I met an interesting guy the other day.
Fresh off retirement, Kevin, a guy from Maple Ridge, down in the Fraser Valley, thought he needed something to ‘transition’ himself from working full time to retirement. That’s all you have to know to tell you he’s a little different than you and me. You and I like to transition from working in the afternoon to the evening with a thing called supper. And we have transitioned from summer to winter many times with another thing called September.
Sure, we transition all the time. We could think of several other examples.
But this guy, Kevin, decided that to transition from working full time to retiremen,t he would ride his bicycle across Canada.
Across Canada!
Yeah, across Canada.
I think riding a bike across B.C. would take all the transition needs out of my head and body. In fact, it might not even take that far. Maybe Kamloops to Golden would do it. Or if I tried Parson to Golden, I might have everything all sorted out by the time I got to the 12-mile. And, in all honesty, if I were really going to do it, I’d probably leave from Nicholson.
But not Kevin.
He must have had lots of things to work out in switching from work to retirement, to need two to three months and nearly 7,000 km to get it done.
Of course, there’s more to the story than that.
Kevin’s wife decided to give him some kind of a retirement gift, and instead of giving him some ‘thing’, she decided to give him a couple of bicycles that he could, in turn, give to some underprivileged kids. Well that turned into something, with the mother of one of the kids who received a bike being so appreciative that he got hooked on doing things for kids, and came upon the idea of riding his bike across Canada to raise $8,000 to buy things for more kids.
Now the idea of a bike-a-thon is nothing new, and when Terry Fox did his Marathon of Hope in 1980, it captured the whole Canadian imagination and still does. But it’s been done so many times that the idea has somewhat lost its sparkle, so it seems to be quite a thing to still try to make it work all by yourself.
But Kevin is doing it.
No motorhome behind him. No crowds at intersections. No help in a thunderstorm. Just miles and miles and more miles. And Canada is not the Netherlands, which Kevin could probably ride across in a couple of days.
He left Victoria, his Mile 0, on Canada Day, and pulled into Golden on July 11, not bad the way I figure it. He says he expected his biggest challenge to be the mountains in B.C., and he did find the trek up to the summit of Rogers Pass from the west to be very much just that. A long, tough slug.
I think he’ll find that the prairies might be a bigger challenge, with the boredom, than our mountains. Just imagine, from Canmore on, it’s a long way to the bushland of northern Ontario, where there might be a little hope of seeing a tree or two. There’s no hope of a person being entertained on the prairie. Bad enough in a car, but on a bike, it would last forever.
Kevin can probably do Canmore to Calgary in one day, and the problem is that when he gets to Calgary, he might think he is halfway across Alberta. No, no, no. When the fur traders set up Fort Calgary, they didn’t put it in the middle of the province, knowing Kevin might be doing this two hundred years later and would like to have had it in the middle, to just even out the effort. Canmore to Calgary is just over 100 km, but Calgary to the Saskatchewan border is about 350 km.
And then yes, the prize for getting across Alberta is Saskatchewan. And if that isn’t like getting some coal in your sock at Christmas, I don’t know what could be, especially if you were looking for some excitement when you reach a provincial border. But just for the sake of discussion here, after the prairies comes the aforementioned Ontario. And I know from driving some of it, biking across Ontario would be like a ladybug climbing Mount Seven. It’s 2100 km. Pretty in lots of places. But 2100 km of asphalt staring you in the face at the Manitoba border?
I salute this fellow, Kevin, and his wife, for having an admirable purpose for which to raise some money for kids, and I’m sure he’ll make it to Cape Spear, Newfoundland, right on schedule. He won’t get even a fraction of the recognition that Terry Fox got, but he isn’t doing it for recognition.
But even just thinking about it?
I’m already exhausted.
