Back home

Hello, Howe Soundings readers. Welcome back. I hope you had a good summer. I hope you swam in the ocean at least twice. I’d be happy to know that you ate at least one big handful of blackberries (even though the crop wasn’t that good, or so I’m told). It would please me immensely if, on at least one night, you sat outside and watched for meteors. And maybe you sat on Chaster Beach until late some hot August evening and sipped homebrew as the sun turned the sky peachy-gold and sank into the ocean somewhere past Parksville. That would’ve been pretty memorable.

I’m back from our summer adventure, and, having worked through most of the pressing tasks of settling back into home life, I can turn my attention to things like this blog (that, and baking bread and planting a cover crop in the garden and playing music and a few more things besides). As exhausting as it is, I cherish the experience of coming home from time away. Travelling gives you the chance to see home as a new place; it makes home fresh. Day-to-day things like walking to the grocery store and stopping at Truffles for coffee seem a little bit special after not doing them for so long – even if it was just six weeks. Glad to be home. Hello, Howe Sound. Hello Gibsons.

Maybe you had a look at the blog that Sheena and I updated during our bike trip. Whether you did or not, the blog hardly did the trip justice – we rarely had much time to write about our experiences, since internet access is, not surprisingly, fairly sporadic along the Trans Canada Trail! Whether I can do it justice now, in just a few words, is doubtful. I’ll just say that it was an excellent trip. Was it what I expected? Nothing ever turns out like you expect it to, but it was as good as or better than I expected. It was an amazing trip.

In short, we followed a combination of logging roads, mountain bike trails, and abandoned railways from Banff to Victoria via Elk Pass, Sparwood, Fernie, Baynes Lake, Cranbrook, Kimberley, Grey Creek, Nelson, Castlegar, Christina Lake, Grand Forks, Midway, Beaverdell, Naramata, Penticton, Summerland, Princeton, Tulameen, Hope, Mission, and Salt Spring Island. (In short, indeed.) Most of our route belonged to the Trans Canada Trail. The scenery ranged from spectacular to pretty nice, but the riding conditions, I’d say, ran the range from perfect to utterly terrible. From Castlegar to Hope, as we followed the Columbia & Western and then the Kettle Valley rail trails, we grumbled daily about trails turned into sand traps by ATVs and dirt bikes. That, I think, is my only complaint about the trip.

And now that it’s out of the way, the highlights: riding between snowy mountains and beside glassy lakes on the Spray Lakes Trail south of Canmore; hurtling down the far side of the impossibly steep Grey Creek Pass road on the way to visit friends in Nelson; stumbling through the pitch-blackness of a kilometre-long railway tunnel east of Christina Lake; eating ripe peaches with our feet in Lake Okanagan; swimming in the Slocan, Kettle, and Tulameen Rivers; camping by the water at perfect Ruckle Park. And more, many more.

But it’s nice to be home. See you around.