'Bikely' Your Friendly Cycling Forum

I finally got around to buying a bike rack for the car. I put the damned thing on. Checked it twice. Pulled the straps. Got the bikes on the bike rack. Did notice that it wasn't quite sitting right on the trunk. Decided to be uncharacteristically optimistic about the niggling doubt about the bike rack's position.

Got in the car. Anticipation building about our little adventure. A block from home the bikes almost fall off the car. Perfect! Just perfect! Pull over. The car now has scratches when it previously had none. Good to know I saved $20 on the bike rack in exchange for the $300 paint job it now surely requires and will not be getting anytime soon. Damned bikes!

Repositioned the bike rack. Tightened the straps as if we were preparing to repell down Mount Everest. Got back in the car. Can't take my eyes off the rear view mirror. I'm staring at the bikes. Almost kill two pedestrians at Bute and Georgia I'm staring so hard at the bikes. "Jesus, what are they blind," says Dee. "Can't they see you aren't looking,"she says! There's something not quite right with that statement I think to myself given that I am THE DRIVER!

Thank you Dee for being a front seat driver. I could have killed 'em. Those pedestrians owe you big time. I promise to keep my eyes on the road. Girl Guides honour (except I never was a Girl Guide). Anybody got a valium? We keep driving.

We make it out to Abbotsford. The bikes didn't fall off in the middle of the Port Mann bridge.

I don't own a single biking book. It was enough to get the rack. The rest, well, I thought I'd just wing it. I'd done a route a couple of years ago out there. I like to think of it as the "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there" style of daytripping. It's not recommended actually. Not in life. Not on a bike. Trust me! I've become an authority on the topic.

And, this is the real purpose of me sharing this not very exciting little post with you. To find some route that we could follow, I checked the Web and happened across this bike forum called Bikely. Once you've done a bike route, you can then sign up, and share your route for others to follow. There appear to be routes from all over the world.

Of course, Dee and I found out this weekend that posting a route doesn't mean that anyone else would actually want to follow your route. Lisa? If you're reading this post, remember Curtis? Africa by bike? Enough said.

Our route - the Sumas Prairie Farm Route - started off really well. Beautiful. Farms. Cows. Horses. Fields. Sprinklers. The tell-tale aroma of manure wafting through the 30 degree sunshine. No traffic. But then, it all went downhill at the end. It wasn't long enough. And, the route paralleled a Highway for the last 20 minutes. Nothing like a nice quiet little ride in the country beside a roaring freeway. Route taker beware.

Got any good biking tales? We're all ears.