From Ferry to Ferry

Thank goodness for Starbucks! Hate all you want on the corporatization of America, I have really appreciated being able to stop at Starbucks along the route to get internet! Unfortunately, we’ve been travelling slowly and pretty far away from any major towns, so Starbucks have been few and far between. Alas, we found one in Centralia so posting and charging time it is!

Anyway - for the route so far, this is roughly where we've traveled:

Our first ride, Vancouver to Tsawwassen, 32 miles.

From Tsawwassen, we took the ferry to Victoria. Or rather, we thought we took the ferry to Victoria. Turns out, the ferry actually drops off about 30 miles north of Victoria near Sidney.  Here's the route we took:

Our second ride, Tsawwassen to Victoria, approximately 22 miles of riding for a total 54 miles so far.

As the ferry headed towards into Victoria, we passed by some islands and saw some beautiful waterfront homes.

Beautiful homes set along the coast as we head to Victoria.

Gorgeous coastline

Thankfully, there was a separated bike path that took us all the way into town. The route was gorgeous, thickly wooded and not too hilly.

Pedaling down the beautiful path.

The trail went over several idyllic creeks. The views were amazing but the bumpy wooden road was annoying!

The best parts were the parts that were paved!

Our first stop when we made it into town was the Swan’s pub for dinner. Several locals recommended this place for its local brews, so we gave it a try.

Getting dinner at Swans “brew pub” and hotel

While we were outside locking up our bikes, a bunch of people stopped to ask us about our bikes and our trip. One couple, Yves and Patti, had done several previous tours and they invited us to stay with them for the night! We gladly accepted, thankful to have a warm shower and a nice place to sleep for the night. We ended up having a great conversation with them about their past trips and getting tips for starting out. Unfortunately, we totally forgot to take a picture with them. They are really into kayaking and do sea kayaking instructions. You can check out their website at www.gokayak.ca. Yves baked the most delicious maple syrup chocolate chip brownies and they sent us off with a few for the road. In the morning, Yves graciously biked us to a local outdoors store so Ethan could get a set of fenders. He also led us to the ferry station before we parted ways. Thanks to Yves and Patti for being amazing hosts and a great start to our trip!

From Victoria, we had originally planned on taking a ferry to Seattle, but turns out that ferry costs $240 for us and our bikes. We decided to take the cheaper route to Port Angeles even though that meant about 150 extra miles of biking. Even though we arrived at the station around 11 am, the next ferry to Port Angeles didn't leave until 3 pm so we had a lot of extra time to explore Victoria. We took our loaded bikes and biked around the area for a bit.

Checking out the Parliament building.

Totem poles! They seem to have a bunch in the Northwest region.

Queen Victoria – a reminder of Canada’s British heritage.

Ethan got really excited about this tree, he wanted to climb it!

After exploring the city a bit, we went to go check out Huntingdon Manor. It’s a beautiful little bed and breakfast that also serves High Tea! We went in and enjoyed some delicious high tea.

The entrance to Huntingdon Manor.

The manor

Hanging out in the gardens

I got a green tea and Ethan got a chai. They were both delicious!

Ethan enjoying his chai!

We had a lovely view of the gardens.

Our first course was strawberries tossed in sugar served with Chantilly cream. Delicious!

The traditional three tiered serving. Beautiful presentation and delicious taste!

My personal favorite thing was the croissant with prosciutto and aged cheddar. 

Close up of the pastries. We were in sugar heaven!

After leaving High Tea it was back on the boat for another ferry to our next leg of the trip!

Loading the bikes on the ferry to Port Angeles.

Well that’s it for Canada! We had a great time exploring and I’d love to go back some day! It will just have to be during summer because I don’t think I could handle a Canadian winter!

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.

Our first ride: Vancouver to Tsawwassen

Sorry for the lack of posting these past few days!  We've been staying at campgrounds with limited access to internet.  Anyway, the past few days have been filled with some beautiful rides and rolling hills.  We aren't really hugging the Pacific yet, but the bays we've been riding near have been beautiful.

