A little training ride

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Vancouver, BC

The ride to Iona beach is iconic among Vancouver’s MAMILS (middle-aged men in Lycra shorts) pelotons. Heading out to a coastal wetland on Sea Island, you ride along an exposed and windswept stretch of road between the airport and the Fraser river. It’s strictly a training ride, and that’s why we took it on today.

We have finally found a gap in our schedules that aligns with the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions on the prairies and we figured we had better get our butts on the bikes for more than a gentle amble around Vancouver. The Iona ride can be a bit of a slog but we did relish being on gravel bikes that could go along a river trail out of the wind for part of the way while the MAMILS toiled on the road.

In early September we plan to fly to Saskatoon where we ended last year, and then ride east past BHP’s Jansen potash project (which Gill started and which Bron has worked on for 12 years) before dipping south to Melville and the Qu’Appelle Valley and then winding our way through Riding Mountain National Park to Winnipeg, Manitoba. It should take about 10 days of riding and the 60km to Iona today was a fair bit shorter than the shortest day we’ll have on the trail.

Orange t-shirts along SW Marine Drive commemorate the Indigenous children who were taken to residential schools and never came back.
Even in Vancouver we end up on skinny gravel trails by mistake. This one went nowhere.
A peloton of MAMILS and Gill on the Iona road
Log booms on the Fraser River below.

#transcanadatrail

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Published by transcanadatrek

Bron Wilkinson and Gill Winckler tackling the Trans Canada Trail in pieces whenever opportunity allows. May take the rest of our lives to complete this adventure.

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