was not good. I ate it and carried on but the root beer was the best part of that lunch. I was SERIOUSLY kicking myself as I went through south Surrey, which featured many men in turbans walking and biking about and the lunch place smells there were AMAZING and I just wasn’t hungry after the bad breadsticks, and I REALLY wish I’d held out for 3 miles. But since I hadn’t looked at the map, I wasn’t sure there would be ANYTHING in 3 miles. It was fairly populated until about mile 40 and then turned into farmland for the last 15 in Canada with occasional neighborhoods (like the odd hill I walked up - TONS of development, 15 miles from the main nearby town AFAICT, so it had the first sidewalk in a long time! thank goodness. It would have been miserable to push up the gravel shoulder or in the drainage ditch of the preceding miles.)

Customs was weird. I almost just walked across the border without talking to anyone, since there was no signage except which lane of the freeway to be in and I was on the shoulder/sidewalk of that stretch (~1/2mi from the street-with-a-bike-lane to there). The sidewalk was large and well paved and clearly intended for riders or at least substantial foot traffic, so that was fine, but then I kinda wandered around the border patrol complex all confused until I asked a border patrol guy where to go and he pointed me into the building I’d already gone into and wandered back out of wondering if I was in the right place…where there was a 20 person line of people holding orange papers and I had no orange paper and I didn’t know what to do so I stood in line and only when the line had finally, slower than the DMV, moved me to the front, I saw the “priority” line for cyclists and pedestrians. So I stood in it for longer than the people behind me stood in the normal line, sigh. But then it was a 1 minute “oh that’s nice enjoy your trip STAMP” from the least annoyed looking of the staff. Pro-tip: Canadian customs at the Amtrak station at 11pm is awesome and efficient; US customs at the border has a shift change at 4 and 3pm turns out to be a baaad time to be there. Nobody was in a good mood. I got a new guy so I guess maybe that’s why it wasn’t a terrible “search your bike isn’t it suspicious that you were just here for 16 hours how else can we make you more miserable” experience as I was worried about. But still annoying to stand there for an hour after exercising for basically 6 hours straight…I was pretty sweaty and uncomfortably cramping and there was no seating and ugh. Worst part of the day I guess.

I ended up at a pretty campground at Birch Bay State Park. Lots of trees, near the beach, pretty empty as it just opened for the season. The lady at the nearby quickie mart was almost excessively friendly and kind but in a good way. Made me feel less bad for not riding 4 miles back to town to eat at a restaurant. I had a corndog, some at-least-one-day-old chicken nuggets, ice cream, beer, and aloe vera pomegranate drink. And I feel great. Now off to read myself to sleep. Yes, it is 8:30pm.

Photo album of those pictures at full res plus a few more

Written by Chris McCraw who resides in Portland, OR but maybe his heart is on the bike?