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Victoria BC to Astoria OR, 501km “Hey let’s go Go-Karting!” said neither of us, ever, on our honeymoon bike tour along the Pacific Coast of North America. Over 3,000km from Victoria, BC, to Tijuana, Mexico, the thought of pausing our romantic whirlwind and dismounting our two-wheeled steeds to drive a mini-car in circles, at slower speeds, never occurred to us.  That was because we didn’t have a fun-hungry teenager to show us what we were missing. Two decades later, here we were at the Fun Beach Go-Kart Speedway in Seaview, Washington. Ed whisked around the loopy track in hot pursuit of our 15-year-old son Sitka, who takes his job as Seeker of Non-Bike Adventures very seriously. This is a kid who has grown up on summer bike tours since before he could walk. He’s cycled across New Zealand, Australia, Europe, Cuba and all over Canada. And he’s the first to remind us that it’s not just about the ride, but also about all the stops in between. “We haven’t had any adventures yet,” Sitka blurted out one morning over a bowl of yogurt and granola brimming with fresh strawberries, surrounded by towering firs in a thick coastal forest.  Our shocked faces encouraged him to clarify. “You know what I mean. I’m gonna find us an adventure activity off of our bikes. Of course, all the biking is fun too!” Indeed, the first week of our 2025 summer bike tour brought us back to our family’s happiest place: together on our bikes. We’re missing a pretty big part, however, as our oldest son Heron pedals in Quebec at the Canadian Road Bike Championships. Being from the Yukon in the far North, he impressed with some strong finishes (fourth in his U-19 Junior category) and experienced his first big crash, with the gauze-covered road rash to prove it. In 18 summers, it’s the first time our full family isn’t exploring altogether. But soon Heron will be joining us near Portland to join the ride. He’s missed a sweet week, amongst the spectacular rainforest on the Olympic peninsula, and along the rugged, windy Washington coast. We thought we’d feel some major déjà-vu on our return to our very first bike tour as newlyweds. But in many ways, it’s been an entirely new journey. First, of course, we have a fresh set of eyes seeing this road for the first time. Beyond tracking down the mini-putt courses and campground ping-pong tables, Sitka helps us notice every moment more vividly - especially being surrounded by hundreds of the giant trees after which we named him. “Man, they’re tall,” he marvels regularly, neck craned to the sky. At Lake Quinault, epicentre of the state’s famous Hoh Rainforest. we found the “world’s largest” Sitka spruce. Having lived in Vancouver, he’d seen a Sitka before. But growing up mostly in the Yukon, with our stunted aspens and pines, the soaring old-growth conifers have made an impression - just as they did in 2005 for Ed, an Ontario boy experiencing coastal forest for the first time. A lot else has changed in 20 years, including more paved bike paths separate from bustling highways. Straight off the ferry in Port Angeles, the Olympic Discovery Trail brought us into the National Park well away from the famous, often frantic 101, on a series of side roads and old rail beds - including the recently upgraded Spruce Rail Trail hugging the north shore of Crescent Lake. We dipped in the shockingly blue waters and found a cute campground nestled away from truck traffic on Day One. A few more times, we found surprise paved paths - leaving Aberdeen westward on the Chehalis River Trail, and out of Raymond on the Willapa Hills Trail - for our merry threesome to pedal side-by-side along beautiful rivers. Of course, we now have cell phones with the BikeMap app to guide us to all these hidden gems en route - as opposed to handwritten transcriptions of our guidebook directions on an old paper receipt in a Ziploc affixed to our handlebars. We’re cycling faster and farther now, probably thanks to annual bike tours over each of our boys’ summer since birth. And certainly because it’s now us struggling to keep pace with teenaged Sitka, rather than the opposite. And it’s also us who insist on chocolate stops every hour to keep us motivated.  Some things haven’t changed, though: a slight drizzle leaving Kalaloch tricked Ed into resisting the call of his rain jacket. He got gradually wetter and more stubborn until the day devolved into a full-on downpour, by which time the jacket would have been of no use. This time, though, we could call ahead to a sweet cabin on Lake Quinault instead of settling for the first roadside motel we came across. We did remember one lesson from our honeymoon: avoid the heart-stopping Astoria-Megler Bridge across the Columbia River into Oregon. The four-mile-long behemoth starts flat, then soars several storeys high to accommodate tanker ships. It also has a puny shoulder with endless obstacles and pummeling cross winds. And we have Internet now, to read about the horror stories told by fellow cyclists. Fortunately, we met Randy, a lovely soul from Vancouver, Washington, who was camping with his family nearby our hiker/biker site at Cape Disappointment. He replied generously to our inquiry about a ride in his pickup truck, then offered great companionship on the quick jaunt across the terrifying bridge - proving that Americans are indeed wonderful people… and you know the rest of what we want to say. But the best difference between 2005 and 2025 is our family. Twenty years ago we were two kids deeply in love. Now we’ve got two kids of our own to share the journey, the memories, and the load. All our newlywed dreams of a beautiful life together have come together quite well. We’ve even discovered the wonder of the Go-Kart.

