Meet Frank

Don’t get me wrong. Few things tickle my fancy quite like shiny new outdoor gear. On any given week, I “need” a new lighter tent, a quieter stove or a new rain jacket. Topping the list though, head and shoulders above the rest, are bicycles. Herein lies the problem. Bikes are really expensive, and given my general disposition towards work and propensity for travel with my family to far flung corners of the world, nice bikes are well beyond the reach of my ever dwindling budget.

Enters Frank. That’s not his full name mind you. It’s short for Frankenbike but he doesn’t care much for it. Frank was born out of  old parts scoured from the internet,  more old parts traded for beer with friends, a big box of even older parts accumulated over the years and gathering dust in my garage, hours of tinkering in said garage and still more beer (for me this time). Very few things on Frank are less than ten years old. He comes complete with a frankenrack made of no less than three old racks put together and an up-cycled yet still fashionably color coordinated, crazy carpet handlebar roll. Bottom line is: of all the things listed above, beer definitely gets the lion’s share of the total cost for Frank.

Frank took it’s maiden voyage this week, a short couple of days after being finally assembled. A quick jaunt in Garibaldi Park on the notoriously loose and rocky trail up to Elfin Lakes for a couple of days of hiking and camping. If I was a gear reviewer for one of these website I spend too much time on, I would have reported my impressions roughly like this: “I initially had concerns heading out on Frank. With it’s mismatched wheels, dented top tube and a groupset that could only be defined as ‘all over the place’ Frank inspired little confidence. The trail began with a steep, loose climb and it became immediately obvious that Frank was something special. It felt amazingly stable when loaded. The geometry is nimble yet very comfortable. The crazy carpet handle bar roll blew my mind by being absolutely rock steady and the gear ratio made easy work of even the steepest sections while the 26 X 2.4 tires with low pressure made you almost forget that Frank is a hard-tail. My concerns about the downhill capabilities of Frank were just as promptly alleviated on the way back as we took to some fine Squamish single-tracks (Meadow of the Grizzly should you wonder). The BB7 cable actuated disc brakes, subject to much snobbery, provided ample braking power and will be an appreciated feature for someone who envisions taking Frank to far flung corners of the world with his family. If I had to criticize, I could say that, on the steeper drops, Frank’s somewhat steep steer tube left me wishing for a slacker head angle. But this might be attributed more to my own short-comings than Frank’s. Overall, Frank is one fine adventure machine for a budget traveler who longs for rough and steep dirt tracks in high and remote places.”

If you are anything like me, after reading this review, you can barely contain your excitement and think: I need a Frank! Good news is: with a little time and a modest investment in beer, you too can have a Frank and with plenty of change left to take off to… lets say… Peru?

What’s that you say? Frank is blue? I guess that’s true. But beneath its sky blue paint job, given where Frank comes from, it is most definitely one of the greenest bike one can get.

 

Follow Me… Just A Little Bit Longer Please

I woke up with a start around 3 AM and quiet tears started to roll down my cheeks. I’m selling the Follow-Me today. And I’m not ready.

It’s not the object itself. I don’t typically get too attached to things. Furthermore, this particular thing had me cursing and swearing more times than I can count and I often fantasized about taking a sledgehammer to it while cresting a long climb in a sweaty and nauseated mess. No, I won’t miss hauling around these 5kg of steel behind my bike. In many ways, I should feel elated. Proud that my kids are such strong little riders and thankful for all the great adventures that this piece of gear allowed. Yet, I can’t hold back the tears.

Here’s the thing. Selling the Follow-Me is not like selling a bike that has gotten too small to get a newer, bigger, better bike. The Follow-Me is a link. A link between my kids and I. A link that is just not needed anymore. It won’t be replaced by a newer, bigger or better link. It will just be gone. It doesn’t feel like the kids don’t need the Follow-Me anymore. It feels like the kids don’t need me.

A sobby hyperbole perhaps but this is all happening at a time when puberty is rearing its scary head. Not in a disproportionate limbs and oily skin sort of way just yet but already in the hurtful way kids roll their eyes and sigh to let you know that you are doing a good job at preparing them to be independent while denying you any kind of credit at the same time. Like their newfound autonomy happened spontaneously and you had nothing to do with it.

