Buying the Bikes - Rocky Mountain RC10's

So, we had decided to go, now we just need everything else. 

Our first step was to buy the aforementioned ever helpful book Bicycling The Pacific Coast: A Complete Route Guide, Canada to Mexico. Then we needed bikes - we’d been riding borrowed bikes in Toronto, so we needed some bikes of our own now that we were in Vancouver.

And not just any bikes -  bikes that would get us from Vancouver to Tijuana.

The first stop was a bike shop where the guy pretty much laughed at us when we told him what we wanted to do and how much we had in our budget for bikes. We decided to try looking for used bikes on Craigslist, but after a few days of pouring over the ads we still couldn't find anything that was in our budget that we liked. 

Then as we were beginning to lose hope of finding anything we could afford we took a trip to the Vancouver Bike Show… Put on in conjunction with the Outdoor Adventure & Travel Show. This was a great opportunity for us to see what was available and hopefully pick up a bargain.

The lovely people from Skiis & Biikes had a stall where they were selling off a lot of last seasons' models at a discounted price. What a stroke of luck! 

After trying out a few models with the helpful and patient Shawn from Skiis and Biikes, helping us to make our selection -  we decided on two Rocky Mountain RC10's made by the good people from Rocky Mountain Bicycles. 

The bikes are by no means top of their range (Rocky Mountain do several much more expensive models if you have the $$'s), but they seem well built and sturdy so hopefully will get us to Mexico in one piece. 
It also feels good to be making the trip on bikes built by a company that was started in Vancouver and that began in 1981, the year of my birth - you can read more about the Rocky Mountain story here.


Dave