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Bike Trip of the Ancients

Here’s how this post started:

Karl responded and generously sent along scans of all his photos from the trip. Those of you with eyes for detail may notice a certain, how to put it, consistency in my dress. At that point in my life I had borderline Cayce Pollard levels of clothing signifier fear. JPUs for the trip consisted of jeans both long and short, a wool jac-shirt and a couple (trip-famous) identical t-shirts. I figure I wore cycling shoes a lot more than I remember – off the bike, I seem to be always barefoot, with w-h-i-t-e feet.

The trip itself? It was organized by Project Adventure (in the person of Karl Rohnke); we loaded up a U-Haul trailer in the parking lot of Hamilton-Wenham H. S., drove up to Montreal, put everything on a CN (thus no spiral tunnels – that’s CP) passenger train, rode same to Vancouver, debarked and rode our bikes home (the North Shore of Massachusetts). An amazing and wonderful trip.

More photos after the jump.

I’ll lay ’em out chronologically, as best I can.

Riding out of Vancouver.

The mountains.

Crackin’ 50mph. Bell may have been making a useful bike helmet in ’74, but the standard was the completely ineffective leather hair-net.

The plains.

The litter (disposable diapers were the #1 (and #2 – get it?!?) piece of roadside debris).

The Soo.

Sudbury. The west side of Sudbury (big nickle mining/smelting town) was a moonscape – the output from the stacks killed everything except the hardiest plants.

No homecoming shots – the last day, we said our goodbyes and took seperate routes back to our respective home towns.