In June 2004 I set off across Canada on my bicycle. Or at least I'd planned to cross Canada. It didn't work out, mostly because of the weather, but I did have a great ride.

These pages are an account of that trip, as told through travelogs I sent to friends. I hope you enjoy the ride!

    When last you heard I'd just kicked some Anarchist tush and was feeling a little bit like Big Dick MacGregor. Well, let me tell you, I paid for my ego.
    Shortly after my last mailing I headed off to OK Falls where I hung for a few days, visited some folks I know for dinner, and chased a very large cougar from my campsite in the middle of the night. Swear the fella was at least 60 K and looked more like a lion escaped from the zoo. It's tail was a good meter long and it had a beige coat. When it saw me it turned and ran. I have never seen anything run so fast in my life, except maybe a couple old girl friends!
    A day or two later, in a blinding rain, I headed off to Penticton, or Tacky Town as I like to call it, setting up in a generic family campsite on the edge of town. There, after months of travelling in inclement weather, I finally got totally and seriously wet. Woke up with a swimming pool in my tent. Have never seen a rain like that one, not on the coast or anywhere else, and was more than a little shocked I would encounter such  a thing in Canada's driest
region. It rained and blew and rained and blew, and it took days to dry stuff out.
    Then one day I was sitting around thinking to myself, well Wild Man, you've gone pretty much everywhere the sun is supposed to shine and found nothing but rain, perhaps you should go somewhere where it is supposed to rain, then maybe the sun will appear. Moments later my camp host, a Buddha like fellow of 30-something years, showed up at my campsite and, without prompting, announced he was driving to Mission, on the coast, where it always rains, and had room for a bicycle-hobo and his rig. Well, I snapped that up like it was an offering from the gods, which it was!
    A couple days later, after a gloriously sunny ride in a land rover through the Hope-Princeton, I found myself and the same fish-hatchery-come-campground where I stayed last August, and sure enough, when I woke up in the morning I found a happy and hot sun beating down. So I got up and rode. In a five hour jaunt that was relatively uneventful, except for an incident near Ladner where I was riding across a busy highway junction and suddenly had a young, clean-cut fellow running along side me, trying to sell me a stolen rolex, I made Tswassen.
    This guys stunt, in rush hour traffic, at a major intersection, was like something out of the twilight zone. I couldn't believe it, and thought maybe I'd been stuck down and was in some sort of weird purgatory. What the hell do I want with a rolex? Just one more thing to steal. I told the guy to get off the road and suggested to him that he was nuts. This seemed to make him vanish into thin air!
    That night I camped at the very expensive Canada Park near the Tswassen Ferry, where I met the only cyclists I've encountered on this part of my trip, a couple American girls, who'd just finished a tour out to Tofino. Unfortunately they had it in their minds to get up at 5 am and catch an early boat to the San Juans, so our visit was short.
    In the morning I made the island and had a delighful ride along the Galloping Goose into the edge of Victoria, then north to Goldstream Park, where I parked myself for three nights beneath the giant cedars, some of them two meters across, and enjoyed the filtering full moon through their high canopy.
    The only down point of that experience was a weird old fellow who insisted on listening to opera at a high decibal level half the night. He also had some strange neurosis that caused him to open and close the doors of his car on an average of once a minute. At one point I got up to go "chat" with him about it but, upon getting up close, I could see in his eyes some sort of deep, destructive pain, that made me turn around and leave him to whatever it was he needed to do to ease it.
    Yesterday, Wednesday, I finally left Goldstream, and after a pleasant visit with one of my former Salmon Arm stage crew members, and her current co-workers, I blasted out the rest of the Galloping Goose, where I got caught in some sort of time warp, and wound up taking nearly four hours to travel 20K, despite a good trail and apparently good mileage on my part.
    Round about 6pm I rolled into Sooke, a now car inundated, speeders paradise where everything costs an arm, leg, and a first born sibling, and is, was, 20 K short of where I intended to get when I left Goldsteam.
    Unsure what it was that caused me to take so long, I was quite certain I was either abducted by aliens or frozen cryogenically for an hour or two, because there is absolutely no way it could take my pistons, new name for my legs, four hours to go 20 K!
    Anyway, I pulled into another expensive campground, after blowing my second tire of the day, and slept out near the inlet, in the fog, while a seal fished and fishes jumped, and the moon, now waning, was a small distant orb surrounded by mist.
    This morning I woke to hordes of fly fishermen trapsing between my tent and picnic table on their way into the drink with their lines and hip waders. Rude lot, those boys. Treated me like I wasn't there, though I'd paid handsomely for the little piece of earth I was now soggy on.
    Ah, but it was beautiful as swans floated past, the morning fog lifted and the warm sun returned. And I got a bit of a cheer watching huge fish jump and not a one of the fishermen catching a damn one of them.
    So, my adventure, is nearing its end. The plan, folks, is to find a beach today and to sit there until time or weather drive me out. I have to be home sometime early in October so it won't be a long stay but, methinks, it will be an apropriate way to end this summer of wet and chill, in a wet fog by a wet ocean.
    Anyway, I'm sure there's at least one or two more travelogues coming your way, but those of you who've been wondering when this seemingly endless sojourn will end, rest assured, I can see it from here. It's out there in the blue mist somewhere and I'm off now to find it.