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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.

Picture yourself lounging on the world’s best sunning rock: moulded perfectly to the curve of your back, with just the right pressure on the sore spots, at the ideal angle for gazing up at the clouds wisping briskly in the blue sky above. Tilt your head left, you see the sky-scraping, scraggy granite peaks that envelop the narrow mountain pass you conquered a half-hour earlier. The nearly-thousand-metre climb began in shady, fragrant conifer-and-fern forest with multiple crossings of rushing mountain streams; then passed by a log-cabin refuge with scrumptious blueberry pie, and later a refreshingly frigid, crystalline alpine lake you leapt into for a break from the mid-July heat; and it ended 2400m above sea level with engrossing, panorama valley views on either side of the rocky saddle. Tilt right: a vast field of enormous, red-hewed sandstone boulders, strewn about by an ancient glacier to form the challenging moraine you’ll have to scramble across when you’re done your rest. Just then, two imposing curled horns appear in your sightline, followed by the stubby snout and long-slit pupils of a bouquetin - the ubiquitous mountain ibex  of France’s Maritime Alps. These muscular, graceful goats mull around with humans like kangaroos in Australia - not especially curious but not afraid either. They mostly seem to be seeking the most mineral-coated stones to lick. “That rock you’re lying on is delightfully salty,” he’s saying with his still glare. “You gonna move on soon or what?”  Reluctantly, you sit up, re-lace your hiking boots and cede your spot. Soon afterward, you’ve crossed the boulder field and are on a tenuous ridge curling around yet another soaring rock face. Then you descend a series of loose-gravel hairpin switchbacks, on a steep grassy slope, dotted with a rainbow of wildflowers, into a verdant farm valley with a constant din of cowbell guiding you to your destination. It’s just one sample day of our family’s exhilarating trek through the Maritime Alps along the Grande Traversée du Mercantour  (GTM) - a gloriously diverse, two-week hiking route in a spectacular parc national  along the France-Italy border north of Nice.  Eleven unforgettable days, not one the same as the others. We’d been wanting to try out one of Europe’s famous hut-to-hut treks since our parental leave in Europe and the South America’s Patagonian Andes, 16 years ago. On a day hike in Argentina with nine-month-old Heron on Joce’s back, we came across a remote alpine hut that served mini-pizzas and lemon meringue pie, and we’ve been craving a return to something similar every summer since. Normally, we’re a family of four on bicycles, but two broken teenage arms thrust hiking onto our summer menu, and we finally realized our longtime dream. But we were admittedly worried about the reality - especially around food. On our first outing this summer, around Europe’s famous Mont Blanc, we learned that two hiking teens consume a lot more food than a single newborn. And Mont Blanc had daily villages and cafes to top up our meal stocks. This time, we were walking into more remote, unknown territory. We knew we could sleep in our tents near the mountain refuges  - we figured we would prefer the fresh air and quiet over packed dorms and snores. But we decided to take the dinners at the remote huts to reduce the amount we packed in - what if their idea of a mountain trekker’s meal wasn’t of the same volume as our boys’? So there we were, in the fruit and vegetable aisle at the Utile supermarket in Isola 2000 - the lone village along the GTM route - unsure which ones to get. If you think it’s a bad idea to shop for groceries on an empty stomach, try it after four days hiking in the Alps with two teens, and another seven more days coming up with no more places to stock up. We bought them all. Well, maybe not all , but certainly far more than we needed, could carry or could eat. Apples, peaches, mango, all types of berries, bananas, peppers, carrots, broccoli, a zucchini and an onion. We also stocked up on enough carbs to fuel a Roman legion: pasta, pizza, bread, chips, tortilla wraps, and several kilograms of chocolate. Plus it was hot, so a couple tubs of ice cream. Three protein bars per day, each, so there’s one full hiking pack right there. Then of course, after our first round of delicious fruit salad, we all felt stuffed. “I think we need a full day off just to eat all this food,” worried 14-year-old Sitka, belly near bursting. “It’s five o’clock and we’re leaving again in the morning, right?” “Don’t look at me - one pizza will be plenty for me,” warned 16-year-old Heron, our new family pack mule and leftover garburator. “We’ll have to carry whatever we don’t eat,” reasoned Ed, who knew the two heads of broccoli were solely for him to eat tonight. “Okay then let’s get started,” ceded Heron, opening up the box of appies. We gorged like grizzlies prepping to hibernate that evening, hoping our fat stores would see us through. Turns out our panicked planning was just right. Each refuge hut ( refugio for the nights on the Italian side) was as different from the next as each day’s hike. Every afternoon we would arrive to a new respite in a unique spot - on an high alpine outcrop, nestled in a glacial moraine, in a valley-side cattle farm, and even at an alpine nunnery where St Anne, patron saint of motherhood, directed a local believer to build a sanctuary a thousand years ago.  Some are smaller and more isolated, bringing in their ingredients once a month by helicopter, or hiking them in on the backs of the guardians (who earn their living on the meals as chef-entrepreneurs, while the alpine societies who built and coordinate the huts get their income from the dorms). Others with easier road access attract larger numbers of hikers on weekend or short-term outings, and so have more access to fresh produce to cook with. All had a little surprise in store: very generous portions, multiple courses, inventive soups, and simple but tasty desserts. We never knew what was coming the next night.  Except we could  rely on great conversation, as each evening we would be assigned a place at a long table with our name on it, and meet new friends and fresh subjects - like French politics, the perilous journey of African migrants in Europe, and why North Americans are crazy for putting our eggs and fruit in the fridge.  The GTM is much less known than the Tour du Mont Blanc - especially in the more remote first half before the stock-up town of Isola 2000 - so meals were more intimate and the trails more peaceful. The daily hikes, challenging and even grueling as they could be at times, made us endlessly grateful that we’d stumbled upon this gem of a summer adventure: we love touring on two wheels because it offers dramatically different views and experiences every day. Now we’ve discovered the same can happen on two feet as well. The 17-stage route normally starts in cozy Entraunes, 120km northwest of Nice at the confluence of the Var and Bourdous rivers. But we only had an 11-day window to catch the Grande Arrivée of the Tour de France on the Mediterranean Sea (and to get Heron’s cast removed on a weekday morning when French doctors are available), so we began with a two-hour bus ride up from Nice, winding through deep canyons to the village of Saint-Étienne-de-Tinée.  