Nanaimo To Fort St. John, B.C.

Well, this is our first "major" bike tour, meaning more than 4 or 5 days. The plan is pretty basic-ride from our home in Nanaimo to the town I grew up in, Fort St. John, to visit my family that were still residing there. In a way it seems like a "safe" trip, meaning that it is a route that I have been over many times in a car (or bus) since I was a child. So I know where we are going, and have a pretty good idea of what we will see.

It does seem like an imposing trip to us, who are fairly new to cycling at this point. The distance is about 1350km, about 850 miles, all within the Province of BC. Not a small trip, and not one that I was sure we could handle. When I was in elementary school many years ago, one of the teachers had attempted to ride from Dawson Creek to Vancouver as a fundraising effort for our school, Devereaux. Unfortunately, he was not able to complete the trip, having knee problems somewhere around Prince George. Here's hoping we have better luck, and hoping that having 27 gears as opposed to the ten he likely had will be of some assistance on the hills.

While we were working on planning our trip, our friend Bob did up an awesome route map, showing all the roads, distances, stopping places, whatever you could want. I think he just wanted to play with using his computer software to lay it all out.  My route plan consisted of "We'll ride east until we get to Hope, then hang a left". Either way works, especially in BC where there aren't really a lot of choices in terms of highways once you leave the Greater Vancouver area. Bob did plan out a nice route through the Lower Mainland, one that I would never have found, and one that avoided a lot of traffic.  

We had planned (or at least hoped) that we would ride about 100km per day, but we weren't sure whether that was a realistic goal or not. There was some concern that with the mountains, and the day-after-day riding wearing us down that we may not be able to accomplish that. The other factor that can complicate planning your route in advance is the fact that services can be a long way apart in many parts of BC (and as we found out, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick...). Back in the old days, they built services a days travel (by horseback or stagecoach) apart, but that seems to have gone out of style. Maybe its because the automobile has escaped those constraints in a big way- changing "a days travel" from meaning 20 or 30 miles to meaning 1000 kilometres or more.  Maybe we can get some of the flavour of travelling in the days of old by slowing it all down on the bikes. Maybe I read too many western novels as a kid, and want to ride my aluminum steed into the sunset-only we're headed east, so I guess it will be more like into the sunrise, only we don't get up that early normally. 


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