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!

    Hope you're all well. Last you heard from me I'd just returned from a weekend in Ya Ha Tinda and was planning to cycle out of Calgary. Well, you know how it goes, the best laid plans. . .
    Well, I'd made my plans, bought some travel food, packed Blu and BoB, and was about to pull out of town, when my hosts offered me a half price ticket to the Cirque du Soleil, Circus of the Sun, an all-human circus, for those of you who don't know.
    Well, I could hardly turn it down. Living where I live, things like the circus never come to town. So I decided to go for it. I also decided, since the circus was on Friday, and the local Folk Fest started on Thursday, I'd catch some of that as well.
    So I went down and hung out outside the Folk Fest gate with my best, "would someone please give me a cheap ticket to this event" look on my face. It worked! I managed to get two tickets, to Thursday and Saturday, for the price of one, from a rather frazzled amateur scalper who'd over-bought some advance tickets and was trying to recoup some of his losses.    Good kid really, honest face.
    So off I went to the festival where I was treated to a decent concert by Taj Mahal, who made several comments about his appreciation for what he called, "the ladies with critical mass on their back ends." Now, I don't know how well that would have gone over in Nelson, but here in Calgary, the girls were lapping it up!
    Anyway, Taj was good, which of itself was a positive thing because I was rather put off by the blatant commercialization of the festival, which is supposed to be for the folks, but the folks can't afford the hundred plus dollars weekend pass, so they sit across the river from the site, where the sound is not so good, watching it through the trees. Furthermore, the site design leads patrons down a corridor that is like a tunnel of commercials for everything from Coca Cola to Tim Hortons (for those that don't know, Tim Hortons is a donut shop named after a famous hockey player who, while driving way too fast, killed himself on a bridge abutment in my hometown).
    Anyway, I was about to turn and run from all the advertisement, and from Taj's repeated reference to the female caboose, when Stompin Tom Connors hit the stage.
    Now, last time I saw the Stomp was 1972 in Elliot Lake, a uranium town in northern Ontario. He was actually staying with some folks next door to some folks that were friends of a woman I'd just driven halfway across Canada with. We were all hold up barbequing chickens when old Tom came over and invited us to his show. Well, it was quite a show, in the local bar with screaming yahoo rednecks all around. Anyway, in those days, Tom could barely
play his guitar and all the songs he sang were pretty much the same, all about the weird people of Prince Edward Island and their drinking habits.
    His voice was also like an off key cross between Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, with not an iota of the literacy! What I recall most was him stomping, a bastardized form of clogging, his way through three pieces of three quarter inch plywood with his wooden soled boots. It was a rip roaring performance laced with profanity and drunken hooting.
    This time, over 30 years later, I found a mellowed Tom, with an in-tune voice and some dandy pickin' ability. His stomp also changed. Perhaps all those years of stomp have ruined his knees or something, but the old fellow was not quite so boisterous with his foot, although he did manage to pound his way through a good half inch of plywood, from Beaver Lumber apparently.
    He sang all his favourites, including the hockey song, and got the crowd laughing a lot, even me. The guy is truly a Canadian icon, although some Canadians might be embarrassed by that. His songs are about everyday Canadian life, the roughness of rural existence, and the regular people who live it. And they even touch, or shall I say, make sense to a hippie boy like me.
    Never thought I'd say this but, I actually liked Stompin' Tom's show and got a good laugh when, at the end, he picked up the plywood from beneath his foot, held it up all splintered and broken, and told the crowd: "If any of ya are down at Beaver Lumber tell them Stomping Tom says their plywood is crap!"
    Next afternoon it was off to the circus, held under a big top at a decommissioned army base, where I was chased around by a security guard all dressed in black. Apparently, his big concern was that I looked like a hippie, in my paisly shirt and funky psychedelic flop hat, provided to me by my host's mom. He chased me through two doors, where I'd stopped both times to chat up some of his female co-workers, and into the main milling area outside the big top. When he finally caught me, I flashed my ticket at him, gave him a stern cold glare and said; "Buddy, if I was going to sneak in I'd have worn a pinstripe suit!"
    Anyway, the circus was wonderful! Erotic trapeze artists twirling above slap stick comedians and tiny jugglers. Epic soundscapes thundering over a mad weaving tumbling ballet. . . Ah hell, I don't have the vocabulary to describe it. All I can say is, go see it if it comes anywhere near you. This is some of the best performance art to be had on the planet, and that's coming from a guy who's seen a lot of performance art!
    I ended that night by drifting back down to the folk festival site where I hung out with all the "folks" who can't afford the "folk" festival. There on a rock by the river Bow, I sat listening to Great Big Sea, another Canadian fiddle band, who rocked out the crowd.
    Then Saturday,  yesterday, I went on down, with a pack sack full of munchies and a good water supply, and spent my day lounging beneath the trees listening to the blues tainted folk. It was quite good. I particularly enjoyed Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir, fiddle virtuoso Oliver Schorer, and some blue grass acts from the southern USA. I also got to see banjo great Earl Scruggs, who at 80 has his hair dyed black and lets his kids do most of the playing and talking. The night ended with a powerhouse performance by a funk band out of San Francisco called Spearhead. If you ever want to dance and just go crazy, catch these guys, they really know how to work a crowd into a frenzy and their performance was the only thing I saw that actually managed to get the stoic cowboy crowd on its feet.

    In between and betwixt all this entertainment I took time the other day to visit with a fellow named Tom. Tom is my hostesses' great uncle, her grandfather's brother, and he's 100 years old! He's the first person I've met who has lived that long. As a young man Tom was a cowboy and worked the herds down along the Mexican border. He tells stories of herding cows, with
his first wife, back and forth across the Rio Grande. When you see his hands you know his stories are true. They are large things, with great gnarled knuckles and thick callouses, that seem out of place on his thin body. This is a man who grew up with buck boards and horses, remembers the first car to roll through his hometown, Lubbock, Texas, and has ridden thousands of miles on the back of a horse. He's gone from stage coaches to jet planes, and that he says, is the biggest change he's seen in the world, the manner in which people get around. Tom is also no fan of the Bush family, which for an old time Texan, gave me hope!
    Wish I could tell y'all more about Tom, but at 100, communication is a slow process. Still, with the tiny bits of info I was able to glean from him, I felt honoured to have had the opportunity to visit with someone who has lived so much. Despite his failing hearing and eye sight, I found him lucid, engaging and marvelous company, even if he didn't so much like my long hair and unkempt appearance.

    Anyway, looks like my Calgary diversion is soon to end. I've set some plans to move along mid-week, there are some economic concerns stalling me out at present.
    I've pretty much abandoned the idea of going further east this year. Time, money, and proper preparation have nixed the idea. Still, I will carry on with an adventure of some sort, which means I'll likely ride north to the Thompson highway, then west into the Rockies, then north again up the Icefields Parkway. From there I plan to ride the Yellowhead down to Kamloops  before returning home on the Kettle Valley Railway. At least that's the plan today, barring further distraction. One thing for sure, I'm ready to get out of Calgary and feel I've given it a real good look. It's also been nice to have some real quality time with my old friends, the Kelley's, who have remained very warm and hospitable to me. We go a long way back and its real nice to have had the chance to renew our friendship. They're a great family, for a bunch of American ex-pats!
    Well, I hope you're all well. Haven't heard from any of you in a while so all I can do is hope you're having a good summer. I sure am!