From there, we climbed three hours straight up through shady forest to meet the main trail on a stony ledge over steep valley walls, hugging an undulating rock face for another hour, through several blasted tunnels, to our first alpine refuge perched above sublime Lake Rabuons. We pitched our tent on its scrabbly shore and took our first frigid dip of many on this trip - certainly not a swim - to rinse off the sweat of the day. On another day, up to Italy’s Pas de Colle Longue , we climbed into the most splendid, green, vast alpine meadow - how a hiker might picture heaven, with an undulating, pristine stream rushing down the middle, spotted with vibrant larch trees and rainbow splashes of wildflowers, and surrounded on all sides by dramatic limestone cliffs.  Even our one rainy day was memorably cool, over the Baisse de Druos, as we sheltered from a hailstorm in the ruins of a two-storey Italian barracks from World War I, then walked through a barren, misty mountain cirque (huge bowls dug out by ancient glaciers leaving small lakes behind amidst the limestone boulders) along a conspicuous rock road that was laboriously engineered for a hunt-happy Italian king but felt eerily like a scene from a J.R.R. Tolkien novel - with sixteen-year-old Heron our guiding Gandolf and forty-something Ed our bumbling Bilbo Baggins struggling to keep up. Later, on our day up to the Pas du Mont Colomb , we packed away our poles and were grappling up fridge-sized boulders with both hands all morning, then trudged through snow fields with crampons up to the sky-high saddle,   only to reach the tiny wedge of the pass and stare seemingly straight down into the abyss-like moraine below.  It was labeled a “technical” descent in the guidebook, which in our home the Yukon has two meanings: to parents, it means “treacherous, use extreme caution.”  To teenagers, “technical” translates roughly into “awesome!” It was both. “We’re not trying to rush you,” explained Heron. “Yeah it’s just that you’re kind of slow,” followed Sitka. And then, with nerves frayed and (Ed’s)  ankles gnarled at the valley bottom, we climbed back up beside a 20m-high dam to the expansive Lac de la Foux, surrounded 300 degrees around by steep slopes and towering waterfalls. We dropped our bags (but refrained from setting up our tents - in France, the rules of bivouac  say no pitching until 7pm) in a postcard alpine meadow, bathed in a waterfall pool, and read the afternoon away under the supervision of a couple dozen chamois  - the ibex’s slightly smaller, more curious cousins. As we approached our tour’s end in Sospel, we thought we’d seen it all along this strikingly varied route - until we reached La Vallée des Merveilles , where ten-foot iron poles marked spots on the rock where our prehistoric ancestors engraved images of ibex, faces and village scenes using some of the first human tools - like neolithic emojis. And the next day, we marveled over a series of ruined old forts from the days of Napoleon in Authion - including an intact summit lookout at the Pointe des trois communes that was the scene of World War II’s last liberating battles. Sure, we’re keen to get back on our bikes soon, since Heron’s cast was successfully removed the day we arrived back in Nice, and Sitka has been eagerly performing his wrist rehab for a week now. But now we’ve tried the hut-to-hut approach to exploring places inaccessible to cycling. And it’s got the same “new awesome every day” feel. And yeah, our packs (on our backs instead of our racks) were very heavy at first, as we carried a week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and emergency freeze-dried meals from home (but no broccoli) in the remote wilderness of the Alps. But every day, they got lighter. And every day, we dreamed up new places we could do this: Corsica, Slovenia, the Italian Dolomites (Sitka’s next target with more intense Via ferratas ). We’re kind of hooked on the hut-to-hut. Especially if there’s a perfect, salty rock to rest on.

For two solid hours, we’d been climbing up steep, rocky switchbacks to reach le Col Ferret  - a 2500-metre-high alpine saddle separating Italy and Switzerland. Across the far-below valley we’d just left behind was the southeast facade of iconic Mont Blanc , “King of the Alps”: a miles-wide massif of jagged granite soaring into snowy peaks, with ten immense glaciers each carving beds for dozens of magical waterfalls plunging into the valley below.  It’s as epic a mountainscape as you can get on this splendid planet without a sherpa and severe altitude sickness. For this, the ten-day Tour du Mont Blanc - 170km circumnavigating the King, from Chamonix, France, to Courmayeur, Italy and back via a corner  of Switzerland - is Europe’s most famous and popular backpacking trek. Some 20,000 hikers a year, from around the world, spend six to twelve months plotting out each stage and sleep spot. We’d just decided on it last week - after two broken teenaged arms forced our family of four off of a Baltic bike tour and into Plan B. And so, on this second morning with old hiking boots and overly heavy packs, our feet were still sore and our legs still wobbly from yesterday’s 20km initiation up and along the precipitous ridge above le Val Ferret  with the front-row view. But our spirits were as high as our elevation. “This place is spectacular,” marvelled 14-year-old Sitka. “Yeah, I can’t believe we’re here seeing this,” added big brother Heron. We were feeling pretty fortunate that our hastily improvised detour took us to such an idyllic new route. And then we reached the top. The trail led necessarily away from Mont Blanc for a short spell through some alpine Swiss valleys, and the only way downward was through steep funnels of snow. Sure, we saw our fellow hikers giddily gliding down the toboggan mountain on their butts. But our next glance was at our two sons’ left arms - or more precisely at the two casts protecting them. “Don’t worry, Mom,” reassured 16-year-old, six-foot-one Heron, whose pack was heaviest of all. “We got this.” “Yeah, it actually looks like fun !” chirped Sitka. “Okay, I won’t slide down. I’ll just walk.” Falling on broken arms at this stage would be devastating, no less in the middle of alpine nowhere. But in the end, parenting teenagers means trusting them to know their limits. And after so many trials and challenges on our bike adventures together, our teens had proven themselves many times over. Just then, a French guide climbed up from the opposite direction with a dozen exhausted snow-climbers in tow. “Oh it’s fine if you put your crampons under your boots.” Crampons would have been a good idea, we thought. Add that to the list for next time, when we’ve had more than a week to prepare.  