Day 3: Ladysmith to Parksville

October 14, 2021

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Our first order of business upon leaving the "lame" motel was to head over to the Old Town bakery. It's not as if the motel was even pretending to offer breakfast that might tempt us. Doesn't fit in $165, I guess. On the way over we spotted the "Temperance Hotel 1900". A better bet? Well not quite, it's not an actual hotel but a building moved onto the site.

We were at the bakery not long after opening, and their shelves were fully and wonderfully stocked. There did seem to be a full complement of morning bakers, so I guess there was no point in handing in my resume! If I were them, I would not "gamble" on a retired statistician/cyclist anyway.

I found the staff very friendly, and I did not get into trouble for taking photos. In fact they said the cinnamon buns especially are a very popular photo subject.

The cinnamon buns are clearly the house specialty.

But there are piles of other stuff. We did not actually go for cinnamon buns this time - too gooey for on the bikes!

Ladysmith has a fair number of heritage buildings. According to the Visitor Guide, coal baron James Dunsmuir chose the harbour as a port for his nearby mine, and the settlement sprang up overnight to house the miners. The homes, shops, etc. were then brought by rail from Nanaimo. This was in the time frame 1898 to 1904. By the way, coal mining tanked in 1931, but got replaced by forestry. Forestry pretty much tanked in the 1980's Although forestry still remains, Tourism and other services now dominate.

For Ken Graham - a Fordson tractor. Originally meant for agriculture in the 1920's, this was used in the forest industry to haul small logs.

Another perennial tourist favourite here is the 49th parallel marker. Although the marker is here at Ladysmith, the parallel does not form the US/Canada border here, as it does across the rest of western Canada. Rather the British managed to grab the whole of Vancouver Island. If not, we would be living in the States!

Typical (but apparently one armed) tourist.

We crossed the #1 highway and began the process of edging up the island, wedged between the highway and the water.

Logging trucks need to be watched out for, but for crossing the main roads here there is a large volume of pickup trucks, gravel trucks, and general traffic.

Here is a small sawmill operation. I got thrown out while taking this picture.

Maybe there is a secret to their operation?

Blueberries, dormant now for the season.

The route chosen for us by bikemap.net avoids the Trans Canada (noisy and choc full of thundering traffic!) and seeks a quieter way, passing by the little town of Cedar. If you look at the track, you will see some glitches we had heading toward Cedar, such as curling in error behind the airport. If you do a double take at the track, you will see that the Grampies apparently walked or cycled over the estuary to save time!

It was probably at Cedar that our claims or hopes for having a World Class tour began to unravel. The rot started with the motel, but from Cedar on it became harder to spot really great stuff. Cedar itself is not so much a town as a scattering of building along the road. And not to disparage the working family, but the housing was not exactly stellar.

Typical Cedar houses. Small, but ok, neat and clean. Maybe even great by overall world standards, but you wouldn't cycle several hundred km to see them.

Passing Cedar, we maneuvered our way by the Duke Point Highway, #1 again, and the so called Nanaimo Parkway, as we executed the plan to enter Nanaimo proper and then cut over to join the Parkway cycle path. But just over the small Nanaimo River bridge, Dodie came down with a rear flat.

A rear flat on Dodie's bike is something we sort of dreaded, and this was the first time it happened, after thousand of km cycled. The problem comes from features of her drive train. First, she has internal hub gears. These are controlled by a cable that is a bug to unhook, and even tougher to reconnect. And of course you do not want to throw the cable tension out of adjustment. There is a thing about a yellow dot that has to line up with another yellow dot, that I no longer remember.

Second, the wheel does not have quick release, so you need a honking big wrench, and there are also sort of torque arms on both sides of the hub to help resist the chain pressure. Misadjust these and your brakes will rub. And oh, Dodie's model of German Magura hydraulic rim brakes are not totally easy to release and reinstall to permit the rim to be pulled past and out.

I am pretty much able to handle all these quirks, even carry the big wrench, and likely would remember the yellow dots if necessary. After all, I was trained in the bike shop in Netherlands where the bike came from. See here:

But you know what, we would rather not be heroes about it. So we picked up in Netherlands a nifty double ended tube. You can install this without taking the wheel off the bike at all. The only downside is that you have to cut off the old tube, which can not pass by the hub while the wheel is still attached.

We actually began by looking for what nasty thing had attacked the tire. It was easy to spot - a chunk of glass, that I pried out with my fingernail.

You still have to flip the bike to effectively do anything

I was then ready to cut out the old tube, but this is where Dodie's "not so fast" brainpower came into play. She surmised that since we could easily see where the glass had cut the tire, we could find the tube puncture in the same position. And yes, we did that. Then some glue and a patch and she was back in business!

The repair allowed us to carry on, passing by the water before diving across Nanaimo to rejoin the Parkway.

