We made it to Vancouver on Tuesday evening, and Nick and Zach headed off on the train yesterday morning. I’m taking some downtime while a bike shop looks into some issues with my bike (rear hub and bottom bracket). I’m staying with some great warmshowers hosts, Kyle and Avvai.
I’ll take a quick stab at summarizing the last week and a half of riding:
- We had really great weather, the only rainy day was when we took the ferry from Bamfield to Port Alberni. 60s and 70s pretty much the whole time
- The scenery was amazing. Lots of crystal clear rivers and ponds, super lush forests, gorgeous ocean views. A lot of the time it felt like we were riding in some prehistoric jungle or Ferngully.
- I had forgotten that Canadian road engineers don’t seem to care that much about maximum grades – in the US it’s rare to see anything beyond 8 or 9 percent, but here you see lots of 11, 12, 13 percent grades. A lot of this route was pretty challenging in that respect – we didn’t have too many major climbs, but there were a lot of very steep ups and downs.
- The ferry to Port Alberni had 8 other bike tourists on it – it was fun to go around and chat with them all about their various routes.
- We saw some good wildlife – lots of bald eagles, a seal patrolling the harbor, a pod of orcas…. We even scared a black bear up a tree!
- Overall a challenging, but fun week and a half of bike touring. But no one wants to read this slop – here’s some photos!
