Date: Sunday, August 20, 1995
Location: Vancouver, BC
Distance: 112km
Time: 5h 30m rolling, 8h total
Average Speed: 20.4kph rolling, 14kph total
Maximum Speed: 54.5kph (yawn)
After taking Saturday as a no cycling day, it was time to go somewhere I'd never been before -- after all, I'd already taken my MTB most everywhere I went last week. I hit the road at 8:30am on a cool and sunny morning, heading southeast to New Westminster. An uneventful leg of the journey, I've taken this route many times, and the streets are still almost dead at this time of day.
First challenge, getting onto the Patullo Bridge. Somehow I took a wrong turn and ended up a long way under the bridge, cycling alongside a freight train, whose tracks run right at the very edge of the road, with no shoulder. An interesting experience. Eventually I managed to get onto the bridge from the other side, and after a couple nasty backstreet hills I was in Surrey. Ok, so I'm a wimp and pushed the bike up the last hill.
There wasn't much to see in Surrey, and the city seems to just keep going up and down. Nature was starting to whisper in my ear, but the park at the top of the hill didn't have any public washrooms, so I pushed on through the city and onto highway 1A. That also kept going up and down, but at least they were long downs to fly on, and long ups which I could actually spin through.
A few kilometers before Langley I pulled into a friendly Esso and utilized the facilities. When I came back out to my bike, a middle-aged man getting a fillup came over and started asking questions. I gave him the very first copy of the pamphlet I made from the Bent FAQ -- I guess that makes me a verified apostle of the church of the bent.
Just before Langley I turned left on highway 10 and headed northeast towards Fort Langley. The highways so far had been quite decent, reasonable widths of shoulder, and not too much debris on them, and thankfully the trend continued. A fairly mundane strech of land and two dropped wedgies later, I was in Fort Langley. Hmm, feels like lunchtime, so it's off to Fort Langley Park.
Well, actually I overshot the park and ended up on a Langley bike route headed east toward the seaplane base, dropping another pack of wedgies en route. I stopped to pull out the map and get my bearings again. One of the wedgies I dropped turned out to be an 85 year-old man out on his mountain bike. He was quite interested in my bent, so I gave him another copy of the FAQ. I hope I'm still getting around as well as he is when I'm 85. Back to the park, and it's a round of sticky buns to keep my stomach happy.
After lunch it was off to the Albion ferry and north over the Fraser River. One of the men working on the ferry was quite interested in the bent, but he didn't start asking questions until I was on my way off so I didn't have time to give him my last copy of the FAQ. Oh well. Now in Maple Ridge I was off down the Lougheed Highway, west through Pitt Meadows, and over the Pitt River Bridge into Port Coquitlam. Not much else to say about the land east of Pitt River, it alternates between strip mall development, and land being prepared for strip mall development.
In Coquitlam I didn't bother checking the map and ended up on the Barnett Highway rather than the Lougheed as I had originally planned. No big deal, and the view from the north side of Burnaby mountain was almost certainly more scenic than the south. The yellow mountains of sulphur on the south shore of Port Moody are a striking contrast to the lack of development along much of the north shore. It should be even better once they finish construction on the highway...
On the west side of the mountain, it was practically like being back in Surrey -- the road started going up and down again. Really nice downs though. I probably hit the maximum speed of the day somewhere around here. Lots of kids out to be impressed with the bent too.
After that it was pretty standard fare, rejoining the Lougheed Highway and heading west towards home. I idled at Anime Jyanai for an hour checking on fansub orders for people who had been emailing me, then finally it was home down familiar roads, and into a plate of spaghetti.
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August 20, 1995: Century II: The Madness Takes Langley