Instead, we kept on improvising. Ed embarked down the slippery descent with his 40-pound pack, digging in his heels with each step to make a path for his boys, who followed with empty shoulders so they could keep their balance down the Dad-trodden trail using their lone hiking pole. Joce followed after to keep an eye on her herd, then Ed climbed back up to shuttle the boys’ bags on his back. “Just one at a time, love!” shouted Joce as Ed gamely tried lugging 60 pounds downhill. “All good, I can do it!” claimed Ed, milliseconds before wiping out, almost riding the butt-slide face-first all the way down the valley, then bringing the bags down one at a time. It wouldn’t be the last time we had to adapt during our ten-day trek, but we did borrow crampons from a fellow family of Canadians we met en route, just to be safe. The Tour du Mont Blanc, or TMB, is the very definition of earned awesome: sublime hiking trails through verdant spruce-and-maple forests, and across alpine steppes with regular, dramatic views of mountain and valley - but only after damn difficult physical exertion. Sure, there are bus shuttles, baggage services, fancy (and crazy pricey) refuge meals and beds, and even gondola short-cuts that feel an awful lot like cheating when you’re (like us) slogging up slopes with freeze-dried meals and full-on camping gear.  But we didn’t meet anyone having it easy on the relentless climbs or knee-punishing descents - whether they were obvious newbies with little daypacks and a lot of huffing sounds, sturdy veterans with larger loads like ours, spry retirees who were actually the most composed of all, or even the hyper-fit jerks who were running - yes, running  - the route with water vests and folding poles.  Everyone was earning their awesome at their own level of fitness.  And also at their own comfort level: one look up at the dangling Brévent gondola in Chamonix, rocking precariously back and forth in the ferocious wind against the grey-sky backdrop, convinced us to take the long way up. “Why would anyone want to go up in that?! ” mused Joce, loud enough for everyone around us to hear. A few couples looked up and started consulting amongst themselves. And, it must be said, at their own level of financial means. We’d heard that the TMB is not for the faint of heart or the light of wallet - but what we discovered was that the two factors are inversely proportionate: pay more, carry less. But at least there exists the opposite proposition. For the legions of tent-campers with whom we shared a field each night - too adventurous, stubborn, or unwealthy (or, in our case, all three plus late-to-the-planning) to have reserved more comfy accommodation - you can suffer for your savings.  And as we can attest, the awesome is all the more sweet. There were treats to be had à la carte , of course. You come across the odd village almost every day for ice cream, fries, pizza or fresh fruit. We supplemented our camp meals with groceries most days, and bookended our trek with much more affordable indoor nights. You can also ramp up the suffering by carrying all your own food and wild-camping ( bivouac en français ), though the rules differ by country as to whether, when and where you can surreptitiously pitch (in France only from sunset to sunrise, in Italy only above 2500m, and in Switzerland only above the tree line). No matter how you roll around Mont Blanc, though, the routine is the same: each morning, hours of seemingly endless climb averaging almost 1000m of elevation gain a day; lunch at the top with a splendid view that makes it all very well worth it; and all afternoon back down again - with alternating moments of pure awe and reflection as to why exactly you’re doing this, again? Indeed, there’s a certain communal feel to the whole experience. As we would pass the same groups at each one’s staggered snack stop, and then get passed by each of them again at ours, we made new friends young and old, in English, Spanish and French, from across Europe, North America and Asia.  Each with their own story, all walking the same path.  Surely everyone else had the same nasty foot blisters, achy knees and bruised shoulders as the older two of us, right? And then, in our case at least, there’s a day that stretches your physical limits, your emotional sanity, and your family cohesion. On Day Eight (having started counter-clockwise in Courmayeur rather than the traditional Chamonix), we started climbing toward Col du Bonhomme  in a teeming rain that abated every half-hour or so before mocking us anew a while later. By early afternoon we reached the summit, soaked and surrounded by heavy grey. Past the crest, again, a vast field of snow along the mile-plus-long ridge. Thanks to our new friends la famille Fontaine , we had crampons. But they didn’t have anything for hail.  Exhausted from the long, bouldery climb, we grumbled along - the kind of hike where your feet keep moving unconsiciously, because if you thought too much about your situation, you’d stop. And if you stopped, you’d likely not start again. The constant, pea-sized ice pellets actually had us chuckling for our misery. Then the sky lit up for a split second. And seconds later, a long, roaring clap of thunder.  Really? Several more flashes of lightning seemed to be getting closer as we trudged through slushy snow and goopy mud amongst the granite slabs in the angry storm. There were other groups of hikers in front and behind us - could we have all lost our grasp of basic survival instincts at the same time? Just as each of us were ready to throw something off the cliff to our right (okay, probably just Ed), Joce caught sight of the day’s awesome. “Woah, look at that over there!” What in the heck could possibly be… woah… Several miles off in the distance was the edge of the vicious storm cloud. And a thousand metres downward was a sparkling alpine lake perched above a sun-drenched valley. It looked like a portal to another dimension. We hadn’t seen blue sky all day - and we still couldn’t - but someone somewhere was dry and happy. There was hope for us after all. Soon we came across a refuge and changed into dry clothes over four tiny, expensive mugs of hot chocolate. The rain stopped, then started up harder again. On the interminable walk down, Ed slid out twice after warning his one-armed sons to be careful, caking his bottom half thoroughly in fresh, thick mud and probably some cow poop. We arrived at the tent-filled field in the tiny village of Les Chapieux, surrounded on all sides by spruce-covered mountains and a glimpse of mighty Mont Blanc up the valley, just in time for the rain to subside. We splurged on some Wood-fired pizza and also dined on rehydrated pad thai. Ed improvised a laundering of his shorts in the creek, and we all hung our wet clothes on our hiking poles to dry, until the rain came again a few minutes later. It was that kind of day. But hey, if you want the awesome, you’ve gotta earn it. Ten days on the Tour du Mont Blanc weren’t necessarily on our family bucket list, but fortune stepped in and guided us to a spectacularly challenging, fulfilling quest. Through lush forest and alpine snow fields, across raging glacier streams and over a dozen alpine passes (and back down again), we refined our resilience and made more memories.   The towering aiguilles  of the King of the Alps - seen from all possible angles - were surely the star. But the little Italian and Swiss and French hamlets and valleys and farms and people make for a superb supporting cast. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime mountaineering experience that’s accessible to most anyone with the will to suffer for it - however much suffering one can take.  If you’ve got a year to plan for it, we’d suggest you get started. And if you don’t, at least remember your crampons.

