Tag Archives: gravel

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.