When your kids are little, you get unsolicited advise by strangers on a daily basis. “Cherish these moments! Kids grow so fast…” they say. I became so annoyed with this brand of popular wisdom that I promised myself to never say anything of the sort to new parents. There is enough hardship and second-guessing in parenthood without some stranger telling you that if you’re not deeply enjoying every moment of the most challenging thing you’ve ever done, you’re probably doing it wrong. So I won’t go there. I do however feel like something special is slipping from my grasp much before I am ready to let go. Selling the Follow-Me just makes it all the more tangible.

It’s going to a good home though. To two beautiful kids and their loving parents who still have these special years ahead of them rather than behind. I wish them as many wonderful adventures on bikes as we were fortunate enough to have. As for us, we’ll keep on riding and do our very best to find new ways to keep the link to our kids alive and strong. Hopefully even stronger than 10 pounds of steel could ever be.

I’m selling the Follow-Me today and I’m not ready. And while there is something undeniably beautiful in the pain of seeing your kids spread their wings, it hurts nonetheless.

The Raspberry Bush

“The moment I’d stop the car, you’d be off like a shot. You’d disappear into the raspberry bushes and come back an hour later, stained red from head to toes with a huge smile on your face.” There is still a twinkle in my mother’s eye as she retells this story from our summer vacations spent camping by the ocean in Nova Scotia. It’s understandable though. There is much more to this cute little family memory than initially meets the eye. A lesson in parenting with commitment and courage and what it means to provide for your kids.

My parents were travelers. In the mid sixties they decided to pack up and leave for two years to go work in a small hospital in rural Uganda . They took my older sister, age two at the time, with them. As a new family they were setting off for a life of adventure. My brother was born shortly after they returned. Then, on New Year’s Eve, 1971 my father was taken from us when a scuba diving outing in the Bahamas didn’t go as planned. My mother who was an avid diver didn’t go that time. They had just learned that, in eight and a half months, I was to be born.

Just like that, a whole life of projects and adventures, everything they had envisioned together, vanished. Gone.  My mom was now a single mother of, soon, three with modest financial means. She would have to find a way to provide for us, alone. I could go on and on about the amazing strength, grace and courage she displayed throughout her life but nothing demonstrates this better than the real story behind the raspberry bush anecdote.

To “provide for your family” is a pretty vague concept. For most people it is interpreted as working to get the money required to buy the things you and your kids need and want.  It’s easy to become misguided along the way, confusing “needing” and “wanting” and since there is no shortage of stuff we want, we end up working a lot. We sacrifice a lot of our life this way probably because there is something inherently reassuring in owning, maybe even stockpiling things. My mom, the traveler, saw the emptiness in this endless pursuit of material goods. A lot of people do. What is quite remarkable about my mother however is that she had the courage to truly commit to her conviction. As a single mother she had every possible excuse to seek “security”. But life had shown her that security is nothing  but an illusion. That you never know what’s beyond the next curve in the road. So, every summer, she would do what most people would consider unthinkable.

As a family, the days of international travel to far off lands were over. Still my mom couldn’t stand the thought of her three kids roaming around on city streets all summer long. She deeply loves nature, especially the ocean. She also deeply cared about sharing this love with us. What this meant though was that, to do this right, every June, instead of just cashing in her two weeks vacation pay, she would simply quit her job without a clue what she would have to fall back on in September, pack up the car and drove twelve hours to the ocean so that we got to spend our whole school vacation riding our bikes, playing on the beach, fishing for mackerel and yes, especially for me, stuffing my face with the sweetest raspberries in the world. These were the happiest moments of my childhood. I didn’t understand at the time the immense effort and courage these summer vacations required. In my blissfully naive child’s mind, I thought these vacations  were “normal”. Come September, she would hit the ground running once again and go find herself a new job. Don’t  think  for  a  second  that  she  was  fearless  though. This  must  have  been  terrifying  which  makes  her  commitment  all  the  more  remarkable.

Riding my bike on the roads of the world, I met several travelers who told me the story of how they decided to go off travelling. It often involved a mostly absent father who spent countless years chained to a desk only to die of a heart attack at 55, a few years short of finally reaping the sweet fruits he had been diligently putting aside for his entire life. The children, not wanting to repeat the “mistakes” (it’s not my place to judge) their parents made, decide to sell everything and live life while it’s still their turn. Sometimes they buy a bike and start pedaling without looking back. My story is different. Instead of avoiding the mistakes my parents made, I’m trying my best, as a dad, to live up standards set impossibly high by the most courageous person I have ever met.