Dearest friends: We are PSYCHED to announce the release of our second book - Bike Touring with Kids: the Europe Epic! It has all the best stories from our 10,000km, 20-country family bike adventure across Europe, with tips on how to get started with your own family - and especially some sweet details on all those European desserts! Please consider giving it a read - print-on-demand paperback or Kindle e-reader - and then a review on Amazon. Here's the description below. Happy summer reading! ---- Ed and Jocelyn fell in love on bicycles, spent their honeymoon pedaling from Vancouver to Tijuana, and refused to believe that life-after-kids would be the end of their ambitious adventures. So they hiked across Europe and South America on parental leave with a baby in a backpack, then cycled with their two young sons on various contraptions all over the Pacific Northwest, Yukon and Alaska, the Canadian Rockies and all four Atlantic provinces, and eventually for six months across New Zealand, Australia and French Polynesia on two tandems. Now, Heron and Sitka are teenagers – and they’re in charge of the route planning, the fun stops, and most importantly, the desserts. Europe Epic is the story of this intrepid Yukon family’s biggest odyssey yet: twenty countries, 10,000 km and several hundred desserts from Spain through Portugal, France, Italy and Croatia to Greece; then from Switzerland through Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden to Norway. In this inspiring and hilarious tale, you’ll follow the fearless foursome as they: -       Bike through bone-soaking downpours, gale-force headwinds, suffocating heat, thick spiky brush, a broken crankshaft, a rambunctious Good Friday parade and numerous dead-ends… -       … But also along spectacular cliffside trails, below sea level (twice), through a 400m-long tunnel under a medieval citadel, up and down the Alps (twice), on hard-packed North Sea sand beaches, and (more frequently than they should) on last-minute mad dashes to catch the day’s last ferry -       Ride not just bikes, but also scooters, surfboards, kayaks, wakeboards, sand dunes, ziplines, waterslides, gondolas, alpine hiking chairlifts, a whitewater raft, a wind-powered rollercoaster, and a Porsche -       Explore sea-carved caves, medieval castles, far-flung Roman ruins, opulent cathedrals, communist war bunkers, hollowed-out airplanes, royal palaces, Viking villages, Dutch windmills, the Louvre, the Acropolis, the Colosseum, and the life of Ötzi the 5300-year-old iceman -       Sleep in tents, on beaches, in free Danish dog-house-sized camp shelters, at a luxury Bosnian resort hotel, in a wooden teepee, next to an all-night karaoke party, in pilgrim hostels, in a Montenegrin cave, at a Willy-Wonka hippie camp, and on a rickety old canal boat -       Witness soccer matches, a tractor parade, a wedding on a fire truck, a silent disco, a spontaneous beach concert, a street fashion show, two sand-sculpture parks, a wave-powered sea organ, and a gaggle of French people chasing a duck with a bag. -       Learn to say Hello, Please, Thank you, “Can I have one of those pastries” and “Where are the chick peas” in 15 languages. -       Chase waves, jump off cliffs, swim in glacier lakes, scale a mountain peak in rock-climbing harnesses, nap under the Eiffel Tower, do the chicken dance in an Albanian grocery store, and get lost oh so many times. Along the way, you’ll watch this pedal-happy gang experience endless highs and lows, meet hundreds of wacky characters and new friends, learn and grow and laugh and cry, and make forever memories as they evolve from two parents tugging along two kids, to four best friends riding side-by-side (not always literally, which would be hazardous) on the family bonding journey of a lifetime. You can buy it HERE now on Amazon - print-on-demand or Kindle e-reader.

As the snow thawed and the long days of sunlight returned to the Yukon this spring, we busily plotted out our next family adventure – perhaps the last full summer as our two teenaged sons begin eyeing national ski team camps and Canada Summer Games road-bike tryouts. If this would be our final hurrah, we would make it a beauty: seven weeks in seven countries cycling around the Baltic Sea plus Iceland. We would begin back in Copenhagen and southern Denmark before ferrying to Lithuania, pedaling northward through Latvia, Estonia and Finland, then a boat back to Sweden. Our week-long layover in Iceland was maybe our favourite part – snorkeling between continental shelves, gazing at geysers and hiking to hot springs, craters and waterfalls. We’d been planning, reserving and dreaming for six months – refining every detail to maximize the awesome. Surfspots and kabelparks, seaside campsites, tours of charming old cities like Riga and Tallinn. Then, a half-hour after the last day of school exams… A freak soccer accident. A broken teenaged arm bone. An eight-week cast. No biking. Less than two weeks later, we have un-reserved an entire two-month cycling odyssey, and plotted out the skeleton of an exciting Plan B. The Great Pivot. This Thursday, we will catch that darn plane to Copenhagen and get a whiff of the boys’ favourite city before moving on to Chamonix in the French Alps for a six-week hike around Mont Blanc and the Tour des Géants straddling the Italian border. We’ll try to skip over to watch a stage of the Tour de France in person (just to rub our bike-free summer in our own faces) and wrap up in Paris for a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of the Summer Olympics. We don’t have a map yet, or a day-by-day plan. We don’t know if there’s gluten-free food for Sitka in the mountain albergues, where to get x-rays and cast removal, or whether we’re for sure allowed to camp in Italy. But we have wrapped up report cards and clinic days, packed up our home for summer house-sitters, and invested in man-sized hiking packs and boots for our man-sized teens. Ed even published his second book, Bike Touring With Kids: the Europe Epic – available on Amazon in a couple days. As we’ve mentioned before, some of best life decisions have been the most spontaneous ones – like getting engaged on our third date, or launching into a parental-leave hiking trip in Europe and South America on a week’s notice. So we’re a bit frazzled, but unfazed by the considerable amount of spontaneity coming our way. And that’s why just a few days ago, when our second son slipped in the forest and broke the exact same bone as his brother (left radius), we just shrugged and laughed. We can’t bike anyway, so why not have all the bad luck at once? Time to leap into the Great Pivot!

