After a Canadian winter of indoor cycling and weeks of planning we’re ready to pick up from where we left off in the autumn. Our goal this year is to ride from Penticton, BC to Banff, which perches high on the other side of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta.
We sandwich these rides between winter’s chill and summer’s threatening wildfires, and must find gaps between work obligations, so more than 1,000km is a fairly lofty goal to tackle in bits and pieces. Particularly since someone put a couple of mountain ranges in the way.
As we get further away from Vancouver, the logistics of this little venture get trickier, and this weekend’s first leg of the summer will involve leaning on friends (and friends-of-friends) for lifts and car drop-offs, renting a campsite as an overnight parking spot, and at least one day done “backwards”. As the Minister of Logistics and Planning, Gill has been fiddling with maps, and calling friends, Airbnbs, motels and taxi companies to ensure we can get where we need to be each day. Not to mention making sure we have the requisite food stops to mitigate Bron’s h-anger. Some days present no meal stop opportunities and we’ll just have to rely on provisions from the local general store fashioned into padkos (road food for non-Afrikaans speakers).
Come with us again tomorrow as we start (appropriately) in the winelands of the Okanagan and then turn south to touch the US border as we head from Penticton to Christina Lake along the eastern end of the Kettle Valley Railroad trail and on towards Alberta on the Columbia and Western Trail.
#TheGreatTrail
#TransCanadaTrail
Trans Canada Epic 