The forest industry is obviously still alive here in various forms. For example we passed one very big looking mill called Coastland:

Now as we entered Nanaimo we observed, as in Cedar, a not very distinguished form of architecture for the single family houses.

To be sure, we did also see some very nicely renovated heritage houses. Somehow I failed to get a shot of any of the great ones, and soon we had passed out of the zone where they were located.

Around this time, and despite the success with the tire, it began to feel like we were being put through a wringer. There was nothing particularly all that dangerous, or strenuous, going on, but the constant struggle to find the cycling route through the traffic and noise and lack of signage was just a bug. When finally we reached the Parkway Trail, we had one further fight to cross the Parkway, which had many driving lanes and turning lanes.

As soon as we got on the trail we were plunged into pleasant and dark forest. What a relief. But soon the trail returned to the roadside and noise once more.

Ah, the Trail, but also the road and those darn logging trucks.

Eventually, and not without a lot of wiggling about and studying the GPS, we arrived at the visitor centre at the far end of Nanaimo. Dodie went in and got some pamphlets, while I photographed the Nanaimo Bar recipe hanging in the window. It's legible, so give it a try!

A short nature trail at the centre included this information about the Camas. It's legible if you zoom on it, and I think Bill Shaneyfelt will enjoy reading it. Watch out for those Death Camas!

Chainsaw carving. More World Class than the Melania Trump statue in Slovenia!

One other thing we noticed at the visitor centre was this poster for an anti bike theft program. We know Joni has been very interested in such things since her friend's bike was stolen in Victoria.

Past the visitor centre the forest seemed to open out, and we noticed a lot of Arbutus trees. Arbutus in notable as an evergreen with a lack of bark, and reddish colour.

Now we began to kind of wend and fight our way toward Parksville. At one point our route from bikemap took us through a private development called Craig Bay. This was posted as no trespassing, but we draw our authority and power from bikemap.net, so in we went. It turned out to be a mind boggling experience. Craig Bay contains hundreds of near identical houses, all painted the same colour. I could feel my sanity slipping away, as the word of Pete Seeger's "Little Boxes" (made of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same) came to mind.

We escaped from Craig Bay, and I was prepared to write it off as an aberration, since my (50 year old) recollection of Parksville was very positive. We encountered some more Craig Bay type houses, and I began to wonder.

Thoughts about suburban housing dropped away as we entered Parksville itself. Now this I really didn't expect. I was kms of franchise fast food, car repair, car sales, and misc. retail. And no space for bikes on the road.

We proceeded down the sidewalk, for more kms, and still saw this:

Soon a sign assured us that we were at Downtown, or near Downtown. Really?

We were surprised, but grew more surprised when we reached our motel.

Ok, this is not actually the motel. It's just part of the motel.

What's going on with Parksville, apparently, is that they have two main assets - the beach (Rathstrevor Beach) and nearby luxury resorts, and the Englishman River park. On top of that they have built great stretches of service businesses, and stuff like our adventure golf park, or whatever it is. Fifty years ago, we did visit the beach and the river. This time, without doing that perhaps it's natural not to have found any redeeming value in the place.

And oh, after 70 km of fighting traffic, we were famished. It turned out we had two options in walking distance: McDonald's and a Chinese buffet. We chose the buffet, since Dodie figured she could find more veggies there. Here is what we got:

Ok, ok, some other trays did have some veggies! But all trays were just barely warm, a possible food safety hazard. Staff were very sweet when we pointed it out in response to "How was everything?"

And look, there were some "Nanaimo Bars". We didn't come here for nothing, eh!

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Postscript: Dodie just woke me up to say that she found the day fine. She thought the routing was quiet enough, with generally separated path. Had she studied the route more carefully, it could have been all more clear, she said. Also it didn't rain. She also mentions that her battery ran out of power, and she just cycled on. And oh yeah, she liked the Chinese food! Go figure.

Today's ride: 72 km (45 miles)
Total: 183 km (114 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	12
Comment on this entry	Comment	4

Scott AndersonDotie found the day to be just fine, but what about the flat-mender? Also, maybe I overlooked it but I didn’t see an overall rating for the day. World class?
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2 years ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesTo Scott AndersonI think Dodie found the flat repair to be a triumph (of puncture sniffing). But the tour has definitely fallen off World Class rating. Even the vienoisseries at Old Town bakery were just about 85% of world class.
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2 years ago

Rich FrasierYour determination and good humor is admirable!
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2 years ago

Mike AylingPuncture repair. The Rohloff is probably six times the cost of the Shimano hub but the wheel is very easy to remove.
Select gear 14
Unscrew the shifter cable box from the hub using the thumbscrew.
Open the quick release lever and drop the wheel out.
When reassembling just ensure that the gear selector is still on 14 and thats it.
No pesky yellow dots, no 15mm spanner required.
My first bike when I was young had a coaster brake and we often did the remove one side of the bead while the wheel was still on the bike routine.
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2 years ago