Monday, August 23, 2010

In my last blog I said "when I get home I will be doing a final update to the blog"
Although i arrived in Saint John's a year ago today, it took a lot longer for my trip to end.
I ended up re-doing the trip vicariously this summer through Dale Spence and Bob Wiggington. I met Dale last summer on my way through Agassiz, he was cycling as far as Calgary. Dale's plan was to leave from Calgary this summer and go as far as Ottawa, he had already done Newfoundland and will be completeing Ottawa-Maritimes in 2011. Because Dale had a conference in Vancouver this June and he liked BC so much, he decided to do Vancouver to Ottawa this year. Lorraine and I went to Vancouver on June 11th to send him off. I followed his progress daily via text messages and google maps until he met up with Bob Wiggington, Bob was keeping an excellent blog it almost felt like I was with them. http://bobwigington.wordpress.com/
Google maps has a feature that has kept me entertained for hours, if you drag the little orange man that is ontop of the zoom bar over the map, plop the little man on the blue highlighted roads, you get a 360 degree view, simply amazing.Every night when i came home this summer, i would check my journal from last year and google map my route, zoom in on interesting things along the way, where i ate lunch, the names of campsites or motels, and all from the comfort of my chair.
So strangely, with a bit of sadness, today is the last day of my adventure, I have lived it, re-lived it and am ready to plan the next trip. Currently, Lorraine and I are thinking of a cycling trip around parts of Great Britain. We are off to Maui in January, who knows we may end up renting bikes there, we heard the Haleakala Hwy is a nice ride.
I'm very fortunate to have done the ride across Canada and thank everyone who helped along the way and at home. It was the trip of a lifetime and I would do it all again.
I have placed several of my pictures on Facebook, feel free to take a look. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=100001459380580&ref=ts