Deer Lake to Anse-aux-Meadows, 694km (Tour Total 2,226km) “Welcome to the Big Land” reads the humongous blue highway placard at the summit of a cruelly steep hill climbing north out of Blanc Sablon, Québec. “That’s a very big sign,” noticed Heron. “Are they trying to intimidate us?” wondered Sitka. “On the other side, it says ‘Thanks for visiting’ if you want just take your photo and pretend you’ve been there,” offered the ladies in the minivan. No way. Now we were curious. Plus we had five hours to kill before our ferry, a famous lighthouse to visit 66km out and back, and a craving for a bakery. We were cycling into Labrador, the immense triangular sibling to the island of Newfoundland, nicknamed “the Big Land” (big B, big L) for its dramatic topography and vast untamed space. But the moniker could easily apply to the whole of Canada’s easternmost province: big mountains, big wildlife, big skies and big history. Its coastal cliffs represent the dividing line between geological epochs. Its fjords are lined by towering billion-year-old rock, carved out by glaciers from Ice Ages past. And its grassy knolls reveal historic first contact between human civilisations 100,000 years in the making. Comparatively, we five cyclists - four Yukoners plus Uncle Steve from Ontario, biking the Viking Trail along the rugged coasts of Iceberg Alley and across the scrubby northern barrens to where Norse men first found North America - felt like mere specks in the sands of time and space. Just happy to be there. Grateful to witness our fantastic, fleeting moment in it all. Our ten-day trek began off the big ferry in Port-aux-Basques, where we immediately stumbled upon an open-air amphitheatre with a band of locals playing a live rendition of I’s the By next to a strip of snack shacks serving fish ‘n’ chips. (For Ed, who could now say he’s visited each of Canada’s provinces and territories, this introduction to the last square on his bingo card was playing right to stereotype.) We skipped ahead by bus to Deer Lake to meet Ed’s brother Steve, who had flown in for a week to bravely embark on his first bike ride longer than 10km. For us, it was our first-ever chance to introduce a relative newbie to our love of cycle touring - and we’d chosen a rather rough place for the initiation. Gros Morne translates roughly from French to “Big Mountain with deep, steep sides” - and there are a lot more than just one gros morne in the mammoth National Park with soaring mesa plateaus split by narrow fjords. “Yesterday (back in Corner Brook) I rode up my first hill with panniers on, and I said Uh-oh,” confessed Uncle Steve. “I should’ve trained more than just bumping up the resistance on my bike at the gym.” Uh-oh. Less than a kilometre in, one the panniers on Steve’s rental bike bounced off into the middle of the highway. Soon after, we avoided near-disaster by replacing a missing bolt on his precariously wobbling rack. Then on the second morning, we discovered he’d pedaled all the first day’s crazy climbs on only his rear gears. “I was wondering what the shifter on the left was for,” he laughed. “My old mountain bike still changes speeds by turning the handlebars.” Uncle Steve was rewarded for his mettle, though, with the full glory of Gros Morne. At our very first campsite, on the shoreline of Bonne Bay at Lomond, we spotted a sleek black, 35-foot minke whale frolicking and fishing a few dozen feet away from our tent. Day Two, after several monster hills up and into the hamlet-lined East Arm, we hiked in the Tablelands - a desert of peridotite rock from the upper layer of the Earth’s mantle thrust up into the floor of the ancient Iapetus Ocean a half-billion years ago. Talk about feeling small. We smartly planned a couple days “off” for activities that we and Uncle Steve both adore: first, an epic sea-kayaking tour with our young guide Zack, from Norris Point to the striking 100-foot vertical cliff of Shag Rock, then along the mountainous contour of the ocean fjord to Woody Point, with its vividly painted rainbow of wood-shingled homes and fishing huts. Afterward, we spontaneously ducked into the Memorial University Marine Research Station for an enrapturing tour of the creepy wolf fish, one-in-a-million mottled lobster, mini flounders and prickly sea urchins in their aquarium and touch-tank with Jacob the encyclopedic undergrad. The next day, we trekked eight hours on foot to conquer the 17km loop traversing the summit of iconic Gros Morne Mountain - scrambling up skree to reach the 800-metre-high plateau of barren limestone, crossing over to expansive 360-degree views of the ocean westward, Bonne Bay to the south, and endless highlands stretching into the horizon everywhere else. We lunched on a vast berry-brush blanket overlooking a spectacular inland fjord hundreds of metres below us, with bridal-veil waterfalls misting down verdant cliffs opposite our windblown perch, before descending along the lush gulley back to the base of the skree. “I can’t believe we climbed up that!” enthused Sitka. “My legs can,” quipped Uncle Steve. In actual fact, our new fifth wheel rolled along with admirable resilience as we tackled mountains, headwinds and walls of teeming rain at times through Gros Morne’s captivating landscape. Fitter than most forty-somethings, Steve still had aches and fatigue in muscles he never knew he had - and he couldn’t sit down for meals for the first few days - but he kept pace with our speed, kept us laughing with his wry humour and bottomless pockets of snacks, kept us informed with his compendious knowledge of plants and bird species, and kept us well fed with a series of seafood stir-fries that spruced up our rotation of camp suppers. By the end, Steve had set a new daily pedal record of 105km, tallied over 400km over his brief week on team, and made memories with his nephews to last a big long time. Riding north on Newfoundland’s west coast, we were elated to be on bikes, as every 20-30km pit stop offered a new highlight. At Lobster Cove, we imagined life as an early 20th-century lighthouse operator family like the Youngs, who kept the kerosene lamp lit 24/7 for four decades. Stuck at home by their duty, they would welcome neighbours from near and far, only knowing their visitors were coming by the oil lanterns bouncing ever more closely in the distance. At Green Point, we were flummoxed by the geology of the layered cliffs, to where scientists from around the world come to examine rare fossils with insights into the planet’s ever-changing surface. At Arches Provincial Park, we watched the tide crash through tunnels bored over centuries in the grass-topped boulders that glaciers discarded in their retreat. And any time, we could pull over at the seaside for a picnic on a rugged slab-stone beach to watch the whitecaps for whales. Even our planned highlight stop offered a stroke of good fortune, as a thick fog lifted just as we arrived at the dock for a boat tour of Western Brook Pond. (Everything about Newfoundland is so big that even the largest of lakes are referred to as “ponds”.) The soaring, jagged cliffs of billion-year-old granitic gneiss are taller than the CN Tower and used to be double their height during previous ice ages, then became an ocean inlet before falling sea levels cut off the fjord from the sea and left a freshwater wonder with half-mile-high waterfalls misting down from the alpine “ponds” on the plateaus above - themselves once part of the ocean floor. Our necks were sore from two hours craning up at the spectacular scenery in all directions, and our minds were sore from contemplating the magnitude of all the time and transformation these rocks had seen - and how relatively tiny our lives (and indeed all human existence) played in the much bigger picture. Much as we’d heard, in Newfoundland and Labrador the weather is big, too. On our day trip to the Big Land (by ferry from St. Barbe), we cycled headfirst into a constant northerly gale, deep down into cozy cove communities and steeply winding back up to the gusty plateaus - all the way to Anse d’Amour and its 100-foot, 138-step lighthouse (the biggest in eastern Canada, of course). Then the clouds blew in heavier and rained their fury on us, chilled to the bone by what was now a mighty tailwind through the mammoth rollercoaster in reverse back to the ferry terminal. Neither word nor camera can capture the feeling of beholding all that space - empty of human presence but teeming with life and colour - in gigantic Labrador that afternoon, and the next day across the forested north peninsula of Newfoundland, onward to St. Anthony. For hours on end, we pedaled with a generous southwesterly at our backs, in ramrod straight lines with broad ponds and stunted scrub on either side, as far as the plains would let us see. We hiked out to the cliffs of Cape Onion to watch a half-dozen magnificent icebergs float by, and spied a dozen humpbacks gracefully breech and fluke in the strait far below. The world of crowded cities with smoky skies seemed a planet away as we got lost in the bigness of pure wild. The rugged remoteness fosters a culture apart, as well. Those resilient souls who have stayed in the Coves - as nearly every seaside fishing hamlet is named - are as relaxed and graciously welcoming as they are hard to understand under the thick, h-amicable h-accent. The men all call Heron and Sitka “son”, and even the young women call Joce “ma darlin’”. When Ed realized his error in assuming the St. Anthony Airport (from where we were scheduled to fly out in two days) was actually in the town of St. Anthony - it’s actually 70km back west - the owner of the cabin we were staying in (born and raised a few doors down, next to the local pub he also owns) said, “I knows a guy with a truck.” Problem solved. And then there’s Clayton Colbourne, our tour guide at Anse-aux-Meadows, and a national treasure himself. Like a Newfie Robin Williams in a Parks Canada golf shirt, he regaled a group of 50 with his vivid stories and intricate detail from when he, as a young boy living in the little house on the point in 1961, watched Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad unearth evidence of Vikings in North America beneath the grassy mounds he played on. As a teen, Clayton helped excavate the historic landmark, and for his adult life (when not out fishing, as is his preference), he’s compiled and humbly, hilariously shared the story of his backyard with the world - the place where human migration reconnected after 100,000 years apart. And all the while reminding us at every step that “Remember, though, folks, I’s no hexpert or hanything.” As though our minds weren’t already in awe-struck overload, we wrapped our trip in St. John’s, with its imposing Narrows, vibrantly painted rowhouses, bustling pub strip, and Signal Hill - a uniquely splendid urban hike along rocky oceanside cliffs, site of the final battle between English and French for Canada’s linguistic destiny, base of Merchant Marine suppliers facing Nazi U-boats in World War, and home to Memorial University’s Geo Centre highlighting more billion-year-old rock carved by glaciers. What a way to end our 2,226km summer bike ride, which we thought was a pretty big deal. And, we guess, it was. We explored some of the most challenging terrain and remarkable places in the east of our beautiful country. We got Uncle Steve to beat his bike-day record by a factor of ten. We visited sites of transformative importance in our planet’s history. But in The Big Land - this province so immense in space and time and character - we learned that our place in the big scheme of things is infinitesimally small. Best to follow our curiosity and enjoy every minute of our relatively brief visit.

