Day 1 - Sandbags

Getting the Trailers packed up



Leaving New Westminster



Along 0 Ave to the border, Langley



Along 0 Ave to the border, Langley



An old barn, Langley



So, we're in... (drum roll please) ... New Westminster!

We left Alana's house at about 4:15pm on Monday after running around doing jobs. We had a few hiccoughs like a tire that wouldn't inflate, too much gear to fit in the trailers, etc. Once we finally got rolling and Alana was able to control the shaking of her bike/trailer we felt good. We rode about 30km out to the New Westminster Quay where the road was blocked by giant sand bags because of the high level of the Fraser river.

Being the brilliant minds that we are, we decided to simply haul the bikes over the sand bags. Ha. We seemed to have made it over successfully until we tried to leave and found that Alana's derailer had been smashed into her spokes and was caught there. After some wiggling we were able to release the trapped spoke and pulled the derailer back so that the bike could roll, but it needed to be fixed.

Fortunately, Alana's Aunt Linda and Uncle Ron (officially the nicest people in the world) live very near to the Quay, so we walked the 20min to their house and showed up just in time for dinner!

Because it was already 7:30pm by the time we got to the house, the only bike shop that we could get ahold of was the old hippie guy who lives in his shop down on 12th. He was not impressed but managed to straighten out the derailer enough to be able to shift (breaking a tool in the process which cost us an extra $10 - possibly because the tip of the wrench is still stuck in the derailer and we took it with us??). He called us later that night to tell us that we could probably get the tip out using a magnet, which was very thoughful of him. >=)

Anyhow, we took the bikes into Caps bike shop this morning and they are fabulous. They've fixed up the spokes and derailleur, and caught some more potential problems. (Alana's brakes were not installed properly and it turns out that most of my suffering is because my seat is too narrow for my wide ass bones - go figure! My derailleur was also a little bit bent.)

We'll get the bikes back at about 5:30pm and are hoping to make it to Langley where we'll spend the night at Horia's parents' house near to the border. That way we can cross into the US nice and early on Wednesday morning. That's the plan, anyway!

All things said and done, bending the derailleurs ("breaking the bikes", as Alana likes to say) was not such a bad thing. At least it got us into a proper bike shop which prevented some future problems. And when I think about the first two days of my bike trip in Argentina... we'd camped for the night in a field by a little stream and while we were making supper some gauchos rode by driving hundreds of sheep through the fence and across the road. When we got up to leave the next morning we realized that the sheep's hooves had turned the earth to thick clay mud which stuck to our tires so thickly that it clogged the space between the forks and tire so that the wheels wouldn't turn. So, then we had to haul the bikes and trailers through the muck and over the fences (which the gauchos had locked behind them) to the road. By the time we got there, the mud had cemented to the bikes so strongly that we had to hitchhike with the bikes and trailers all the way back to the town that we had started in to have them cleaned with a power washer. Compared to that, yesterday was a breeze!!

We'll post pictures when we can!