The boys and I went riding today. We ended up on the side of a small glacial stream. Before long, on a dare, clothes came off and we were up to our necks in frigid water gasping and laughing uncontrollably. We stopped for a root beer at a small roadside cafe. On our way back, we spotted some ripe thimble berries and huckleberries. A plan quickly came together and we started to fill our empty water bottles with enough berries to bake a pie as a surprise for Robyn. Alex and I were picking side by side when he turned to me and asked.

-“Papa? What could possibly be better than this?”

– I don’t know Alex. As far as I’m concerned, nothing.

Merci maman.

Slow Awakening

Life lessons from making babies on bicycle trips.

I can’t remember where the idea came from originally but, when I started cycle touring I was under the impression that a proper day of riding should count 100 km. I’m in decent enough shape but I’m no athlete and on my first trip, across Patagonia, covering this distance against fierce headwinds and up Andean passes often felt like a suffer-fest. Somehow I stuck with it.

Some people will happily slice through the air wrapped in spandex for hundreds of kilometers day after day revelling in the intensity of the exertion. There is nothing wrong with that. I’m just not one of them.  Some are smart enough to realize that by themselves.  I’m not one of them either. The misguided ones, like me, feel a pressure to achieve, buying into the idea that through performance comes worth. Our culture is such that the “high achievers” are the yardsticks against which we should all measure ourselves whether this suits us or not. And we measure success with things we can count. Without an impressive number of kilometers under my belt I was just a tourist on a bike and I thought I was better than that.

Fast forward 10 years.

It had been slow going since our departure from Glasgow a few days ago. It was Robyn’s first bike trip and she would have none of this 100 km nonsense. She argued that there was no point in choosing to travel by bicycle only to try to go as fast and far as possible. She may have had a point but she didn’t convince me. It is because I was madly in love with her (I still am) that I was willing to put up with the snail’s pace but every once in awhile (she might say many times a day), I would grumble that what we were doing wasn’t a proper bike trip and get frustrated with our slow progress.

On the West Coast of the Isle of Arran we found a nice spot to camp overlooking Lochranza Castle. Robyn had been feeling sick that day but had put in a good fight nonetheless against a strong headwind in the afternoon. In the evening she came out from behind bush with a puzzled look on her face and an explanation for her ailment. “I’m pregnant” she said, still holding the test stick in her hand.

We were hoping this would happen, which explains why we were packing pregnancy tests on a bike trip. We spent the evening sitting side by side watching the ruins of the castle and the ocean beyond wondering how much our life was about to change. Of course, in the short term it also meant the we would probably slow down even more. I was OK with it though because now, I had an excuse. No one would stick it to me for keeping the days short while cycling with a pregnant woman. We would just ride whatever Robyn felt comfortable with. The objective was not a destination anymore but simply to have a good time. In the days that followed, the trip somehow became much more enjoyable.  What Robyn, with no touring experience had known all along, I had to be forced to learn. The enjoyment I was gaining from a slower pace far outweighed any distance related bragging rights. With that I started to consider what I initially used as an excuse to be a forced awakening. Not that I don’t enjoy a big day here and there but I had finally let go of that stupid 100 km idea and felt liberated.

This realization reached far beyond the way I travelled. Of all the different aspects of my life, bike touring has got to be the one where the social pressure, self-imposed or otherwise, is the least pervasive.  Becoming a parent on the other hand is a moment where the pressure ramps up dramatically as we try hard to provide what we believe is best for our children. By coming to us during a bike trip, Nicolas, as he came to be known, forced me to slow down and let go of self imposed pressure and made me realize that life got much better without it. I am not proud of the fact that I needed him as an excuse to get there but the lesson was learned nonetheless and it set the tone for what kind of father I wanted to become. I want to create space and simplicity to allow us to just be a family rather than race to accumulate everything a family “needs”.

Researching our next trip, I came across more than a few travel bloggers insisting that we should just drop everything and go. That our routine at home and work is miserable and pointless. That nothing stops us from following our dream and such… But traveling is simply trading one set of opportunities for another. My life is not so bad that I have to get away from it. Even by “following my dream” I can easily fall into the trap of trading one source of pressure for another if I worry too much about what other people may think of my voyage (or how awesome we’ll look in our next blog post). The pressure is relentless though and remembering this is hard when planning a bike trip. Harder still is to remember this in my daily life.

