August 12, 2018
Some reflections on the tour
First, let’s look again at a few of my personal favorites, back for a second showing:
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We have Steve Miller of the Grampies to thank for this unplanned postmortem. In a comment on the previous post, he asked for our thoughts on road safety on this tour (note: if you give us feedback, you might spawn a bonus track yourselves!). It’s a good question, which I’ll get to shortly. First though, some other thoughts come to mind, in no particular order.
For us, it really worked well to visit this region through car-assisted day rides. We can’t say that we really liked driving all the way from Portland to lower British Columbia, but once we were there it was great to use the car to rebase ourselves every few days. We were able to cover a larger region than we could have otherwise, and we avoided some less desirable riding that would have been necessary if this had been an unsupported ride. Two examples: Without a car to get us within reasonable distance, we would not have been able to ride up Highwood Pass, one of our favorite days of the tour; and as a counter example, our least favorite riding of the tour was on Highway 97, around Penticton - if we had ridden the Kamloops loop as day rides instead, we would have just driven through this fairly unpleasant stretch.
Along the same lines, riding the tour as a string of day rides meant that we often rode the same section of road twice, in opposite directions. In such a spectacular terrain as this, out and back rides are great. Everything looks different in reverse, and it’s great seeing the same formations in different lighting.
We came out of this tour thinking of other places where having a car would work as well - the huge, sprawling American Southwest is an obvious example. It would be great to live in a land with a robust train network to leverage, but without that option it’s possible we’ll see another tour like this down the road some year.
If I were planning this tour again, I’d change just a few things. First, and obviously, I’d come in a less busy, cooler time of year. I’d love to be here in September. Second, I think I got the sequence wrong. It made sense this way logistically, but I wish we had ridden the Icefields Parkway last. It’s such an overwhelming experience that it overshadowed the remainder of the tour a bit.
We really haven’t taken that many longer tours in English-speaking countries, and we’re still taken aback by how much we enjoy the incidental conversations we have along the way. And we especially loved getting together with new friends in Kamloops and Nelson, folks that reached out to us in our previous journals. I’m grateful to them for inviting us into their lives, and hope that this happens again down the road. If you see us coming your way, please get in touch!
As always, for all the time and lost sleep it costs during the tour, now that it’s over I’m glad that we stuck with the journal the whole way. There’s so much of this experience that would be lost to us otherwise. Already, flipping back through our photo album I’m surprised at how much I’ve forgotten and can’t place unless I go back to the journal to find the context. I do this mostly for us, but we’re really grateful for the encouragement we get from those of you who follow along. And we’re really appreciative of Jeff, who makes this possible by maintaining this great new website. Support it!
Finally, back to Steve’s question, which Rachael and I discussed at length over breakfast yesterday. There are many things that come to mind about road safety, but the number one thing to say is that these are our just our thoughts (and mostly mine; Rachael’s impressions were of course a bit different). We would never encourage others to ride the same roads we take, because we all have our own comfort zones. I’d say we’re in the middle of the risk spectrum somewhere - comfortable with traffic and large vehicles on our shoulders, confident of our bike handling skills, but still fairly cautious and risk averse.
I was reminded of this over dinner in Nelson, discussing with Roland the drive over the pass between Creston and Nelson. Driving it, I was glad we were in the car and not on the bike - it just felt too tight and precarious to me - little or no shoulder for much of the way, lots of blind curves, and enough traffic that I felt that we’d be too anxious to enjoy the ride. Roland though said it’s a good ride, which he’s taken multiple times. I think he’s farther out on the risk spectrum than me, but maybe, given a chance, I’d take that ride myself someday. I think I’d be happier doing it solo though rather than with Rachael behind or ahead of me - I’d worry about her experience and her safety.
So, here’s what I think. Going into this ride I was worried about roads and traffic, but was very pleasantly surprised. We found some really wonderful riding up here, even in the height of tourist season. With a few exceptions the roads felt quite safe to me. They either had very generous and reliable shoulders, or the traffic burden was so low that the lack of a shoulder didn’t really matter because you could hear the traffic coming from far off. I thought that in general the drivers were very considerate, giving us plenty of room when they passed (easy to do of course, on a low stress empty road). I thought that taken as a whole, the road quality was excellent - smooth surfaced, well maintained.
In particular, I was really pleased by the entire Icefield Parkway. I was really afraid that it would be too busy to enjoy, or to feel safe on. It was totally awesome, even in the height of the season. Totally.
I think too though that our experience would have been quite different on a completely unsupported tour, where we had to bike the whole distance. I’m sure we would have been fine biking the whole way, but being able to drive through some of the busier stretches worked really well for us.
OK, now I’m really done. Thanks for keeping us company, see you in Dubrovnik!
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