Morning Day 4: 6/29/09
Woke up yesterday bright and early, broke camp as Amtrack employees started parking in the alleyway, and went back into the station. The train left at 7:40 am, so we arrived in Canada, unboxed the bikes and got through customs by about noon. While getting everything sorted out in front of the station we were approached by a young lady on a bike:
“Hey! You guys want to buy a bike? $30!”
“Uh, no, we can’t carry a bike.”
“Ok, fine, $20.”
“Sorry, we still can’t carry it.”
She then moved down 20 feet to ask some other people in our group the same thing, with the same response. Why you’d try to sell a bike to people who are already riding bikes is beyond me.
We rode out of the station to find some food in Vancouver, since we hadn’t had anything real to eat on the train. We immediately ran into some roadies, who were super cool and gave us directions to a pub as well as an area of downtown with a market and some eateries. Our food supplies needed to be restocked at least a little before the ride, so we found the market, and got some Canadian cash from an ATM. Next to the market there was a great little falafel place, reasonably priced. We all got the shwarma, which was excellent, and after we were done the manager offered to refill our water bottles. By asking directions and a bit of dumb luck, we found the bike path that runs along Vancouver’s waterfront. It was an incredibly beautiful day, and there were bikers of all descriptions out (and people other than bikers as well). It was really cool how many people were out, a fact only improved by a good percentage of them being attractive
women.
We had a few wrong turns in the city, but at length we found Lion’s Gate bridge, a huge suspension bridge. It’s a pretty cool bridge, and was very rideable, as it had a ped/bike sidewalk separated from the road. From there we took Marine Road, a nice rolling ride to the ferry.
While waiting for the ferry we met Peter, a fellow cyclist and a resident of the island that we were going to. We chatted with him about touring, riding in Canada, and the site that we were planning at staying at that night. He was super stoked on the idea of our tour, and since he lived near our campsite, he offered to ride us to the supermarket, and then give us directions from there. So, we stopped following the coast and took a pretty cool route over the center of the island to the market and the campsite. Peter was super awesome, and sent a picture of all of us on the ferry to our folks.
We got to the campsite around 7 or 8 and had dinner cooked and camp set up by the time it got dark. (Which, due to the latitude, was incredibly late, around 10 pm.)
The park attendant was cool enough to take USD rather than Canadian, and was even so nice as to give us the going conversion. People in Canada are apparently super nice.
(Robert)
