The Pacific West Coast - it begins

Our bikes are in plastic bags, our worldly possessions are in Chinese bags held together by parcel tape and we are off to Heathrow tomorrow. It is an adventure 3 years in the planning, we are going to cycle the Pacific Highway from Vancouver to Mexico. 2000 miles down the Pacific Coast at 35-40 miles a day plus side trips to Seattle, Yosemite (if it has not been burnt down by the current forest fires) and a few days in San Francisco. 

This is a recognised cycle route, details can be found at http://www.adventurecycling.org/ . The Adventure Cycling Association is the US equivalent to our CTC. We plan to head south from Vancouver on 4^th

September and arrive in San Diego about 7^th or 8^th November – about 65 days.  The guide book recommends starting after Labor Day (1^st Monday in September) as this is the day that the locals put their RV’s in the garage for the winter and the roads are much quieter. The weather is still good and the prevailing wind is from the north and should blow us to California.

We will be stopping at the Mexican border as the guide book says “Tijuana (just south of the border) is no place for a Gringo on a bike”!

So ‘Who’s Who’.  Gilly and I (Brits) who have many miles of cycle touring under our belts – bums as hard as steel and panniers as light as a feather (well mine are!).

Pat and Di (he Kenyan and she Brit) now living in Atlanta, this is Di’s first major tour and hopefully she will remember the golden rules of cycle touring:

1.     Always look cool.

2.    Sometimes things go wrong.

3.    If rule 2 applies always – yep always - refer to rule 1.

4.    Absolutely no whinging!!!!

Di will have a couple of weeks off in the middle of the trip as she has a previous engagement with a golf course.

Jim and Marlene (Canuks), we met them in a small village in Northern Spain, Villaviciosa, they were walking the Northern Camino to Santiago in the rain and we were cycling to France in the rain! They are native to Vancouver.

Michael (Yankee Doodle), we spent 6 weeks or so with Michael and his wife Donna in Africa. He is now the wrong side of 70 but, as in Tanzania when he joined the macho crowd to climb Kilimanjaro, he has decided it is never too late to try something new. (P.S. I stayed at the bottom with some of the ladies).

Gilly and I plan to stay in the US for about a month at the end of the trip. We will pop across the border to Tijuana with a friend of Pats (who works there) for a night or two. After a few day exploring the San Diego area we fly into Las Vegas for a week, then we fly to Los Angeles to catch the Amtrak across southern USA to New Orleans, then onto Atlanta and into the Appalachians for a few days staying with Michael and Donna at their mountain house. We should be back home on about 8^th December – just in time for the British winter.