Pictou to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, 556km (Tour total 1,532km) “I’m finished. I don’t think I can make it!” “Just one more kilometre to go.” “But it’s another uphill!” “We’ve already biked 84 kilometres today. Just one last push.” “Aaaagggghhhh!” “C’mon, Dad, you got this!” “Ugh, okay.” There may have been more whining in Ed’s head than just this, but the last-ditch encouragement from his sons certainly helped him cross the finish line after an excruciating day crossing over the magnificent, mountainous spine of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Highlands. We’ve mentioned before that bike touring is a superb way to foster resilience in our kids. Since they were old enough to wear a helmet, we’ve met all kinds of challenges while cycling every summer. We’ve scaled the Alps in Austria, the Southern Alps in New Zealand, the Rockies in Alberta and the Cascades in Washington. We’ve faced ferocious headwinds for hours on end in Portugal and Germany and British Columbia, and pummeling rain in Australia, Denmark and the Olympic Peninsula. When you’ve surmounted obstacles like these, we hope, everyday hurdles back home like ski races, math tests and emptying the dishwasher will feel a little easier. But it doesn’t mean we always model that resilience ourselves. As our teens grow on their saddles, physically and mentally, they’re gaining strength, experience and perseverance. As we parents get a year older with each annual trip, it seems we… just get older. Earlier that day, we were riding up the 12% grade of North Mountain in the midday heat. Ever since they were mini-cyclists, we’ve developed the habit of sandwiching the boys between us, but when Dad the leader needed to pull over to stretch his back, he said offhandedly, “You guys go ahead if you want.” Zoom. They’d been waiting for that invitation, apparently. Off they went, gliding smoothly up, up and away around the steep switchbacks. Sitka even pedalled standing up for most of it. When we eventually caught up at the 1500-foot summit (even Ed’s eyebrows appear to be thinning, as he had to stop three times to wipe the stinging sweat out of his eyes), Heron and Sitka were calmly sipping from their water bottles. “We saw a moose, right here!” enthused Sitka, pointing to his tires. “It’s still in the bush, there, if you can spot it.” Joce - calm and steady, the true model of resilience on our family (her eyebrows evidently still work) - didn’t end up seeing the moose. She was just glad to be at the top. And that the boys don’t mind waiting for us. Of course, the boys are still working on their resilience, too - if they can’t find their e-book reader or have to wake up early for a ferry - but the bigger problems and disappointments don’t really faze them any more: Getting drenched and pelted by hail-hard rain at 35 knots on a whale-sighting boat with no whales in sight? “We got some serious air on those swells!” Have to bike an 11% grade for 90 minutes up to French Mountain’s 500-metre summit in a drizzly fog? “That didn’t take as long as I thought.” Flying down Mackenzie Mountain’s 13% hairpin downhill in a thick, soppy cloud where you could barely see the outline of the rider in front of you, let alone the reputedly stunning coastal views? “That was awesome, especially when the road lines suddenly turned right in front of my wheel!” Only way to cross the Great Bras d’Or Strait between Englishtown and Boularderie Island is the two-lane, shoulderless climb up to the 100-foot-high Seal Island Bridge? “It wasn't fun, but it was bike-able.” We’ve left behind our reserve battery pack, had our tent fly ripped to shreds, and Heron even broke a spoke this week on his rear wheel - on the dreaded cassette side - in the middle of nowhere. “Hey Dad, how ‘bout I fix it myself?” “I think I see a cafe ahead,” observes Sitka. “Hey Mom, let’s go get a snack!” “I tell them that there’s no problems, only solutions,” Ed has quoted Lennon to the boys since forever. Apparently it’s beginning to stick. It didn’t hurt that we spent the past ten days in one of Canada’s most extraordinary natural playgrounds - along the beach-laden north coast of Nova Scotia and onto Cape Breton Island with its two striking coasts, spectacular national park and reinvigorating Gaelic and Acadian culture. It’s also a province ravaged by unprecedented wildfires earlier this summer, and by abnormal flooding during the week we were riding through - a sobering reminder that rising climate-change-related events are making nature adventuring more challenging, and resilience ever more important. Indeed, for the first time in memory, we were forced indoors by the torrential 36-hour downpour that took the whole province by storm (by pure serendipity, we had planned an off-bikes day in a cabin in Ingonish Beach). We overcame the disappointment at missing our scheduled hike on the forested peninisula with board games and movies - an unprecedented no-movement day that left us all with an unfamiliar stir-crazy feeling (except for Ed, who volunteered to get groceries 8k away, so donned his bathing suit and blared his underappreciated Spotify playlist under the heavy rain splotches and through the deep roadside puddles). We arrived in Nova Scotia from PEI on the ferry in Caribou, riding south over the Pictou Causeway to New Glasgow for a glimpse of African-Canadian history (in addition to being a hub for Black Loyalists and freed slaves, it’s where trailblazer Viola Desmond civilly disobeyed segregation laws in the local theatre almost a decade before Rosa Parks boarded that Alabama bus) and another cousin visit with Ashley and adorable family, then along the Sunrise Trail scenic route toward Cape George Point, fossil seeking at Arisaig Beach, down to Antigonish for a brief campus tour of St. Francis Xavier University (parents more impressed than teens) and eastward on quiet farm roads and through Mik’maw communities to Cape Breton. We crossed the shoulderless Canso Causeway with little trouble thanks to patient drivers giving us oodles of space, and thankfully met a couple who told us the first few kilometres of the Celtic Rail Trail are currently washed out until the town of Troy. There, we merged onto this glorious groomed path for 80 kilometres over a couple days of shallow sandy beaches, steep and stellar coast views, and of course lots of live music. We lunched in Judique at the Celtic Interpretive Centre, taking in the local custom of fish and chips with a healthy side of brilliant fiddle, guitar and piano by a band of locals. Ed was in his happy place, playing Ashley MacIsaac’s Sleepy Maggie on repeat on his head all the way to Mabou, where we cleaned up and dined at the famed Red Shoe Pub on more haddock and fries (homemade bean burgers for the boys) with more live Celtic