Tuesday, September 6, 2011 was set as the first day of the Pacific Coast Bike Ride / Tour. Monday was Labor Day in both the US and Canada. Average daily traffic among the pacific coast route drops from 10,000 to 5,000 after that weekend and the weather is still good, so that made the most sense to me. When you’re sharing the road with RVs driven by people who rented them and aren’t sure where they are on the road, you want there to be as few as possible.
This also gave me lots of time to get things settled at work and with my bike equipment, not to mention getting the legs (and knees!) back in good shape. If you recall I had some issues with my knees last year and didn’t want to do something stupid and ruin this season as well. I think I just simply over trained so I was being more cautious this year.
Dan and I were in a hotel in Blaine, WA, having been dropped off the evening before. After being dropped off we headed out for some dinner and ended up at a Thai place. I decided just before going in that I was going to take the recommendations of every server during my trip. I ended up with a plate of good Thai (is there any bad Thai food?) and a chardonnay. The food was great, the chardonnay was ok – I just had half a glass.
We had a table right next to the water and were able to watch an awesome sunset. The excitement about the ride was starting to make its way to the surface.
Doing the last minute stuff back in my room I realized that I had all the GPS routes on my computer at home but had not loaded them onto the GPS bike computer. D’Oh! I scrambled to get the routes I had mapped for the next couple days (thankfully at GPSies.com and MapMyRide.com) onto the device. It meant a late night but oh well.
Here’s a shot of the Lego minifigs and a shot of me.
Dan and I worked out a simple method for connecting in the morning since neither of us was interested in using an alarm. We’d just text each other when we were up; the one to get up and see the other’s text was the last one up and so we could open our doors, call, whatever.
Here’s an image of me and Dan just before leaving the hotel. And yes, I know that my helmet and cycling glasses are very dorky. Note that Dan is using his race bike with a Bob trailer. Dan has an ultralight camping bent and thinks I’m crazy weighing in at 100 pounds. The Bob is a nice trailer; the only downside is that I can never draft off of Dan because of it. Ah well, I have this mental image of me as “big strong rider Glen” anyway so that just added to my ego 
We took off and made our way to the border checkpoint just a few miles away. I went through first and made a couple mistakes to which Dan said afterward, “there were so many reasons she could have made our day miserable”. First, I had my cameras going. One was forward facing and fixed, taking a photo every 60 seconds. These images were going to be used to create a video showing the entire trip in super fast motion. Immediately upon approaching the border agent she asked, “are those on?” and wasn’t too happy with the answer so I shut them off. Then she asked for my passport and I had completely forgotten that I’d put my emergency cash in there. So she immediately hands me back a few hundred dollars in cash. I can only imagine Dan just keeping from busting a gut as he watches me fumbling trying to bribe a border agent to cross.
We got through easily enough and immediately afterward my front pannier (the bags on the racks) starts to fall off. One of the two hooks had come off. Not a good start. I’ve ridden hundreds of miles with these things and am bewildered. That is until I realize that just a day or two before Alex and I were trying to work out some way of securing / locking them to the racks. I’m pretty sure I had just failed to tighten one of the hooks back up. I pull out my tools, right there at the border crossing, fix it up and we head on down the road. I had no more trouble with my panniers at all for the rest of the trip.
I’m going to be bluntly honest here (anyone know me to be any different?) – cycling through Vancouver sucked. I had this bike route map that showed so many preferred and “cycle friendly” paths. Well, for a city that wants to be the greenest on earth, they really need to do some more work. We ended up on paths that were for mountain bikes, that terminated in the middle of a stream, that had no shoulder, that were in heavy and fast traffic areas, that were up incredibly steep climbs, that didn’t mark transition from road to path, that went to gravel paths, etc. It bordered on nightmare and was tolerable only because we were so excited about things and were willing to put up with quite a bit.
It wasn’t all bad, just mostly bad. There were some parts through the middle of the city that were pretty nice.
At one point we pulled over for a quick break and found ourselves next to my favorite Oregon weed, Blackberry bushes. We ate and ate Blackberries until full and headed out again.
