Deciding To Go

It came in a conversation out of nothing; we were hiking through Algonquin Park in North Ontario, musing about what to do once our time in Canada was over, should we just return home? No, too soon, still want more adventure, so what should we do and where should we go, we discussed many ideas but there was one that stuck out and got us both very excited.


Why don’t we go on a bike ride, a really long bike ride?


I guess I’d kind of always had a slight inclination to do something like this, a few years back I’d had a drunken conversation with my friend Dan about riding from London to Madrid but like many drunken ideas that guys have (‘let’s open up a bar!’ anyone?) it never came to anything. But now… it seemed like the perfect time.

Where to go? Well, we reasoned that we would probably be in Vancouver at the end of our visa so that sounded like a good starting point, maybe we could ride all the way to Mexico? Yeah, Mexico, that sounds like a great idea…

So when we got home, the researching began, first off we were relieved to learn that we weren’t completely insane, many people had ridden this route before, from Vancouver to Tijuana, riding along the Pacific Coast, there was even a book written about it called Bicycling the Pacific Coast, which is very helpful, documenting where you need to go, where you can stay and even where you will encounter a bike shop, in fact it provides you with pretty much all the information you could need, so after doing this research, we were excited, shall we do it?


Yeah, shall we do it? I think so, let’s do it, ok, maybe. We ummed and ahhd and procrastinated for a long while about whether we should do it, could we afford it?


But come February we were in Vancouver and once again discussing what we should do when our time in Canada was over, a few ideas were tossed around and once again the bike ride came up, shall we do it? I don’t know, I don’t know either, shall we do it, yes, let’s just do it, if we really want to do it we’ll do it and we REALLY want to do this so let’s go!

Dave