30 August 2012
The Selkirk Loop and the North Kootenay Lake-Silvery Slocan Super Side Trip. This is what we will cycle tour over the next two weeks. About 400 miles of spectacular scenery, light traffic, and mostly adequate shoulders. At least this is what the website promises us. Soon enough we will know if this is true or just marketing fluff, like how the Sydney, Australia travel guide promises 340 days of sunshine a year. That may be true in a drought year in the Outback but in Sydney? A politician’s promise if ever I heard one.
This is an eagerly anticipated trip for me as I can count on one hand (and still have fingers left over) the number of vacation days I have enjoyed in 2012. This is not because I’m one of those can’t-leave-my-desk kind of people. On the contrary, I find leaving my desk for long periods of time one of the most joyous ways to spend my life. It’s a big world so often kept small by the obligations we choose to make, the ones we think we must do, we must keep, we can’t disregard or the Earth will stop spinning and we will fall off into the great, ugly, fearful unknown. If I want A then I must do B and odds are, B doesn’t involve running off into the big wide world without a care. Sad, really. We should all strive to be more untroubled, to feel less obligated in general, to make choices that add to our freedom cairn one rock at a time, pointing the way to a world that freely grants us more than a few weeks of paid time off per year. But then here I am again, perched high on my see-the-world soapbox, the one purchased and paid for by all those hours between 9 and 5. We’ve been here before (and will no doubt be back) so let’s just go back to the beginning and say that I am happy to be on the verge of burning my ever-so-slowly accumulated PTO for a Two Nation Vacation.
As for Gina, well, this is just another notch in her cycling belt. What’s 400 more miles over two more weeks after you’ve already cycled over 4,000 miles over three months? Another holiday, that’s what that is, and when I toss my Envy Hat aside, I’d say a pretty good way to wrap up the summer.