I love this next photo which was taken automatically from my front-mounted camera. (I forgot to mention earlier that my second camera was mounted such that I can turn it while riding to get almost any angle, including facing up, down, left, right, forward and even back at me.) Apparently Dan and I were discussing some ride options. One thing you should know is that by the time we started this ride I knew a LOT of the Vancouver streets because I had spent sooooo much time going over these maps.
Here’s an image Dan took of me over one of the very high and lengthy bridges in Vancouver. The bridges usually had pretty good pedestrian and cyclist areas but getting to them were not always very clear.
Here’s Dan on the same bridge.
Before we got to this bridge one of the straps on my pedals broke. I’ve had these pedals for about 10 years so this didn’t bother me too much except that I didn’t have any spare parts for it. I decided to use typical pedals with a cage instead of clipless pedals because of my shoes. I wear size 15 so my shoes are big. I don’t have enough space for everything else much less for another pair of shoes, so I pull the cleats off my cycling shoes so I could wear them anywhere and am just using normal pedals with the toe cage. We came to a bike shop where we were able to refill our water bottles and where I was able to get replacement cages and straps. Only $15, not too bad, and only about 20-30 minutes to do the repair work in front of the shop.
After getting out of the city we made our way to Point Atkinson, one of my favorite lighthouses in the world and one where I have some bad memories. I wanted to visit it and replace the bad with good memories, spend a little time there healing. Dan was supportive of this so we took a little detour and spent some time on the lighthouse grounds. It was beautiful, we couldn’t have ended up here on a better day.
Here’s a shot of the Point Atkinson lighthouse.
And here’s a requisite Lego minifig version. They’re out sunning if you can’t tell.
Before we’d made it this far the whole photo-every-minute plan was out the window. The cameras, even with extra batteries, didn’t last even half the length of the day’s ride. It was disappointing but realistic. I ended up using just the flexible mount and taking video shots whenever I wanted something, using my smartphone for other images. Even with that the cameras didn’t last as long as they should have, failing in the most inconvenient times.
We got ourselves to the ferry at Horseshoe Bay and had a chat with another cyclist there while waiting. He was a local by the name of Warren. He invited us to join him on the Ferry so we did that as well. Dan and I were planning to eat on the ferry but Warren consumed our attention. We were able to get a bit down but the ferry was docking and cycles go off first with passengers so we had to high-tail it down. While eating we met another guy by the name of Murray. The sun was going down and we had another 20 miles before our campground, which we had discussed and Murray had overheard. He caught us out by the bikes as we waited for the ferry to complete docking and he offered to drive us a ways.
We took him up on the offer and met him a bit down the road to avoid all the ferry traffic. He ended up driving us to just past our campground where we pulled our bikes and gear out of his truck. I was only slightly bummed at having hitched a bit during the ride instead of it being a “pure” cycling-only trip but got over that pretty quick. Practically this was the best option and there wasn’t any point in making things worse.
We found the campground easily and setup for the night. It was nearly (or already?) dark but the sky was clear and the wind was light. Here’s a shot of our campsite (photo taken the next morning). You can see Dan with his ultralight stuff and my tent with my bike behind it.
All in all it was a great first day. Despite the issues we’d run in to, we had a blast and were enjoying finally being out on the trip. We exchanged comments more than once about finally doing the tour. And it ended up mirroring much of the rest of the tour as well – some road quality challenges, long days in the saddle and always looking for food, but in all it was great.
Oops, quick update! I promised Jim, one of the guys I met cycling, that I’d post all my stats for the ride along with the rest of my blog.
Here’s a link to the weather for the day: http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/CYVR/2011/9/6/DailyHistory.html?req_city=Vancouver&req_state=BC&req_statename=British+Columbia
Here’s a link to the gps-tracked route: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/118570891
The temperature at the bike ranged from 52 (F) to 86. Moving time was 6.5 mph and we rode 61 miles for an average moving speed of 9.4. Total elevation gain was 3857 feet, and we were *not* expecting that amount of climbing.
Filed under: Bicycling