We're psyched to be hosting our first community presentation next month in our home town of Whitehorse, Yukon! We'll be inviting local bike families and cycling enthusiasts to come hear and see our stories over the years and across the continents - and get inspired to plan their own active family adventures this summer and beyond! Tickets are available on Eventbrite: click here . Virtual presentations coming soon - meanwhile, here are more details about the Whitehorse event on January 26th: Got kids?* Got bikes? Got dreams of exploring the world together and making unforgettable family memories?  Join us on January 26th at Mt. Mac’s cozy Grey Mountain Room for a Sunday afternoon virtual ride through the years and across continents with the Gillis-Land-Murphy family - Ed, Jocelyn, Heron and Sitka, who have cycled together from Cuba to New Zealand to Norway, from toddlers to teenagers - and are now celebrating the launch of our second book, Bike Touring with Kids: Europe Epic . Your $15 ticket includes $5 off the purchase of Europe Epic at the event, signed by the author. Activities for the kids, snacks and refreshments for a winter afternoon dreaming of your next family adventure! *Having children not required - this event is for all cycling / travel enthusiasts irrespective of family status!

“Hey Dad, look back across the bay. I can still see that boulder island we were hiking on two days ago!” “Yeah, Sitka, you’re right. And now, over there, at that point in the distance, I think that’s where we’re camping Wednesday night.” “What?” pipes in older brother Heron, deftly twirling his hiking pole in his recently un-casted left hand. “It’s really gonna take us three days to walk only to there?” It sure did. For a family accustomed to cycling a hundred kilometres or so a day on our bike tours, we’re used to the landscape changing pretty quickly. Even during our two treks by foot through the Alps this summer, we would always feel like we’d covered a lot of ground over several mountain passes before supper time.  Now, as we backpacked the north coast of France along the Grande Randonnée 34 in Bretagne, tracing the ever-undulating contours of the jagged shoreline with our boots, our daily 15-20km of hiking seemed startlingly sluggish - especially when gazing out over the open Atlantic Ocean and all its hidden bays, nooks and inlets. One day, we turned inland along the Léguer River and walked 18km before emerging back to its mouth, 50 metres across from where we’d left it. Slow progress. But for all the moments we wished we had two wheels to get us farther faster, we also found a different kind of magic that left us in awe of this vast, vibrant region, that we would never have known as well if we weren’t on two feet instead. For starters, we rarely saw road - or paved anything, in fact. Most of our ten-day hike from Saint-Brieuc to Morlaix on the GR34 trail was on the very edge of the continent - along sandy beaches, through village harbours, or high up on rugged cliffs, with dramatic front-row views of obstinate land meeting insistent sea in their eternal, ferocious dance.  The Bretagne coast (Brittany to the Brits across the Channel, and Breizh to the native Bretons, descendants of ancient Celts who still see their language on sign posts) is famously dotted with stunning magmatic statues - pink granite boulders sculpted by the sea in infinite shapes like cumulus clouds, piled dozens of metres high in often impossible stacks.  Some, near charming Perros-Guirec, are accessible and explorable from the beach, with tourists scrambling through and over them for a day’s-worth of stroll. Others are far offshore, like bobbing whale heads in the distance.  The ocean floor here is strikingly shallow - in some bays for a mile or two out to sea - so that the tides reveal incrementally new bits of islands in artistic formations, then hide them slowly away again. At first, this makes for some less inspiring coastal views throughout the day, with dozens of boats marooned in expansive mud flats, like an apocalyptic pre-tsunami movie scene. But a few hours later, the azure water is back in, so clear on a sunny day that you can see the brown peaks of those stone statues barely, momentarily submerged. One must choose one’s swimming breaks carefully, or face a mile-long hike out for a dip. Not like that would have stopped Sitka anyway. Like our mountain treks, the climbs and descents could be steep and strenuous. But with a maximum elevation of 98 metres above sea level, the challenge is only ever five or ten minutes long before reaching payout in splendid views over the next bluff. Exploring by foot rather than bike also affords us more opportunity to talk to our teens. Our foursome is in near-constant conversation on all topics under the bluebird sky: among others the latest happenings on the Tour de France that we’ve been following religiously, plans for this fall (spoiler alert: biking), opinions on Canadian and US politics, and every plot twist of the novels we’re currently devouring (except Ed, whose snail pace has him still reading the same book