Our kids have left home. We at 50 something are having our first OE to Canada. A month off work and a journey to visit our boy in Alberta.
We haven’t seen him for a year and a half. That’s 18yrs with your kid and then they get on a plane and vanish, just like that. How did that happen so fast? Why are my kids so independent? Am i a bad mother? I want them both back here. I want them to ring me daily. I want to know what they’re up to. But then I remember I hardly ever ring my own mother…I should ring more.
Anyway back to the holiday. Just for fun and to add to the logistics we are “bikepacking”. This means flying with your bicycle, then putting all your stuff on it and biking some random route for young fit people on bikepacking.com. Flying internationally with connecting flights and bikes should be easy right?
The plans keep changing. Fires and smoke means the 1000km BC trail from Vancouver to Banff is out. We are now heading to Vancouver Island. Bummer, but can’t be helped. At least we get coastlines and ocean. Liam has kind of checked out. He should know it could be dangerous leaving me fully in charge.
12th August 2026 – I am early to the airport! We have disassembled bikes,cardboard bike boxes, helmets, camping gear etc. I have one change of clothes, 3 pairs of quick dry undies and a $5 bra from from postie plus, a lightweight raincoat and one pair of shoes plus jandals. Is this enough? Too much? We are on Fiji Air. It is the cheapest airline. But then we later learn they charge $250 each way per bike damn it! Thats another $1000 return for 2 bikes. And they say we have to shrink wrap our bike boxes. Lucky there is somewhere to do this at airport. We check in the bikes and they dont charge us the $250! Hooray lucky i didnt prepay online. The advantages of being slightly disorganised.
Fiji air to Vancouver has a 5 hour stopover at Nadi. Reddit told me you can go to a nearby hotel with a pool. Instead a grumpy fijian lady ushers us into the airless transit lounge. Stuck for 5 hours. I wanted a cocktail by the pool damn it.
12 or so hours later we arrive in Vancouver. The Airport is really flash. There are water features, aquariums, live trees and sculptures. They must be rich in Vancouver.
We get our bikes from oversize luggage and start reassembling. It is really hot and I am being useless. Why dont the screws go in. They keep going round and round and won’t catch the bloody thread. Its so hot im dripping with sweat. I cant pump up my tyres with that tiny bike pump its too hard. Everyone on our flight left the airport hours ago.
Finally we get our bikes together and gear loaded. Then Liam goes to buy a SIM card and I wait outside for what seems like an eternity. The only seat within 100m is a wheelchair. Finally he comes back with no SIM and a cancelled bank card. I’m too tired to figure this out.
We decide to go. Neither of us have any data. I mean the air bnb is only 10km away how hard can it be?
Quite hard. Lots of motorways. No obvious way to get across a massive river and still really hot. Why didn’t we uber? We must be nuts. Luckily car drivers are super courteous to bikers in Canada. If i was riding like that in NZ i’d have been run over multiple times by now.
Finally we make it to the air bnb – a beautiful slightly dilapidated old house. Some asset rich cash poor people living amongst multi multi million dollar estates. It cost $150 a night. Much cheaper than $500 a night motels. Accomodation is so expensive in Canada. We are going to be making close friends with our tiny tent.
Because we’d been awake so long we decide to go into town. We go to Brewing August for craft beer and burgers. You can make and paint pottery while you drink. They have great beer!
After this we get pain relief for our upcoming bike trip. A very common shop in Canada.
Finally after a very long day home to sleep.
Day 2! Time to check out Vancouver. We ride the Arbutus cycleway to Kitsilano beach and cycle around Stanley Park, a large forest in the middle of the city. I swim in the ocean. The sea is cold here!
There are bike trails and community gardens everywhere. There are also numerous horse stables and bridle paths. I guess thats what you get when lots of people are uber wealthy. But its ramshackle beautiful in a really unstructured way. Thats what appeals. And the city is so bicycle friendly. We avoided downtown, which is apparently the epicenter of homelessness, open drug use and severe poverty. We dont want to see that. We’re on holiday.
Day 3: Bike to Horseshoe Bay and ferry to Nainamo, Vancouver Island. 40km hilly narrow road. I really wanted to catch the bus. I wish we had caught the bus. The bus has 2 bike racks just for us! This road sucks and my bike is really heavy.
Then a 2hr ferry ride to Nainamo on Vancouver Island. Nainamo we find, is not a great place for biking. Actually after hanging out in nice parts of Vancouver, its just not a great place. Its so spread out. It has no real centre. Apparently some drunk guy at city planning mapped out the place. Also in the 80s and 90s the mayor was a big property developer, who actually dressed as a pirate, while he robbed the city and lined his own pockets. Why is this such a familiar story?? We have this story in Hokitika.
But our Air bnb is a cute old miners cottage. Overall though Nainamo is a pretty weird place.
Day 4: Bikepacking journey starts for real. After a 60km return uber trip getting food supplies and water treatment tabs (from the centreless Nainamo), we leave on our bikes to start the bike packing route. We have a serious discussion about taking jeans and a 5kg chain bike lock. Do we really need these things? I think not, but they come along anyway.
This is our route: “Forming a 450-kilometer loop around the south end of Vancouver Island, the Alberni Bam Bam is a week-long ride that starts and ends in Nanaimo. It links gravel roads, rough doubletrack, and a four-hour boat ride up the Alberni Inlet, featuring numerous swim spots, old-growth forests, very remote quirky communities etc”. Yes it sounds so amazing.
I have it downloaded on “ride with gps”. I download the maps too. God im organised. We plan to get to Lake Cowichan to camp tonight. It is far, very far like 90km away and the hills go up and up and up (1000m up). We stop for lunch and we stop for a swim and we meet some Canadian bikers who have turned back at a locked gate with serious warnings. We are not turning back. We are from NZ.
We come to the gate. It has a lot of no access signs. A voice comes out of a speaker beside a red shed. OBEY THE SIGNS it says. NO ACCESS. TURN BACK. OBEY THE RULES. Where is this voice coming from? Its Saturday, we are allowed in the weekends. It says so on bikepacking.com, so it must be true. Come out and talk to us I shout. No response. I’m not turning back i yell. No response. Liam has retreated to a nearby picnic table and looks uncomfortable. I’ve come all this way and im going through the gate! I start pushing my bike through the gap. Awkward but possible. “Come back” Liam yells. No I say. Im going, they can chase me if they want. He nervously follows expecting an angry security guard to be close behind. But it turns out to be a motion sensored camera triggering a recorded message.
We run into a forestry truck further along the road and the guy just waves at us. Then we meet 2 young guys, Ben and Sam who crash out of the bush with their bikes. They went bush bashing to get around the security gate. Turns out they are doing the same ride as us on the same schedule, so we will be seeing them a bit over the next week or so. They, like most Canadians we meet are just soooo nice.
Tbc
