ON TWO WHEELS

In 2014, Susan and Clif spent five months cycling across Canada on a tandem bicycle — 8,192km from Victoria, British Columbia to St John’s, Newfoundland. This page is the full story of that trip, post by post, province by province.

Getting Started

• Nazca Quetzal Tandem At South Queensferry — The bike that would carry them 5,000 miles across Canada, parked at South Queensferry before a single mile was cycled.
• 51 Mile Training Run To Gullane — A 51-mile training run to Gullane, put in long before the real distance even began.
• Route Map — The full route plan for crossing Canada, mapped out before a single pedal stroke.

British Columbia

• Victoria To Nanaimo — Cycling out of Victoria into a 2m-wide hard shoulder crowded with pickup trucks, they coin the phrase ‘this one’s a pusher’ for the toughest hills — and Susan, adamant she doesn’t like KFC, ends up ordering anyway once the assistant manager falls for the bike.
• On Highway 1 — A quiet snapshot from Highway 1 — no words needed.
• Nanaimo To Mission — A near-miss with a Warm Showers host outside North Vancouver leads instead to a spontaneous overnight with strangers Jim and Rhoda — a bottle of Glenfiddich, a Thai curry, and family stories stretching from Ayrshire to Manitoba to Wales via Argentina.
• Mission To Hope — A big, butch neighbour walks his cat on a leash at the campsite, a lone llama turns up in a roadside field, and 150-carriage cargo trains rumble past blueberry farms on the ride from Mission up to Hope.
• Goodnight Bike — Susan’s ruling on the bike sharing the motel room for the night: bedroom, yes. Bed, absolutely not.
• Another Biker — How every Harley rider should look.
• Beyond Hope — A full day of rain through the Fraser Canyon ends in Boston Bar, where an ‘underground chef’ from Vancouver has turned a rundown motel on a bypassed highway into a genuinely great diner.
• Onto Cache Creek — A sunny climb up Jackass Mountain to Lytton, then 196km from Hope brings them to a Cache Creek campsite named Brookside — which, disappointingly, contains not a single former Brookside soap actor.
• Giving Up On Retirement — A career change announced: Clif is now the Sheriff of Nowhere Town, and Susan the floosie at the local saloon.
• Kamloops — 82km and 4,600ft of climbing — more ascent than Ben Nevis, though it felt like the Matterhorn — earns a rest day in Kamloops, justified entirely by the excellent beer at the Noble Pig.

The Canadian Rockies

• The Elusive Moose — A moose appears roadside near Jasper, and Susan’s frantic warning — ‘he doesn’t like his photo taken,’ apparently read in a leaflet — keeps Clif from braking, cementing a new rule: no stopping for moose or bears.
• Canadian Roadsigns – Trick Cycling Ahead — No words needed — the sign says it all.
• The Mighty Chicken Wing — A dedicated post for one specific friend back home, aimed squarely at his one true passion: a plate of gourmet chicken wings with blue cheese sauce, a close second to Colonel Saunders’ Hot Wings.
• Jasper And The Rockies — Three days taking in Jasper, opening with the view from the top of Whistlers Mountain before working through the surrounding Rockies.
• The Icefields Parkway (2014) — 232km of one of the world’s most scenic roads, through snow-dusted glaciers and passes above 6,800ft — a Sunwapta Pass whiteout, three pairs of socks, dreadful food at every motel, and Clif’s verdict that this is, hands down, the single best road journey they’ve ever done by bicycle.
• Lake Louise and Banff — Susan’s genius trick of downplaying a steep hill walk as ‘level 1.5km’ works exactly as intended — and at the Banff campsite, Clif reasons the bears are welcome to the bagels and Nutella, as long as he’s allowed into the tent before they show up.

The Prairies

• Stampede to Calgary — Three of Calgary’s finest police cyclists rescue them from a hopeless GPS, and a Champions League final at the Ship and Anchor ends with Susan drenched in celebration beer when Gareth Bale scores — followed by a soaking walk home she insists on, as fair revenge.
• Calgary To Drumheller — Leaving the Rockies behind for the flat, big-sky Prairies, a fierce wind nearly blows them off the bike on a 9% grade heading into Drumheller — stormy skies overhead make the decision for them: no camping tonight.
• Drumheller – Home of The Dinosaur — A world-class day at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Dinosaur Valley, followed by a photo beside the world’s largest dinosaur — so impressively huge it somehow avoids looking tacky.