As we head into our next “adventure” in Southeast Asia, I’ll try to apply the lesson learned in the Scottish Isles:  Just enjoy it, slowly, simply. Thank you Nicolas.

Cycling through my own prejudice. And following through on an old promise.

Weaving our way through parked trucks along the mile-long line of vehicles waiting to cross the border did nothing to appease our apprehensions about cycling into Syria. After a month of riding in Turkey we were slightly anxious about the kind of welcome an unmarried, agnostic cycling couple would get in a country where the practice of Islam is much less liberal.

A tent on the side of the road grabs my attention. The campers, two Dutch cyclists, have been there for 2 days, waiting. One of them had an Israeli stamp in his passport that raised a few eyebrows and “caused some problems”. Weaving our way through parked trucks and groups of resigned drivers playing cards, smoking and drinking tea, we got to within a hundred meters of the customs office.

 

A smiley rotund man in a brown blazer ran in our direction waving his arms and yelling: “Welcome! Hello! Hello! Yes!” He introduced himself as an “official of the tourism bureau of Syria” and insisted that, if we gave him our passports, he would get our visas within minutes. Yeah, right! We thought.  With growing doubt that we would ever get across the border without help and after much deliberation and  we took a leap of faith and handed our passports.

 

After twenty agonizing minutes the “official” returned, all smiles and handed us our passports, stamped and ready to go. We were waved right through the border by a group of soldiers bouncing up and down like excited children with huge smiles and yelling: “Welcome! Welcome to Syria!” Minutes later a group of men at a gas station called us in to offer us a cup of strong cardamom coffee. We gratefully accepted. As the single, tiny, dirty and cracked china cup was refilled and passed around I remember thinking out loud: “You know, I think Syria is going to be all right”.

 

This was 1998. Much quieter and happier times in Syria. Nothing hinted at the underlying tension and discontent that would lead to the Arab Spring and ensuing Syrian civil war that has killed hundreds of thousand so far and displaced  millions in one of the worst humanitarian crisis in history. Nevertheless, watching the news even back then, it was easy to believe that Syria, and the Middle-East in general was filled with westerner-hating  fundamentalists with a penchant for extreme violence.  Nothing shatters prejudices quite like cycling through a region you know little about, especially if the little knowledge you have comes from “mainstream media”.

 

Every single day we were invited to eat and sleep in homes ranging from modest apartments to rural homesteads to traditional goat hair tents. In the morning we were usually given more food than we could eat in a day and carried it in our panniers only to offer most of it to the next family who would inevitably take us in at the end of the day. Everywhere we were treated with kindness and respect. As one of our hosts put it “We all have to cross the desert at one point. When my turn comes, I too will have to rely on the kindness of strangers.”

 

All this hospitality can be exhausting though. So one night we decided to ‘hide’ and pitch our not-so-subtle bright yellow tent in a cluster of boulders and shrubs. No later than we planted the last peg did a shepherd appear and insist that we follow him to his house. We certainly had mixed feelings about refusing hospitality but, in the end, the need for a little privacy got the better of us and we stayed put at the risk of offending our would-be host. Our heart truly sank two hours later when he returned with his young daughter to offer us two bags full of fruits, yoghurt, bread, dates, nuts and jam. I don’t think we will ever fully understand how extravagant this generous gift was for a man who needs to provide for his family by tending a small flock of goats in a rocky desert.

 

Toward the end of our stay in Syria, sitting cross-legged on the floor around yet another feast offered by one of our countless hosts I asked: “Everyone here has been so nice to us. What can we do to pay you back?” Our host was acutely aware of many westerners’ prejudice against the Arab world and his answer brought me back to my own apprehension as we entered the country weeks before. He simply said: “Go back home and tell people how your trip was.” I promised I would. Now more than ever, people need to know who the Syrians really are so that the hateful words and bigotry of some aspiring American politicians fail to perpetuate the fear and ignorance.

 

Syrians are literally and figuratively crossing their desert now and they certainly deserve all of our help and kindness. May peace be upon Syria again soon. As-salamu alaykum.