How to Have a Good Time on the Sunshine Coast

a bike trip in British Columbia

[Listen to Blake read this as a 4-minute audio file.]

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Ingredients for a good time: 

• Three friends, three bicycles

• Three days on the Sunshine Coast, four on Vancouver Island

• Long, cool, summer-solstice days (following a much-too-rainy spring)

• Hills, flats, suburbs, highways, forests, towns, cities, a true diversity of environment

• 40-80 kilometers (25-50 miles) of pedal-pushing a day: far enough to make everything taste amazing, short enough to maintain good humor

Ingredients for a better time:

• Rewarding your first big hill climb with a brewery stop

• Sneaking a carrot cake in a bike bag for 10km to surprise your friends after dinner

• Waking to a prepared French press after 9.5 hours of undisturbed sleeping bag slumber

• Splaying out shirtless on the sun deck of the enormous “BC Ferries” that shuttle you between islands and peninsulas

• Chipping away at your queue of audiobooks and podcasts on endless straightaway stretches

• Indulging the many old guys who wish to advise you on road status, side-treks, and life-changing bakeries—sometimes dangerously crossing the highway to do so

• Afternoon swims in frigid lakes, dinners on ocean horizons, crabs dueling in evening light, mosquitos dancing above mesh barriers, flying downhill fast enough to forget the concept of “future uphill,” accepting endless headwinds as karmic repayment for a life of tailwinds

Ingredients for the best time:

• Six hours in a sun-drenched backyard biergarten, ranking dogs’ attractiveness, napping after a growler, drawing each other without looking at the paper, Egyptian rat screw, acroyoga, and a cat named Wanda

• Stealth camping in a logging site loaded with berries and bear scat, oh-look-some-actual-bears!, scrounging together a last-ditch dinner of instant mash + mac’n-cheese + bell pepper + wild fennel, dirtbike-dudebros harassing you at midnight, followed by a light rain

• Forgetting your beloved notebook at a lakeside park, taking a phone call from a random BC number just before boarding a ferry—”I think I found your journal”—missing the ferry but safe in your hands again, thank god for observant strangers and first-page inscriptions

• Accepting the inevitable ups and downs of biking, mapping this onto your emotional landscape, recognizing your desire for constant ups and downs, your aversion to flats, your rejection of stability and predictability, give me hills or give me death

• Staying with a zero-reference Warmshowers host who surprises you with a veritable seaside palace, beers on arrival, airbed, hot tub (my god, a hot tub!), morning lattes, two sociable cats, and two pieces of advice for staying adventurous through your mid-sixties: keep doing the the thing you want to be doing, and do it such that you can do it again tomorrow

• Waving goodbye to your bike buddies to cross a treacherous mountain pass to visit two Canadian friends you made in Latin America, the first in Bolivia when you were 24 and she 19, now with house-husband-newborn but still an irrepressible drive to travel-explore-defy-convention, the second from Guatemala, six years ago, now happily ensconced in the surfer-bum-mecca of Tofino, a fellow restless-world-wanderer who’s found a home

• Returning to Vancouver over bridge and ferry, happy-tired, wild-bearded, quads thrashed, lungs inflated with Pacific breeze, again appreciative of all that civilization offers, again curious-vibrant-enlivened, smashing salad-pizza-ice-cream into face-hole, mind swimming with writing-business-adventure ideas, in love with biking, friends, future, this life.