Family Travel Countdown

We have started getting some of our ducks in a row for our cross-Canada leg of the trip. The first concrete decision is we’ve made the choice not to bring our electric car. This was a tough one as I was pretty confident we could have made the route work from a charging/mileage standpoint. In the end, it was the cargo space that led us to this decision. It is just too small and will not hold the gear we plan on bringing. Essentially we want the kids to have some comfort and we don’t want stuff piled on the children as we drive a few thousand kilometres. We haven’t yet made a decision as to what we will do with the car but I will either have to sell it, loan it out or take it off the road. That is a decision for another day.

What will we do for a vehicle? I’m fortunate and have convinced my father to lend me his vehicle for three months. We got lucky on this front as that saves us a decent amount of money. He has a sports utility vehicle that we’ve used on camping trips before that we know we can make work. One of the major benefits is that it has a hitch that can accommodate the bike rack we bought at the beginning of the summer.

Earlier this year we did a test trip with the SUV and some of the gear we might be bringing. We did a car camping trip with some friends outside the city and wanted to see how a trip with bikes would go. We put the bike rack on the borrowed SUV and loaded the gear and went. The bike rack was installed easily on the hitch in a couple minutes. The headscratcher was that it took me 30 minutes to get the bikes appropriately mounted. It was like a giant Jenga puzzle. In the end, we sorted it all out and I took a picture to memorize the configuration.

We then went off camping and unfortunately, it poured rain every day we were camping (that includes drive both ways). It was so wet we never even took the bikes off the rack. We essentially ended up just driving them to the campsite and back. At least I got to practice driving with the load hanging off the back and understand some of the challenges. When we got back home, I put all four of our bikes in the shed.

Why do I mention the shed? Well, the next morning I woke up to discover that Paige’s and my bikes were missing. Someone had broken into the shed and taken the bikes. Fortunately, the children’s bikes were left untouched. It is no big deal but we do laugh about the fact we never did get to use them during our test camping trip.

So now we are on the lookout for some used adult bikes. We’ve been scouring the online marketplace listings to see if anything is practical. Currently, we believe there is no need to get anything great as the bikes will take a pounding with the projected journety. Secondly, we don’t want to be overly upset if they get “borrowed” by strangers during our trip. So if anyone has a beat-up, old, adult bike they don’t want anymore….let us know!

Ciao for now
Mike