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Braintree resident Madeline Sharrow and friend Matthew Manning of Northfield biked about 1000 miles through Canada this summer. Dew-encrusted sunlight filters through the side of our tent. Slowly Matthew and I extract ourselves from our sleeping bags and step out into the misty morning. Bread and peanut butter for breakfast…again, maybe lunch too, depending on how far we can bike before hunger sets in once more. Middle of nowhere Ontario, 50-something km till the next town, 90 km till the one after that. Matthew and I have been on our bikes for the last three weeks. Left the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont August 6 and headed up Route 108 into Quebec. The plan, as we explained to the skeptical boarder patrol, was to bike as far west as we could in the next month and a half. Destination: The West Coast. I had been planning this trip all winter. Matthew and I wanted to bike for the adventure of athletic traveling. We also wanted to prove that bicycles can provide a viable means of transportation, even for long distances. (We may not have broken any speed record, but we definitely didn’t consume any fossil fuels). We decided to go through Canada out of curiosity. Eager to explore a new place , this mysterious country that is so close and yet, I hardly knew. Matthew and I decided to use mountain bikes fitted with heavily treaded road bike tires. I was riding an old yard sale bike we’d had at my house for the last few years and Matthew got a bike from the bike shop in Rochester. To carry our gear we had made panniers out of old back packs and a square five-gallon bucket. Our friend Ian Burton had passed the technique on and the homemade panniers held up magnificently. We were determined to keep our gear to a minimum. We settled on bike helmets, bike lube, extra tubes, a pressure gauge, a small air pump and a min combination bike tool. No padded shorts, spandex, gloves speedometer or special shoes for us. For this reason I think people sometimes didn’t know what to make of us. Were we really serious bikers? Or outlandish traveling vagrants passing through town? Fancy gear, or no, we encountered no end of friendly, curious and hospitable people along the way. In Thunder Bay, again and again we were surprised and inspired by the kindness of strangers who recognized that we were traveling a rough road and were curious to hear about our adventure. Once in Ontario we purchased a map of the incomprehensibly massive province and day-by-day planned out our route westward. In eastern Ontario we biked south along the St. Lawrence River, swimming and camping on its banks. We then headed north on smaller roads through the Algonquin Provincial Park where we spent an incredibly grueling day laboring up hill and mountain while tourists, trucks and RVs wizzed by. In Perry Sound we had our first taste of the TransCanada highway, which we ended up following all the way through Sault St. Marie to Thunder Bay, Ontario. The TransCanada highway proved to be stressful, but manageable and entirely variable in condition. Some stretches had a huge shoulder for us to ride on. In other places the shoulder was much more narrow and infested with jarring bumps, harrowing cracks and rough potholes. The traffic was usually quite heavy and fast moving, which we soon became accustomed to. I was most impressed however by the courtesy of the Canadian truckers. Highway 17 has a constant flow of gigantic 18-wheelers, dump trucks, and all manner of large vehicles flying along it. I would have thought that a cyclist’s worst nightmare to be a semi, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that 99% of the truckers passing us would move way over in their lanes to give us a wide and safe berth. Once Matthew and I reached Thunder Bay, after three-and–a-half weeks of straight biking, it was clear that we were not going to make it all the way across the continent in the remaining time,. The weather was becoming noticeably colder and I had to be in Washington state for school by mid September. We decided to take a bus across the plains and use the remainder of our time to bike down the coast of British Columbia into Washington. The 48-hour Greyhound trip was undoubtedly the worst part of the whole trip. But it was worth it once we piled out, exhausted and disoriented into the sunny streets of Vancouver, B.B. After a few days visiting old friend, Tar Goreau, at the University of British Columbia, Matthew and I biked down into Washington and ended our trip soon after in Olympia. It’s nearly impossible to say how far we actually biked. Converting kilometers to miles is one thing, but with all the back roads we took in Quebec, times we got lost and over all confusion, it is entirely hard to say. I think the entire trip must have been at least 1000 miles, since we made it about a third of the way across Canada, but who knows… I wanted people back home to read about our trip so that you all could have a part in our adventure. Whenever I go out into the world I think about my home and I feel like I carry a part of Braintree with me wherever I go. I also want to tell about our cycle trip because all along the way we met people who were astounded by how far we’d biked. Contrary to popular assumption, you don’t have to be wildly athletic, have lots of money or fancy cycle gear to bike off into the sunset . Anyone can do it, we’re living proof. _____________ |
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