When leaving Vancouver, we decided not to follow the Adventure Cycling route because we wanted to go see Victoria.  Our first ride was from Vancouver to Tsawwassen.

Once we got outside of Vancouver, the countryside was quite beautiful.

Beautiful country homes outside of Vancouver.

Logs being floated down the river.

The biking was going great and we were keeping a good pace...until we hit the Alex Fraiser Bridge.  Even fully loaded, we weren't having a hard time keeping a pace between 13-15 mph.  This bridge, however, presented our first real challenge.

The Alex Fraiser Bridge.  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_Highway_91

The bridge was actually designed to support bicycle access and has a separated bicycle section.  Even with our own lane, however, that climb was still very steep and quite long.  We both downshifted into our lowest gears and somehow we managed to pedal our way all the way to the top at a barely faster than walking pace.

Somehow we pedaled to the top!

Feeling tired but accomplished!

Coming down the bridge was actually kind of scary because I didn't want to accelerate too much and go too fast on such a narrow pathway.  After a couple more hours of pedaling, we finally made it to the city, Tsawwassen.

It was a long day of riding, but we made it!

Not long after passing the welcome sign, we made it to the RV park where we were staying for the night.

Our first campsite!

First time pitching the tent on the bike trip.

Our first camping dinner, cooking some pasta on the camp stove.

Our first night of camping was fun!  It was an RV park so we were the only people tent camping, but the staff was very friendly and helpful.  We spent some time reorganizing and repacking our bags and got a good night's sleep on my awesome air mattress.  So far the air mattress has been awesome!  No leaking or waking up on the ground yet!

From Tsawwassen, our next journey was to the ferry terminal where we took the ferry over to Victoria.

Riding up to the ferry terminal.  We biked through like a car.

The ferry carries cars, so we just walked our bikes on with the cars and stowed them along the wall.

Got my bike on the ferry.

Coming into Victoria!

We met our first group of fellow bike tourers on the ferry!  This couple have been touring together around the world for the past ten years and had just come from biking across the desert in the USA.

This is a couple of power-tourers!  They document their journey at http://www.culturequest.ca/

Anyway, that's it for our first journey.  We were just starting to feel like we were actually touring!  More to come soon about Victoria and crossing back into the USA!

Vancouver

I promised pictures, so here are a few!

Packing up the bikes wasn't too bad, but it took a lot of time.  Once we finally got the front wheels off and everything zip-tied together, the bikes went into the boxes fairly easily.

One thing I insisted on bringing was an air mattress!  I love camping, but I really can't handle sleeping on the hard ground.  I found this one on Amazon and it's been awesome so far.  It rolls up nice and tight and is smaller than the tent, even though it weighs slightly more.

We didn't figure out our packing very well so we ended up just throwing our panniers and stuff inside suitcases to get to the airport.  Ethan's bag was exactly 50.0 lbs!  It was definitely a lot of stuff to haul around...

Once we landed in Vancouver, we got picked up by the Velofix mobile bike shop!  The service was awesome and the mechanic got our bikes put back together and in top shape before dropping us off at the local metro stop.

It was interesting hauling two bikes and two suitcases on the metro...but somehow we made it.

Once we made it to the city center, we met up with Ethan's co-workers for drinks and dinner at a local bar.  After crashing at her place for the night, we spent our first day in Vancouver going to various shops and getting things we need.  I really liked the sign at this shop which lightly made fun of hipsters:

It took a little jury rigging and a trip to home depot, but we finally got the front racks installed on our bicycles.

Then packing the panniers and loading up the bikes was a bit of a struggle.  The zippers on my rear panniers broke so we took those to a luggage repair shop to get new zippers put on.

Finally, after some struggle, we got everything onto the bikes!

We biked to a different co-workers place for the night.  We went out for some traditional Canadian poutine which looks kind of gross but is actually delicious.

After sampling the local fare, we went to a local bar for an improv show which was pretty funny!  Overall, Vancouver has been a lot of fun.  Now we're looking forward to getting on the road and really getting this trip started!