It's not all about the bike

Cancer Donations: Here

Ecuador Websites: Here

Ecuador Donations: Here

These are a few stories that I have been meaning to share. I figured after all these blogs about the riding itself; it might be nice to take a bit of a detour into some of the other memories of the trip.

The 2011 Canada Wide Science Fair ambassador program finished in Toronto, and I was very sick when it finished. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to ride for a while, so we decided to take a quick drive on the day the fair ended from Toronto to just inside the US. My experience with crossing into the US had always been through airport security, who are generally pretty friendly. Boy was I in for a surprise… We got the border late at night; I was totally exhausted (probably from the 3am Boston Pizza run the night before with the ambassadors) and could barely speak from a very sore throat. The boarder guard asked us what our purpose was in the US, and after we told him that I was doing a bike ride to raise money for cancer and poverty in Ecuador, (I kid you not) he accused us multiple times of being religious missionaries bent on soliciting the good American people out of their hard earned money, then absconding with that money down to Ecuador for who knows what dastardly plans. They asked us to leave the vehicle, and enter some kind of holding facility where they continued to question us. I think the best non four-letter words I could use to describe them would be incredibly incriminating. Everything we said (that was totally normal) was spun into something we never said (like soliciting, or missionary). And that was before Daffyd had to say he’d been in contact with farm animals… Long story short, they made a mess of the car, and eventually let us go to freely roam the US on our religious missionary work, aggressively soliciting innocent people so that I could take the money down to Ecuador to foster anti-American sentiments :)

All of the biking I had done previously had been on the west coast, or in Ontario (both of which have hill and trees). So to do about 1600k of prairies was refreshing at least for a while. Two of these things that most people don’t have on their front yards in Victoria are horses and cows…

I was heading down a gradual hill and started to hear this repeated thudding noise, and as a rule of thumb if something is wrong on your bike, your first indication is usually sound or feel (and after 100 hours of listening to your bike you’ll be able to hear slight changes in the sound it makes). So here I was riding along looking like a fool checking my bike from head to toe, when I look over to my right and I see about 7 stallions galloping right beside me (I don’t know if they were actually stallions, I didn’t stop to check, but it sounds much cooler than horses). It was later in the day and the sun was projecting behind them, it was definitely an unforgettable moment that would put any Clint Eastwood ‘riding into the sunset’ movie to shame.

The other memorable encounter with farm animals was significantly less gallant. I was just biking along doing my thing, and I look over at a field full of cows. Then I notice one was looking at me, then another, and another and before long almost the entire field of cows is watching, slowly rotating their heads unblinkingly, as I rode past. I’ve never felt so self-conscious biking in my life; the piercing judgmental look of those cows was like the look I would get if I wore a full pink plaid spandex outfit to my first day of high school. And this didn’t happen just once, oh no sir, this happened every time there was a herd of cows. I could probably have filed passive aggressive harassment complaints. But I did have a chance to get those cows back, one tried to run with me (I didn’t even know cows could run), but I kicked his butt in the race, and made myself feel better :) I think the cow was just jealous of the horses running with me.

There are a few other stories that might be worth sharing, but those will have to wait. For now I have the duty of being the only Canucks fan in the bar in West Glacier Montana…