Ontario

• Ontario – ‘Yours To Discover’ — Another day, another province, another border-sign photo — this time, Ontario.
• Kenora – Lake Of The Woods — The flat Prairies give way to the Canadian Shield’s hills again — 116km and 2,000ft of climbing bring them to Kenora, a town that feels remarkably like somewhere in the English Lakes.
• Thunder Road — Four brutal days into Thunder Bay: relentless sideways rain that soaks a recumbent rider from every angle, a wolf spooked off by damp socks, worn-through tyres wobbling on the downhills — and a slice of homemade wild blueberry pie declared, unquestionably, the best pie in the world.
• Trans Canada Rush Hour — A brief hilltop rest stop between Kenora and Ignace turns into an impromptu gathering of trans-Canada cyclists heading both directions — the road’s own version of rush hour.
• Not Just Another Trans Canada Cyclist — Olympian Clara Hughes, mid-way through her own 12,000km cross-Canada ride, cycles right past them near Thunder Bay — and Susan’s brutal verdict on two days of camp-stubble (‘you look like an old man who can’t look after himself’) settles the question before the missing camera crew ever could.
• On The Same Path — A day of trans-Canada cyclist encounters ends with the best one: a fellow Scot from Cumbernauld, flying the St Andrews Cross, aiming to cross Canada twice in ten weeks — on a BMW 1100 motorcycle, not a bicycle at all.
• Canadian Roadsigns — ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’
• More And More Cyclists — A chance roadside meeting along Lake Superior swells to 13 trans-Canada cyclists in one spot — including Eric and Astrid, who sold everything to cycle the world in search of exactly this kind of company.
• Thunder Bay to Wawa — Painful shin splints slow Susan through the Canadian Shield’s relentless hills — tougher, by many accounts, than the Rockies — while a collapsed beaver dam takes out a bridge behind them, and a former US fighter pilot’s trembling lakeside cabin makes for an unlikely, sleepless overnight stay.
• Another Point Of Interest — Winnie the Pooh’s real origin story: a bear cub bought in White River by a Canadian soldier in 1885, named after his hometown of Winnipeg, later gifted to London Zoo where a young Christopher Robin Milne fell in love with him — camped out right behind the town’s monument to that history.
• Where Are The Romans When You Need Them? — A near-sideswiping by dangerous drivers Clif nicknames ‘moose heads,’ a roadworks flagman eating sandwiches while holding a stop sign, and a randomly gravel-strewn ‘shortcut’ add up to one demand: bring back the Romans, because even they built better roads than this.
• Canadian Roadsigns — It’s obviously a handy place for something.
• Manitoulin Island Southwards — A foggy ferry crossing from Manitoulin Island, kind strangers sharing beer after the local shops close early, and a thunderstorm so total that once you’re soaked to your pants, that’s genuinely as soaked as it’s possible to get.
• A Point Of Interest – Wiarton Willie — A confused hunt for ‘Wiarton Willie’s Inn’ turns up something stranger: a small-town groundhog who predicts the weather each Groundhog Day — and, following his death, was famously mourned via a public coffin viewing, dressed in a tuxedo with a carrot in his paws.
• Chen Guan Ming — A Chinese farmer named Chen Guan Ming, pedalling a rickshaw against a headwind toward Manitoulin Island, is on his own multi-Olympics goodwill journey — having already cycled through 18 countries to London 2012, now bound for Brazil 2016. A genuine perspective check.
• You Should Have Seen Me In My Prime — Must have been a looker in its day. Weren’t we all.
• Toronto — Three months of eat-sleep-cycle metronomic routine catches up with them in Toronto — a bio-hazard-labelled storage locker for their cycling shoes, an Indian restaurant mysteriously out of chapatis, and roughly two-thirds of the whole journey now behind them.
• Back To Work — A theme-park break in Florida with family ends with US Airways cancelling their connection and rebooking them from an airport 200 miles away — a persuasive plea and an Air Canada switch eventually get them back to Toronto at 2am, with 2,000+ km still to go to St John’s.
• Ganin Yem — Cycling east from Toronto, familiar-sounding place names prompt Susan’s Geordie remark from the back of the bike — ‘haddaway man, this is just like ganin yem’ — and Clif’s reply proving, just this once, he’s bilingual.
• Toronto to Kingston — Back on the road after Florida, Susan’s shin splints finally healed — a chance reunion with Paul, who took their very first photo at the Mile 0 marker back in April, leads to a harbour tour in Cobourg and expert local route advice all the way up to Ottawa.

