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.

Have Bike Will Travel: The Mission Statement

Here I am in Vancouver, British Columbia with two bikes, two suitcases, and my best friend on the eve of pedaling myself south to Tijuana.  

For those of you who haven't heard about my crazy idea, you might be wondering, how did I get here?  Well, for my first three years of college I didn't have a car.  Living in L.A. that meant that my only way around town was either the metro or my bike.  I couldn't bear living in a city as diverse and vibrant as Los Angeles and being limited by the metro system, so every year I got a little bit more brave in my bike adventures off campus.  Little by little, I started biking further and further from campus, until one day I found myself 28 miles from home in Long Beach and suddenly the idea of bike touring didn't seem so crazy anymore.  The idea of the freedom of just dropping everything, packing up my bike, and going wherever my pedals could take me was so thrilling I became obsessed with the idea, longingly staring out windows wishing I could be on my bike.  Perhaps prematurely, I bought the Adventure Cycling Pacific Coast Bicycle Route Map Set so that I could studying them whenever I wanted a break.

Little by little, Ethan and I started to figure out whether we could actually make this crazy idea a reality.  We both graduated in May, so we have a really unique window after graduation and before starting work full time.  Ethan worked things out with the company he works for, Integral Group, and I worked things out with Boeing, and suddenly we both have 7 weeks of delightful, unencumbered free time to fill with adventure!  Once we figured out the timeline with our jobs, we booked our flights excited about the prospects!  Then came all the practical stuff.  First of all, neither Ethan nor myself had a true road bike.  We're both broke so we shopped on craigslist for good deals.  I ended up with a Novara Randonee and Ethan got a Bianchi Volpe.  Thankfully Ethan already had lightweight backpacking gear so we really only needed to acquire bicycle-specific gear like panniers and fenders and clip-in pedals and so on.  We definitely could have spent more time/money acquiring gear, but I think we've got the essentials we need to get started and I still have some money left to spend on things like campsites and food.  

And then, all of a sudden it was really happening!  Now, here we are in Vancouver staying with a co-worker of Ethan's who works for the Integral Group Vancouver office.  After arriving at the airport, the Vancouver Mobile Bike Shop, Velo Fix, picked us up at the airport, unpacked and re-assembled our bikes, and tuned them up!  The mechanic was absolutely awesome, really helpful and got our bikes in top shape and ready to tour. After a quick trip along the Canada Line, we met up with our host and some of her friends for dinner and drinks at a local bar.  Coincidentally, one of her friends actually did this trip before and pedaled all the way to Ecuador!  He shared stories and advice with us which was really great for us newbies!  

Anyway, our plan from here is to spend tomorrow exploring the city and packing up for bikes for an early departure Wednesday morning.  I promise that my future posts won't all be walls of text and that I'll be uploading photos soon!  So stocked to get started!!