since June). Hiking has its own challenges, of course. On bike, we pass through many towns - and pass many grocery stores, snack shacks and patisseries - each day, easily detouring off-route if needed. On foot, we could go a couple days without fresh food stops - which would have to be near or directly on the trail - meaning heavier packs and grumpier packers. And being in France, of course, sometimes shops were on a hours-long midday break for sieste , cafes closed on the one day we were happening through, and campgrounds full because, well, summer weekend. These dilemmas were inevitably exacerbated by Ed’s chronic underestimation of each day’s predicted distance (GPS maps are great at measuring road routes - less so with coastal walking paths). At one point he responded to Heron’s innnocent inquiry about the number of kilometres left with an exasperated shoulder-shrug and a defeated shoulder-slump. “I have absolutely no idea.” But we all toughed through the rough bits: Heron is still lugging the majority of the family’s food and gear in his over-heavy pack, sometimes way ahead of the rest of us, seeing it all as training for ski season. Joce is silently enduring a fresh set of foot blisters that remind her with each step and require vigilant care. And Sitka has grown and inch or three this summer, so has joined the family club of hitting our heads on every low-hanging branch and ceiling. He finds this less funny than he did when it was Ed and then Heron. Still, we’re feeling rather spoiled on this route, once voted France’s favourite of all its Grandes Randonnées . We’ve stumbled on more-frequent-than-expected ice cream stands and gluten-free blé noir (buckwheat) galettes stuffed with cheese and other savoury toppings. On several occasions, our campgrounds have hosted galette or pizza food trucks on just the day we arrived. And we’ve had evening tournaments of mini-putt, pétanque and outdoor ping-pong - just as we like it. And we even finished our trek a day early, in Plougasnou, where we indulged Ed’s inner history geek with a boat tour out into the Baie de Morlaix to visit the Chateau de Taureau - a Renaissance-era fortress built by the locals to fend off English pirates, fortified by France’s Sun King Louis XIV and then used as a water-bound prison for embarrassing aristocrats and counter-revolutionaries. True story: you could write to the king about an insolent (adult) child, drunk sibling or creepy uncle, and have them imprisoned on this treacherous island, so long as you paid their costs - we know you’re thinking of just the family member you’d choose right… now. Then we walked (without packs!) to la Plage Trégastel and rented a sea kayak from, essentially, a vending machine, and explored the boulder statues up close in excitingly choppy waves. *(Also spotted: actual vending machines for baguettes and pizza! Ah, Europe.) And to top it off, we happened past a jazz concert in a secluded garden near our campground. It took us a quarter-hour to find the entrance, by which time the band had wrapped up its soothing set. But when they spotted the curious Canadians emerging from the raspberry bushes, they generously resolved  to play one more. The initimate audience were delighted by our appearance as well, clearing four chairs for us to take in the full experience among the lilacs. “A toast to new friendships!” mused the pony-tailed host and his wife. A sweet end to a summer we’d never planned on. Indeed, just the day before, as we sweated up and down the steep cliffs for four hours contouring into Plougasnou, we looked into bay to the northeast and saw the faint outline of that same boulder island Sitka had pointed out on Monday - the one we’d climbed the last Friday afternoon.  It was the following Wednesday.  We pivoted our necks and saw all the glorious coastline we’d seen up close. Every nook and every inlet. Maybe seeing the world on two feet isn’t so bad after all. That said: as we arrived at our final campground, Ed gasped as he realized he forgot to take out the extra cash we would need for the next day’s boat tour. The last ATM we passed was six kilometres back - over an hour on foot each way.  Big problem.  Desperate, he glanced around and spotted, leaning against a camper-trailer… a bicycle. “Maybe I’ll borrow a bike from another camper,” he dreamed out loud while checking in. “I’ll lend you my bike, no problem!” offered the elderly camp host, who led Ed to her musty old barn with an old granny contraption in the back.  Flat tires, cobwebbed spokes, gunked-up chain and rusty brakes - this was still nirvana for a guy who hadn’t pedalled in two months. He pumped up the tires and gave it a whirl, whisking freely with the wind in his hair… Okay, maybe an exaggeration. Ed has no hair. But still, the old clunker did its job, delivering our hero to the ATM and even a grocery store for extra chips and Orangina to celebrate. “You know what solves all problems?” he quizzed Joce with a joyous hug on his return. “A bicycle.” Yes, we thoroughly enjoyed our summer on two feet.  But deep down we’re still a family on two wheels.