This year, Rem and I took a three-part vacation in the land of his birth, British Columbia. We spent the better part of 10 days biking around Vancouver Island (Victoria - Nanaimo - Port Alberni - (boat) - Ucluelet - Tofino), sitting on sandy beaches and visiting Rem's brother & his fiancee. After that, we attended the wedding festivities of one of Rem's best friends from way back and then spent a few days lazing around in Vernon.
The bike trip was good, though the beginning of it was difficult. A weekend of insufficient and stress-y sleep before trying to peddle a loaded bike up hills was probably not the best way to start. Fortunately, it meant that the end of the trip, where the road was flatter and I was better rested, felt positively easy.
The weather was nice - sunny and warm for all but one day which was only cool and happily not rainy. Between poor surfaces and some killer grades, we were limited to mostly highways but happily there was almost always enough shoulder to feel comfortable. The one notable exception was trying to get out of Nanaimo, which turned out to be about 20 km of strip malls and big box stores: the incessant dodging of meridians and impatient drivers trying to turn was unpleasant.
As you might have expected, Rem did the research for this trip and concluded that none of it would make me divorce him. His one warning was that between Nanaimo & Port Alberni was "one good hill". After the third "good hill" that day, he thought that we were done climbing. Then, wading in the glorious cool Cameron lake water, I got talking to a family there and was told, "I'm so impressed you guys are tackling the hump." Eh? What? The Hump? "One Good Hill" had a name. I was not pleased.
When we finally got there, The Hump turned out to be a three stage hill. The first two stages were tough but okay, but the third stage had an 8% grade. I could only go about 100m at a time before stopping to huff and puff and blow myself over. Ascension took a good while. Just as I was getting near the top and trying to avoid (yet more) broken glass, I thought to myself that it would really suck to get a flat tire up there. As soon I finished thinking it, hissssssssss. Rem had it fixed within about 10 minutes, and I appreciated the break, even if it was taken sitting on the shoulder against a concrete barricade and watching large trucks whizz by. We saw the sign shortly thereafter: 411m. A wee bit more than "a good hill"!!
I got him back, though. We spent a couple days around Tofino, biking to the beaches and hiking trails (three cheers for incredible old growth rainforest), and I wanted to stop at an observation post on the way back. I'd read the description in the book and it sounded very nice, even if the path to the outlook was 150m of steep climbing. Trouble is, I didn't think about the fact that it was an OBSERVATION POINT called Radar HILL and thus was likely to be the highest point around. The road turned out to be even worse than The Hump, if shorter (? maybe?). We weren't loaded this time, but I still had to walk up with a quarter or so of the road to go. Rem made it up pedalling but said he was going as hard as he could while standing and still
just barely kept moving. The girls at the top who'd passed us in cars commented on how they thought we were hardcore. This prompted much laughter and eventually a discussion about the continuum of hardcore cyclists as viewed by non-cyclists. I concluded that I was at the bottom and crazy Malcolm (who in addition to biking Asia on a tandem, chose to bike across Europe solo - starting from Vladivostok on the eastern coast) is at the top. Fortunately, after all that work, the "steep" path was nothing and the view was gorgeous. Too bad we forgot the camera.