Quebec & The Maritimes

• Tour Du Canada — Three days of repeat encounters with a fully-supported charter tour group crossing Canada — luggage carried, food bought, route sorted for a few thousand dollars. Now why didn’t they think of that?
• Sunset Boulevard — A cheeky refund-guarantee question at a campsite called ‘Sunset View’ backfires spectacularly — the sunset delivers, and Clif’s Scottish thriftiness kicks in the next morning, refusing to hang around for a sunrise he didn’t pay extra for.
• Getting Through the Hard Times — A Simon & Garfunkel parody, rewritten for the road — whisky standing in for troubled water, and a Tatamagouche ‘hippie dippie’ offering cold comfort along the way.
• Getting Through The Hard Times Part 2 — Susan’s own parody, in the same spirit as Clif’s earlier one — an ‘Evita’ rewrite dedicated entirely to ibuprofen, her genuine daily ‘tipple’ for sore knees three months into daily cycling.
• Anniversary Cycle — 30 years married, celebrated with 105km and 2,800ft of blistering-heat climbing into Cape Breton — nearly 12 litres of water between them, a Mars bar and Marathon sandwich fuelling the last tired miles, and outstanding seafood chowder to close out a genuinely memorable day.
• Meet Brian — At the top of a huge hill toward Whycocomagh, they finally meet a fellow recumbent rider crossing Canada — Brian Brokenshire, the first of his kind spotted in three months on the road.
• Canadian Road Signs — No introduction required. Only imagination.
• North Sydney At Last — A B&B host named Cheryl spoils them with lemonade, wine, and a huge homemade cake spread — putting Susan in genuine ‘breakfast heaven’ — the night before the ferry finally carries them off the Canadian mainland toward Newfoundland.

Newfoundland

• Our Screech-in — Kissing a piece of cod, downing a shot of Screech rum, and getting ‘knighted’ with a paddle — the full Newfoundland Screech-in ceremony, complete with Clif’s leggings accidentally worn back to front and immortalised in a friend’s photo.
• Onward Newfoundland — 900km and many hills still stand between them and St John’s — a city with 225 rainy days a year, and rain forecast for the very next day. As readers Dan and Donna put it in a comment: life’s too short to stay at home.
• Port Aux Basques to Corner Brook — A Park Ranger’s pickup truck lift up a hill turns into a genuine white-knuckle ride, with Clif clinging to the flatbed wrapped around the trailer — and once safely down, he insists on cycling back to the exact spot they were picked up, refusing to let a single ‘cheated’ quarter-mile stand.
• Goosey Goosey Gander — A gale-force headwind and a 30km hill combine into the toughest day yet, earning Clif the nickname ‘DQ’ (drama queen) from Susan — and a suspiciously well-timed Plan means their Saturday arrival lands them right on George Street, the busiest bar strip in North America.
• Gander to St Johns — 3,000ft of Terra Nova climbing, then a white-knuckle descent on rear brake pads that hadn’t yet bedded in — softened by a motel owner who finds them a room when everything’s full, and a mystery stranger who quietly pays for their lunch.
• Dildo — Yup, there really is a town with that name — and Susan made Clif take the photos. She can be so juvenile at times.
• Tims — An honourable mention for Tim Hortons — the Canadian institution that hosted them on countless mornings across the whole crossing, with breakfasts, coffee, donuts, and free wifi.
• The End — 8,192km, or just over a fifth of the Earth’s circumference — finishing at Signal Hill, the site of Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless signal in 1901, followed by a genuine reflection on why they did it at all: for the sheer joy of the adventure itself.