Los Angeles and Vancouver (Boring Title says Stephanie)

Disclaimer: Tired and don't want to spend a lot of time writing. Please excuse poor grammar, spelling, etc.

Los Angeles

We started this bicycle trip with a lot of last minute scrambling and packing. We bought our bikes off craigslist a week before the flight, obtained panniers and bicycle pump a couple days before departure, and finished packing our bikes in cardboard boxes around 11:00pm (we actually got complimented on our great packaging job by a bike shop mechanic in Vancouver, despite it being our first time and only watching a couple youtube videos). 

Vancouver

However, we got to Vancouver with no problems and all of our gear intact.

We then met up with Velofix (mobile bike shop) who picked us up with our bikes and luggage at the airport and drove over to a nearby parking lot to assembly/tune up our bikes. This service was a godsend!!! It was extremely convenient and the mechanic did a great job setting up our bikes with great attention to detail!

After about 4 hours of bike tuning, we took the metro and rode our bikes to downtown to meet up with my Vancouver coworkers at a local pub (Vancouver is the largest branch of my company Integral Group). I was in contact with Christie (coworker) before the trip and she was nice enough to offer her place for us to crash the first night and then we met Tait (another coworker) who offered his place the second night. I can't thank them enough for their hospitality, it really helped while we focused on getting our stuff together and preparing to hit the road. 

When I say get stuff together for the ride, let me give an example. One of the things we still wanted to do before we began the journey was purchase and attach front racks. This in itself took half a day. When we got back from the bike store with our fronts racks (the only ones in stock) we realized they didn't fit. We spent over half an hour rotating, bending, and tweaking the racks to try and make them fit, but eventually decided we needed to drill out one of the holes and extend it by a couple millimeters. Thankfully a quick bike ride down to home depot solved that problem, and they've been working great since!

Of course Tait made sure to introduce us to Poutine before we left Vancouver, it was delicious! And we even got to see some Canadian Improve Comedy during our second night in Vancouver, we were all laughing out loud throughout most of the skit.

We finally left early afternoon, on the third day, and headed to Tsawwassen, where we stayed for the night at an RV park.