Vancouver to Santa Cruz

We only made it about 40 miles along our 85 mile journey today. The rain was simply too intense. We stopped at the Hungry Bear Cafe at around 1pm, completely soaked, head to toe, shoes full of water, cold, and hungry. After drinking hot beverages, eating lunch, and checking the weather forecast, Jas and I both decided it would be best to go to Forks, get a motel, and take tomorrow off. The catch, of course, is that thanks to the wonderful phenomenon that is Twilight, every motel in Forks is completely booked from here to the next pre-teen vampire fad. So, we decided to set up shop at the Bear Creek Motel, a convenient 100 yard walk from the Hungry Bear Cafe. There’s wifi and beer in the cafe, and a heater and a shower in the room. It cost some money ($70 per night, about half the price of a room in Forks), but we’ll be dry and comfortable for the next day.

I spent the past hour or two figuring out how to get photos posted the way I wanted, so there’s a photo post pre-dated to August 7 a few entries down with pre-trip photos. I’ll post more photos from along the way a little later. Time to stretch and figure out dinner now. Wednesday looks like it might be partially cloudy, which is a big step up from the flood we endured today.

At least my socks are made of wool.

So, I wrote the last entry outside of a place called Tim Hortons. Canadian’s know it well and love it, for good reason. Great donuts, great coffee, and probably the only place where you can get a sandwich combo that includes a sandwich, a donut, and a coffee. For lunch. Internet was provided by a sit-down jive called Earl’s that (probably accidentally) managed to broadcast WiFi across the street.

After having a donut and a cup of Throat Coat, we rode about 60km through Vancouver down to Tsawassan to catch the ferry to Vancouver Island. The ferry took about an hour and a half and landed us just north of a town called Syndey. Incidentally, about half of the ride to Tsawassan was on Hwy 17, which ended at the ferry and miraculously continued onto Vancouver Island. It was our first of surely many times of riding along the highway.

Once on Vancouver Island, we rode to the first Visitor Information centre to figure out campgrounds for the night. We wound up staying in a quaint little state-owned campground just south of where we landed on the island (just north of the visitor centre), but only after we rode the 10km into Sydney to pick up food and Canadian money.

The campground was peaceful and quiet, a stark difference from the crowded, noisy routine they were running in North Vancouver. Peace and quiet comes at a cost, though. Somewhere in the early morning hours, it started to rain. Coincidentally (or not?), I woke up in time to hear drizzling and in time to bring our shoes into the tent to prevent them from getting soaked. All in all, the rain wasn’t too bad, but it certainly motivated us to stay in the tent longer than we should have (about 8:30). By the time we were packed up and on the road this morning, the rain had ceased and most of our goods were still wet.

Since we got a late start, we nixed our plan to go to the Safeway in Sydney with free WiFi and blog, instead choosing to truck it to Victoria. It was a good choice. We had a nice stop at our last Tim Horton’s before the states, looked at parliament, rode around the city for half an hour, and then caught the ferry into Port Angeles. I would’ve liked to stop to get a picture or two of arriving in the US, but it was 5pm and we were on our bikes and more interested in figuring out where we would be staying for the night.

We wound up heading west towards the coast, along the Olympic peninsula to an RV park on the Elwha Dam. Conveniently, they also have WiFi, and they’re letting us stay in their BBQ pavillion (basically a picnic area) which is conveniently covered. Considering the clouds and weather forecasts, sleeping on concrete is a pittance to pay for a guaranteed dry night. Especially given our route for tomorrow, a hefty 85 miles.

Tonight we’ll be (ab)using the WiFi to upload the handful of videos that Jas has taken with the Flip. I still haven’t had time to write code to incorporate photo posting as I’d like, so I don’t yet have any photos to share. When we take a day off from riding I’ll sit down and work it out.

Right now I’m giving the computer to Jas so he can do his thing.

-k

P.S. – The google map that documents our journey is updated as well. Have a look!

We arrived safely in Vancouver sometime around 5pm on Friday night, dropped off by Eddie and Andrew. The drive up was rather long, and didn’t allow for very much sleep. As a group it was decided to head on in to Stanley Park in Vancouver, at which point we spent a few minutes unloading and preparping, with a very small amount of park wanderings in between. Kevin and I took off from the park region and proceeded along the Lion’s gate bridge and stayed near the water in an RV park just on the other side.

On Saturday we proceeded down towards Tawwassen, stopping to pick up a few supplies on the way, like another bag for Kevin, and a cyclocomputer for me. Both have been fairly handy for us thus far. From here I had my first flat tire of the trip, which turned out to be fairly quick to fix. Once we hit Tawwassen, we took the ferry across to Vancouver Island just north of Sidney and found a little-known campsite for the night.

