I’ve often wondered what it would be like to live life without the internet. One of my best friends’ books Strangerland is about how her parents migrated with just letters, some really bad quality (and expensive) international phone calls and the power of asking other people for help. At one point, a relative of one character goes to every bus station in the city just on the off chance that’s where my friend’s mum arrives, because you can’t just SMS your partner your destination. When I finished my first rotation in my seasonal job in Canada, in mid-June, I was thinking hard about how to spend my first two weeks off. ‘Just go to the lake and do some shrooms,’ someone said to me, but I didn’t think that was much to go on for a fortnight. I have a bike in Canada anyway, but it’s a real midlife crisis road machine with skinny tyre clearances, and doesn’t have the hardpoints for racks and bags. So I spoke about this dilemma with a few friends, and my buddy asked me, ‘what would you do normally?’ I said ‘I’d go on a bike tour’, and he said ‘well, just do that, then,’ and that was the problem solved. I’d just solve the problems. I’d visited Vancouver Island a few years before as a tourist, and really felt like I’d only scratched the surface, so back I went, getting the ferry across from the Vancouver mainland, and then the bus.
This is a short-ish blog post outlining some key stuff I learned. I hope you like it, and maybe it’ll inform your own future plans.
Tag Archives: bikingvancouver
Learnings and observations upon emigrating, getting a Canadian working holiday permit, and buying a bike
On the advice of friends, I got a bike from Kickstand Vancouver, I think on 3 or 4 April. I wasn’t too sure what to expect but I knew I was really sick of waiting for the bus and wanted the freedom to scoot around places like I was used to. Yes, I could use Facebook Marketplace (the Vancouverite’s favourite) or eBay but to be honest I just wanted to go somewhere, try a bike out, be fairly sure it was mechanically all there and just bring it home, especially bearing in mind as an immigrant with one suitcase, I had no tools. I found the opening times for Kickstand Vancouver and turned up. I really like Kickstand and think it’s a precious resource, but there’s no two ways about it, it is a matter of just turning up and seeing what there is. It isn’t a big name bike shop, you aren’t going to get to stroll down lines of bikes your size and luxuriate over what you’d like to ride away on. And to be honest, this wasn’t a big problem. I had in mind getting some kind of steel-framed, fendered commuter bike, and instead rolled away with an alloy Giant OCR in a pleasing cherry red, which has been an absolute blast to ride around on.
Calum On Wheels 