Lance & Julia's Travel Blog: Sunshine Coast Cycle Tour

We've survived our first overnight cycle tour together! Up the Sunshine Coast to Sechelt and back. We had been trying to do this trip for a few months, but had ironically been put off by weekend after weekend of bad weather. The weather in and around Vancouver has gone decidedly downhill since we arrived, and now it's pretty much, without any exageration, constantly cloudy. The forecast for the weekend was in keeping with that - "rain sat am, light rain sat pm, showers sun am, and cloud with occasional rain sun pm". I read somewhere (the Kathmandu catalogue I believe - very knowledgable!) that the eskimos have like 100 different words for the snow, dealing with it so much, well Vancouverites are like that with rain. So, we finally came to the realisation that if we were going to do the trip before May 2009, we would have to brave the weather. Plus it was Lance's birthday...

Just in case you think I'm exaggerating, a colleague on the following monday excitedly asked how the trip was, saying how pleased she was that we got such "spectacular weather", and in the same breath told me about a small plane tragically crashing just near Sechelt (where we were), due to heavy fog! Seriously - these people need to get out of the country more!

Anyway - depsite the weather, we had a great time! We took the bus up to Horseshoe Bay, and the ferry over to Langdale. The clouds are bizarre, apparently due to the 'dew point' and the peculiar landscape of sea hitting towering mountains (can anyone explain this to me?) - so they just hang there, no matter how warm it is, or being right at sea level. We rode through Gibsons, a very cute seaside town home to an old Canadian TV show Beachcombers", more cute towns Robert's creek and through Sechelt (not so cute) and stayed at a lovely little BnB with, most importantly after a solid afternoon's riding, a seriously grunty spa!

It was good riding, we followed a lot of coastal back roads, it was relatively flat, lots of gorgeous scenery, and hey Lance was carrying all our gear (despite it being his birthday)! He was still a lot faster than me sadly...