It was extremely undeveloped as far as state or federal campsites go, and was exactly what we were looking for.

This morning we left our now wet (thanks rain) campsite and headed in to Victoria proper, about a 30k ride.

This part of the ride was really quite nice, there was a side of the road bike path from where we were about 1/3 of the way in, at which point we were on Hwy 17 precisely. (Amusingly enough we rode across all of Hwy 17.) Stopped at a Tim Horton’s in Victoria, which doesn’t happen to be as plentiful as on the east coast. Biked the rest of the way downtown to Victoria, and got to see the Parliament building from the outside, and then caught another ferry from Victora into Port Angeles.

(This one isn’t that interesting)

Tonight we’re in Elwha, Washington, just outside the port and it is the first time we have had internet and power for an extended period of time. With any luck the batch upload of videos will work, and the above place holders will be removed. done.

Hopefully at the start of Oregon, we will take a day break and another set of blog posts .

From in the car, taking off at Stanley Park, the Lions Gate Bridge, and our first campground.

We made it up to Vancouver at about 6pm last night, tired and disheveled. The drive up was direct, but we hit traffic in pretty much all of Washington. We also managed to hit rush hour traffic through Vancouver. Fun.

Andrew and Eddie dropped us off in Stanley Park, a nice place to start a long journey. We rode through the park and across Lions Gate Bridge to Capilano RV Park for the evening. The campground was a bit noisy, and our tent was right next to the on ramp for the bridge, so sleep was a bit light. On top of that, the tent my dad said was a two-sleeper was a wee bit short for Jas, and a wee bit small to fit all of our stuff inside.

Today we’re off to Victoria on Vancouver Island. Here’s a map of progress:
View Bike Trip 2009 in a larger map

And Jas posted a video.

I’ve got photos working as I’d like, so here’s the first gallery. Hopefully I can pre-date it so that it appears before we actually left, since it’s a gallery of pre-trip photos.

I arrived in Santa Cruz yesterday evening and got a drink or two with my old housemates.  I also tried out the sleeping bag/mattress pad for the first time.  The sleeping bag I’m borrowing from my dad is more like a fleece blanket with a zipper.  It’s super lightweight, and rolls up pretty small, but manages to keep me pretty warm.  My only gripe is that I’m used to big down comforters and bundling them up between my legs and arms.  Time to get new sleeping habbits I suppose.

Next post will be from the road or Vancouver, with pictures.

-Kevin

This is a more important post than it may seem. It’s proof that I can connect to the internet and post to this blog on my eeePC from my iPhone.

For the geeks out there, this was actually a bit tricky, as the eee is running eeeXubuntu, rather than the formally supported (by PdaNet) Windows XP or Mac OS. Specific instructions for getting PdaNet to work on Linux are non-existent, or at least burried deep in Google.

So, for my future reference, and for the reference of anyone who is interested in both setting up and connecting to an ad-hoc network on Linux, here’s the step-by-step conglomerated from tutorials here and here:

• Open Terminal
• % sudo -i
• % /etc/dbus-1/event.d/25NetworkManager stop
• % wlanconfig ath0 destroy
• % wlanconfig ath1 create nounit wlandev wifi0 wlanmode adhoc
• % iwconfig ath1 mode Ad-Hoc essid “networknamehere”
• % iwconfig ath1 enc open “passwordhere” //this line is optional, only required if you want a secure network (advised)
• % ifconfig ath1 -promisc 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

This is pretty much where the first tutorial takes us, though I’ve left out the line to stop the NetworkManagerDispatcher, as it doesn’t seem to be necessary.  This alone won’t work.  It establishes the ad-hoc network, but leaves your eeePC unconnected.  For tethering to work, both the iPhone and the eee need to be connected to the adhoc network, and the connection step requires a bit of fudge.

There’s only one more command left, but timing makes a difference.  The command:

• % dhclient ath1

This attempts to connect to the DHCP server, which is not on the eee, so before you execute this command, you need to have your iPhone connected to the network you created in the lines above, and have PdaNet open and ready to go.  It took me a couple of rounds of trying dhclient before PdaNet saw the computer, and I decided to renew the lease in the middle of this post for good measure (that only took one try), but it will work eventually.

So, now we know we can blog from the road, as long as iPhone gets service.  I haven’t tried uploading any photos from the tether yet, but we’ll see how it works soon enough.

Tomorrow I’ll be test riding up Topanga with my trailer full of stuff to see how the load feels on hills.