Northwest
Point Roberts, Washington
Our last camping night out was at one of the strangest outposts of the United States, Point Roberts, Washington. It's so unique that it's the featured zip code in National Geographic this month. Check it out at National Geographic's website.
It's a little artifact of uninformed diplomacy. When the US and Britain finally got their stuff straight about where the line between the US and Canada is, they missed the fact that Point Roberts would be in the US, but have no access to the mainland. It's one little 5-square-mile section of the US. But you have to cross the border into Canada, drive several miles, and then cross back into the US if you want to get there by land. Take a look at the National Geographic article. It has a great satellite image showing exactly what happens with Point Roberts. In fact, if you look at the picture, you'll see just above Point Roberts on the left the jetty that is the ferry landing where we came in from Galiano Island.
New Trails: Cascadia Marine Trail and Trans-Canada trail
We learned about two fascinating new trails.
Our favorite campsite, the San Juan County Campsite, was part of the Cascadia Marine Trail, a wonderful set of campsites that would allow you to kayak all the way from lower Puget Sound up through Vancouver Island. What a great idea!
And we kept hearing more and more about the Trans-Canada Trail, a collection of routes that allow hikers and others to cross Canada on a hodgepodge of old rails-to-trails routes, roads, etc.
Lots of potential in both of those! Imagine the possibilities.
Finances for the trip
Well, we're back, and I've done a casual, approximate accounting for our trip.
The total trip cost was about $3,000. That includes 48 days for Randy, 19 days for Nancy, and Randy's flight back home (but Nancy got hers free).
When we were travelling together at the beginning and end of the trip we spent about $65/day. There were some hotels and more than average restaurants and the like.
When I was travelling alone from Gunnison to the Pacific coast, I spent about $1,000, or about $30/day.
I just went back and compared these numbers to our Mexico trip in February of 2003. In our month in Mexico we spent about $20/day/person. So I think that spending about $30/day/person travelling together in the US is not too bad. I thought it was a little high when I first looked, but it doesn't seem bad now.
Of course, these are pretty rough numbers, but it's good information for us as we budget for the BIG Americas trip from Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada, to Ushuaia, Patagonia starting in 2006. If our spending there on that trip is similar to these two trips, we'll need about $30/day/person in the US and $20/day/person south of the border, declining a bit after Mexico. So if our trip is to take 2.5 years (our estimate), we might need about $40,000 for the big trip (figuring 150 days in the US/Canada to start the trip, and lower costs to follow). That's actually less than the $50,000 I had estimated earlier, so hurrah!
We're home!
Well, we're back home now after a great trip. The last 2 weeks was an island vacation, for sure.
I ended up riding the most miles of any trip I've taken - about 2500 miles over the 7 weeks or so of the trip.
There were no mechanical breakdowns; I had only one flat. There was a problematic out-of-round front tire that had to be replaced in Pocatello and a new seat bought in Missoula, but those were just footnotes, not mechanical issues. (Interestingly, I did have sorebut from the new seat for a couple of weeks... It was different from the one before so different parts of my back end had to get used to the seat!)
The trip was a success; we did what we wanted to do. The 1800 miles or so after leaving Nancy and Mark at Gunnison and before running into Chris and Patrick at the top of Sherman Pass in Washington State were pretty lonely for me. I think I might go on a route with more bicycle tourists on it next time I just have to ride alone... You get a chance to see more people that way. I did meet lots of nice people and enjoyed them all, but you don't see them for more than a very little while.
It was a bit of a pain finding places to update the website in the US and especially in Canada. (We used the graciously-offered facilities of small-town public libraries when we found them.) It was SO much easier in Mexico, where every village has an internet cafe that's open in the evening. Perhaps on the next trip we'll do less-frequent updates if we have that problem. It sure would be nice to be able to upload pictures more often. read more here... lee mas aquí... »
Touring the Islands
We are back from our trip and I wanted to share a little bit about bike touring in the San Juan Island/Gulf Island areas. Almost anything one attempts is relative to another attempt.
This trip was relatively easy bike touring, compared to any of our other trips. Why, you ask? The places which we visited where much closer together and the islands we toured could be toured in one day.
On a typical day we would ride to a ferry, wait for the ferry, the ferry ride would take an hour or two and then we would take an hour, two or three riding to our final destination of the day. So we would not ride a lot of hours or get in lot of miles. We spent many evenings watching the sunset over the protected harbor, which takes about an hour, and then in the morning we would take an hour watching the sunrise. Randy called this part of the trip a theme park because there are so many wonderful things to distract one from riding a lot. read more here... lee mas aquí... »
New maps on the Route page
I used Microsoft Mappoint to create a complete map of our trip, in quite some detail. It was actually able to find almost all the little roads we took. Besides an accurate main map, there are more-detailed maps of the Colorado, Utah/Wyoming, Southern Idaho, Central Idaho and Montana, Montana through Eastern Washington, and Washington and British Columbia.
And for those that love the real detail: There's a PDF strip map with complete detail of the whole trip. It's big (3.2MB), but really has all the detail.