music. For 48 hours, the Spotify hip-hop shifted to upbeat Celtic classics - yes, including the Rankin Family, part-owners of the Red Shoe - with the boys bopping merrily alongside Mom and Dad. After a refreshing ocean dip at Margaree Harbour, we rode shoulderless road up the Acadian coast, as the bluffs in our foreground grew gradually larger and more imposing until Chéticamp, southwest corner of Cape Breton Highlands National Park. “It’s important to keep a bear-safe campsite, folks,” recited the recent high-school grad at the entry booth to the beautiful campground on fast-flowing Chéticamp River. “We’re from the Yukon,” we explained why we didn’t need the pamphlet for the nth time. “Where are your bear bins?” “Oh, I don’t think we have any. Linda, do we have bear bins? No, we don’t have bear bins. “I guess you can just put your food in whatever you usually put it in. We don’t really get bears.” “I’ll find the garbage bins so we can put our food bags in the back part with the bear-proof handle,” offers Heron, nonplussed. Another solution our family had concocted over the years on two wheels. Our day off at Chéticamp featured the splendid three-hour Acadien trail hike from maple-and-fern rainforest to the stunted spruce and berry bushes atop the highlands, then a ride into town to the funky Freya and Thor cafe, and finally that ill-fated whale tour (“guaranteed” so we were offered our money back, but we took the half-back option since we caught all that air, and also were jazzed by the close-up looks at the soaring, 500-million-year-old pink granite cliffs and an adorable colony of dozens of huge harbour seals). We’d rinsed our bike clothes in the rushing brook next to our campsite just before the rain set in, so Sitka Google-mapped a local laundromat to dry them in. No sweat - figuratively and literally. We hiked the popular Skyline Trail through moose habitat to the fabulous boardwalk at the edge of those beautiful bluffs, just after that foggy climb up French Mountain. When the cloud parted momentarily, we could stare down at the windy, sketchy highway we’d just conquered. “Wow, I’m glad I couldn’t see that road while we biking it,” mused Sitka. After the cloudy blind descent down Mackenzie, we emerged in Pleasant Bay, where the super-friendly local host at the impressive Whale Interpretive Centre suggested a second shot at whale-boating. “Sorry, it’s too foggy out for the rest of the day.” “I really wanted to see whales,” bummed Sitka, who had been deeply affected by the displays showing the evolution of human appreciation of cetaceans, from blubbery commodity to revered fellow mammal. Then a glint in his eye. “How about tomorrow morning?” And so it was that we met a small pod of elusive minke whales - 35-foot wonders surfacing a few times before arching their graceful, angular dorsal fins and diving a few hundred feet for food. And so it was, too, that Ed was so exhausted after a late start to that day up North Mountain and along the Aspy Fault, then up another steep climb over to the east coast of the Highlands - even after a stop at Neils Harbour’s lighthouse ice cream parlour (cash only, so Dad darted into town, found someone to fix the local ATM, and returned a hero with two twenties) - before the final kilometre in Ingonish Beach threw up one last uphill he couldn’t handle. Until his physically and mentally stronger-than-ever teenagers showed him otherwise.

Three island loop rides, 130km (Tour total 976km) There’s a certain feeling that comes with being wrapped cozily in your sleeping bag, opening your eyes after a deep sleep, and seeing a slice of blue sky directly overhead. After a few seconds of pure camping bliss, you realize that your tent fly is missing. Or, on this blustery morning on the ocean-cliff edge of Gros Cap, that the fairly essential layer between your tent mesh and the elements is shredded straight through. It had been a near-sleepless night hoping our nylon homes would survive the gale-force storm thrashing them nearly flat. Successive gusts pummeled the resilient but now so seemingly fragile structure, keeping us wide-eyed for hours. The tent in the site next to us had been leaning so far over that we could see the outline of their cooler inside. Just as we finally drifted off, it felt, Heron awoke to the tragic scene above him. “Mom, the fly is ripped.” “I just woke up.” “It looks pretty bad.” “Should I take it off?” Of course, our teenager sent four calm texts to the tent next door before remembering Mom puts her phone on silent at night, and wears custom-fit ear plugs in any event. Emergencies are Dad’s job. “Guys, the fly is destroyed! I need help!” came the whispered shout from our oldest son forced out into the gale in his shorts. Now that’s a better way to get one’s parents to leap into action. With the speed and precision of the US Marine Corps, our camp-happy foursome of Yukoners dismantled the ill-advised set-up we’d concocted in late dusk the previous evening, and sought shelter on the smarter, lee side of the spruce thicket to assess the damage. “Yep, that’s a long rip,” reported Sitka. All the way down, parallel to the zipper seam. Six years of Yukon wilderness and six months across Europe made us feel invincible in our trusty MSR Papa Hubba. But even this awesomest of tents couldn’t hold against the ferocious gales of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on a gorgeous 100km-long archipelago with 12,000 seafaring Québécois a hundred miles off the mainland. Les Îles de la Madeleine represented the third province in our Atlantic Canada summer bike tour, after much calmer rides along the Northumberland Strait straddling northern New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Les Îles were first settled by a few dozen expulsed Acadiens in the mid-18th century, allocated to Québec in 1774, then populated largely by survivors of shipwrecks along its beautifully treacherous coastline. They’re a weather-hardened, deeply kind people accustomed to taking tragedy in stride. And so it should’ve been no surprise that Sylvie, the cheery host at the Parc du Gros Cap’s cuddly little auberge next to the windswept campground, took us in, booked us into the last available room for the night, made Joce coffee and started calling all her friends for a solution to our tentlessness. One possibly had a long glue-able patch to keep our “double toit” going long-term. Another surely had a three-person tent to lend for our last three nights on the islands. Others had spare rooms or knew of shops nearby to buy new camp gear. Once it was concluded that the damage was irreparable, our accumulated experience in mid-trip problem-solving came through. Ed made a series of phone inquiries that led nowhere except unravelling his diligently planned outdoor camping week, while Joce