Crossing Canada

22 August 2024 Writing from the airport departure lounge in Vancouver, I find myself reflecting on the week just gone, and the two months preceding it. It turns out that nine weeks away riding a bike is quite a long time! Starting in Nova Scotia, the rugged terrain of Newfoundland and Labrador is a distant…

13 August 2024 Leaving Alaska behind us, we reentered Canada and started to head south. I’ll recommend the Yukon bikers’ campground to any bikers out there – it’s where I changed the oil in my Ducati on the way north. A couple of long days in the saddle saw us joining the glorious Cassier –…

4th August 2024 Time is rushing by. It’s been a busy few days. It is said that adventure begins at the edge of your comfort zone – well, by that definition yesterday was certainly an adventure! And it feels great. We have been riding around south and east of Anchorage, and achieved the goal of…

27 July 2024 When travelling, it is frequently the things that go wrong that stick in the memory and make for entertaining stories later on. At the time though, it doesn’t always seem that way and for one of our party at least we would wish things had been different. More of that later. I…

21 July 2024 Today we rode over 500 km through forest. There was a town about half way along, called Watson Lake. And that was about it. Apart from a couple of gas stations, at one of which we stopped for coffee (and gas), and two or three other settlements with signs advertising lodging ,…

Canadian Rockies Wednesday 17th July I’m writing this from the terrace of an incredibly upmarket lodge about 50 km to the east of Jasper. It’s stupendous, if a bit rich for the nature of our travels. We have had a wonderful few days. It is also the day that now six of us reconvened after…

After the fun bits of Quebec came the tedious bit – skirting around firstly Quebec City, then the following day Montreal and Ottowa, where our satnavs took us through the centre of the city. Actually, at least the traffic was moving there and it is only small, so no great shakes. But we lost Al…

Labrador City had nothing for us other than petrol. We knew there was a campsite 25km further on at Fermont, the road now heading southwards. Fermont is a town built to house workers at the nearby mine, a source of high quality iron ore. Temperatures there drop below freezing in seven months of the year…

It’s immense. The standard unit of measurement of land mass size is a Wales. At 405000 sq km, Labrador is 19.5 Waleses. With a population of 521000 souls , there’s 1.3 people for each sq km. In Wales, hardly the most populous place on the planet, each sq km holds 150 people on average. Maybe that’s…