OK, day two didn't start well (I am a notoriously late sleeper - not recommended for a cycling tour), but I'd have to get used to it. After a lovely breakfast at the Laurel Point Inn - I was sorry to see the back of that place, what a bathroom! - we gathered for the day two prep talk, gear check and prep, and route description.
Ahead was a 42km ride to Buchart Gardens along the scenic East coast of Vancouver Island. It guaranteed to be a lovely ride with a perfect clear blue sky and crisp but warming temp. Once again, I blatantly refused the use of my route guide and determined to follow anyone who looked like they knew what they were doing. This was a sound strategy.
Well at least it was until within 2 kms I'd flatted a front tire and was left stranded! Bleh! Happily, my backpack revealed tubes aplenty and the kindly Bob stopped and offered me the use of his pump (I wasn't carrying mine - it was the thrill of danger I was chasing!) With a top-up from the van's pump, which had pulled up (the van, not it's pump!) and with guide Marty now in tow - man I towed that guy everywhere :P - the road along rolling, smooth and gloriously scenic suburban roads continued.
Millionaires are like locusts around here; if the house isn't worth a million the view is, as per below:
Forgive the slight detour into degradation, but Marty and I vowed to take up running along here - the sheer number of spectacular ladies jogging this route was mind-numbing. I do believe our average bike speed dropped below about 5km/h!
I will say that on tour we also had a gorgeous and lovely young lady - Meagan, who was completing the tour with her dad Tom. Meagan, a yoga teacher, seemed to be enjoying the ride and I rode along with her for a while, but didn't say much as I'm not well versed on what old farts like myself say to lovely young ladies. I mostly just rode in front, in the process very likely making her wonder "what the hell is this old fart doing riding in front of me"?
After a gorgeous ride, we arrived for lunch at the world famous Buchart Gardens. All I can say is google it, coz I'm not into gardens, gardening or dirt! What I saw from the lunch area as I ate a hearty meal looked nice tho'! Some group members lined up but the lines were long and time was short.
This lunch was like all others on the tours - well organised, delicious, and with a great mix of foods comprising all the groups: vegetables and salad, meats, breads and carbos and the obligatory stuff-that-is-normally-bad for you: chips, m@ms, chocolate covered raisins and nuts, fat cooked into food-like shapes, mercury (well, maybe not the last one, but you get the picture). I soon learned that a balance of the former 'good' foods and the latter 'bad' foods was essential, both for peak operating performance, and to dissuade my body of the notion that it was was going to have any chance of losing weight on tour!
After lunch, an optional ride of 19km to the ferry terminal at Swartz Bay for our transport to the next island and our digs for the night. I wanted to ride - my bike didn't. Another flat, this time under cover of the bike rack! A pinched tube was the immediate suspicion but nope - a failure on the tube seam.
Post-repair and feeling decidedly less confident about the tube situation, Marty, Bob and myself nevertheless decided to hammer out the 19kms optional ride and got a nice train going at 30km/h+ along the 'undulating' terrain. This term would later come to be viewed with deserved suspicion, as the guides' use of it described just about every type of hill, mountain and valley terrain imaginable. Undulating is code for "don't tell them it's steep!" and under this broad classification, Mt Everest would be 'slightly more undulating'.
Just a side note here - I'm from a particularly flattish piece of earth, so any combination of hill plus my mass of 92kgs conspires to severely decrease my forward motion. I pretty quickly acclimated to climbing on the tour, but at first, these islands were quite 'undulating'!
Bob didn't seem to think so - closer to the ferry where it got a little more undulating he took off like a greyhound: I presume nature was calling! Great bloke and rode the pants off his S @ S equipped (couplings allowing one to separate a frame into two parts for tighter packing) steel frame. Marty hung with me as he wanted to watch me suffer as I dragged him up hills!
After a short wait for all of us to gather and the arrival of the ferry, it was all aboard and onto the next island: Galliano, and our accommodation for the next two nights, lovely Woodstone Country Inn (I have the pic to prove it!).
A short blat (4km) up a steepish rise and we were there! More on the Inn later. We were all allocated rooms: the rooms were all identified via names of flowers/floral bushes - I got Lavender! My nationality again was causing me pain - it was a plot!
One magnificent dinner and a lot of great conversation later, lots of laughs and I personally having a great chat with Ric - the second of our guides and a friendly, smart and altogether champ of a guy who I clicked with straight up - it was off to the sack with dreams of flat tyres, flower-named rooms and good company in my head. And bonus - breakfast not until 8:30 the next morning! The holiday had begun!
No comments:
Post a Comment