Across Canada by Bicycle

Bike Touring Travel Log Excerpts

Table of Contents

Travelling Through Memories

I have often wondered about the future of this page. A good number of people apparently land on it, and given that it's listed on the navigation menu just to the left this is hardly suprising... Anyways, it has more or less been sitting idle with no content to speak of for the last couple years. This is a fact that I am not entirely proud of because it points directly at how I operate in regards to most of my projects... Sigh. Anyways, it's currently 4:18AM one April morning,and I am going work on this page come hell or high water.

Originally my plan was to transcribe parts of my handwritten journal onto the site, except that I have found the actual process of doing this so mind boggingly excruiciatingly dull that I have managed to put it off for seven years. So, what I am actually going to do is recreate a number of my experiences to the best of my current memory and see what happens. Maybe events didn't quite happen the way I portray them here, however I call upon the story tellers priviledge and promise that you won't know the difference anyways.

Like most stories, there is a beginning to everything, and this story begins in a bar.

Christmas Time 2001

I cannot say that I am a regular patron to any sort of drinking establishment, however, on this occasion I am sitting with my friend Tristan in the bar infamously known as The Den in the lower level of the Mac Hall at the University of Calgary. The place is fairly crowded, as it is the evening of the last day of examinations for the majority of the first year engineering students, however Tristan and I have managed to get a table to ourselves and are polishing off a couple drinks as well as a basket of fries covered with a cajun seasoning. The conversation at hand is what are we going to do with our lives, the upcoming semester and more importantly the distant summer vacation.

Tristan says to me, "Maybe we could go camping, or play paintball a bunch or something".

"Ok, sounds good but what's the somthing"?

"I don't know, how about we take a canoe down the Bow River and see where it goes"

I roll my eyes, "Yeah but we don't have a canoe, and there's probably a lot of dams on the way, and I don't know anything about that anyways, but you know, maybe we could take my VW bug on a road trip around the country. That would be pretty fun".

Tristan smirks at me "Yeah right, I know how reliable that car is, we'll be lucky to get out of the city"

"Well I guess you're right", I reply, "why don't we take our bikes instead. That would be cool, maybe we could bike across the country"

Now Tristan is rolling his eyes, "Yeah right, we can't do that, it's way too big".

"Hmm, I don't know about that, I bet I could do it, anyways, lets go home".

So I eventually get home that evening and go down to the computer room and after an hour or so of searching I turn up a website written by a fellow named Sean Munro and which accounts his tour from Vancouver to Waterloo which I completely devour. And suddenly I get this weird tingling feeling all over my body. I dig out a number of road maps and the family atlas and as I look them over, the tingling nearly overtakes me. So there I am sitting in my moms basement at 3 or 4 AM, and I say outloud to myself, "You know what Ted, I'm going to bike across Canada".

Road to adventure

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