finagled the last available cozy seaside cabin on the neighbouring Île du Havre-aux-maisons, tracked down a new three-person Hubba from an outdoor store in Nova Scotia, and coordinated its timely delivery to a Canada Post office along our route three days hence. Parental teamwork at its finest. Meanwhile, Heron and Sitka set about researching alternative itineraries for our first day on les Îles, given that the wind had also cancelled our long-reserved kayak tour around the iconic cave-laden coastal cliffs. Now expert day-planners after six months plotting out fun-stuffed routes in Europe, they guided us on a pro-level 35km loop tour around l’Ile du Cap-aux-meules: to the Phare du cap lighthouse, perched perfectly for views of the quirkily sculpted, deep-red sandstone west coast all the way up to Belle-Anse; then along a surprise encounter with one of Québec’s famous Route verte cycling tours with the sea to our left all the way up to Plage du nord for crème glacée and a boulder-jumping, rock-skipping session; then back into town for gluten-free macarons. gluten-filled fresh apple pie and homemade Greek salad at la Boulangerie Madelon. It wasn’t what we’d planned, but it was a perfect bike day together. Midday we had stumbled upon a surf shop on a random country road, so we stopped in to see if there were any non-kayak adventures on offer. “Ce fou de vent serait l’idéal pour du kitesurfing,” enthused the bronzed dude behind the counter. Heron’s eyes exploded - we’d tried seeking lessons all over Europe last year but never caught the right conditions at the right place on the right date we were passing through. “What about the little guy?” we ventured. “Is he heavy enough to try?” Sitka was told often in Europe that he’d likely just fly away with the kite. “Bien sûr!” They’d find him a smaller kite, is all. Sitka practically ripped Ed’s arm off with excitement. “In the three-hour class, would they make onto the water?” In Europe they’d required more than one lesson to get past the theory and the beach. “Absolument.” This guy was winning points left and right. And so we booked kitesurfing for two (as you may know, Ed can break a toe just looking at a surfboard, which is a convenient way for him to avoid displaying his profound ineptitude at balance-on-water sports) for the next day at 11:30am. If the wind was going to tear our summer home apart, it might as well gift the boys a more exciting extreme experience. The French phrase “au gré du vent” means “by the will of the wind.” It’s used literally for things getting blown about in the breeze, and also for people getting blown around by life. In our case, it was both, as we pedaled headfirst into a brisk gale down to the long sandspit to the shores of l’Étang de la Martinique for the boys’ dream kitesurf day, only to have the wind suddenly slow to a near-still whisp when we arrived. “We can do the first part of the lesson learning about the equipment and how to hold the kite,” cautioned Yuri, our eager young teacher. “But I’m not sure it’s strong enough to keep us afloat.” A half-hour later, the gales that shredded our tent fly had fallen fully asleep. No matter how hard Yuri tugged and turned and ran back and forth in the shallow waters, the giant inflated kite refused to stay airborne. Le vent des Îles was messing with us again. We would salvage that day, too, with a tour of the southern-most Île du Havre-Aubert, dining in historic La Grave on gourmet fish tacos and pizza with fresh Tomme des Demoiselles cheese made only on these islands, then discovering a remote sandy beach stretching for miles to wander with waves lapping our feet and chat about our fall family plans back home. Of course now that the wind has calmed, all the replacement kayak tour slots were full, so we packed our final day on l’Ile du Havre-aux-maisons with a fromagerie stop to meet that troop of cows responsible for specialized Madelinot cheeses, a short hike to the colony of double-crested cormorants at the lighthouse at La Cap Alright, a wave-frolicking session at la Plage du Dune-du-Sud, and a spontaneous drop-in at la Méduse glass shop, where a local artist couple create marvellous trademark pieces with colourful sculpted jellyfish inside - making for stunning effects when lit from below with a disc lamp. The money we’d saved on cancelled kitesurfing and kayaking will thus serve to illuminate our living room in perpetuity. As we pedaled home to our cozy cabin on the lagoon between Cap-aux-Meules and Havre-des-maisons, the cloud and fog that had enveloped our whole visit so far suddenly lifted, revealing a quite picturesque set of islands we hadn’t truly seen yet, dotted almost cliche-like with lively-coloured country houses. We wanted even more to stay another week - maybe then the wind would cooperate. In the end, our resilience was rewarded with a sweet sunset over the lagoon, and we remembered that for all our careful scheming, on a bike tour, we are always “au gré du vent.”

Moncton NB to Pictou NS, 350km (tour total 846km) When we imagined cycling across Prince Edward Island, Canada’s tiniest province, we pictured rolling farmland dotted with colourful country homes, miles of coastline with those iconic red-sand cliffs, and the famously flat, picturesque Confederation rail trail for pedaling the hours away under a canopy of willow trees. Like spending the summer with Anne of Green Gables, actually. We didn’t anticipate huge exhilarating water slides, jumping off wharfs on hot busy beaches, or for Heron to experience his first monster summer music festival with thousands of party-ready strangers. So we got a bit of it all - plus an epic visit with long-missed cousins. A pretty packed week on a pretty chill island. We landed in Moncton to begin our six-week Atlantic Adventure, assembling our bikes at the arrivals area and cycling away on quiet country roads to the Acadian north coast of New Brunswick, where we regained our French fluency along the shores of the Golfe du Saint-Laurent. It was a clear contrast to our weeks pedaling in the BC mountains out west: vastly different feels in equally beautiful country. Joce had ridden these roads twenty years ago, toward the end of a cross-Canada bike tour with thirty other 20-somethings in the Otesha Project - a social justice and environmental education non-profit she co-founded with her friend Jessica. So it was poetic that we could stop in for an overnight visit with Mel, one of those Otesha riders now living the dream on an inspiring sustainable market farm near the ocean, and still working for the planet working communications and advocacy with CPAWS. It’s always a treat to show the boys a glimpse of our younger selves - and so many other cool life paths they could follow - through our endlessly interesting old friends. Next day we crossed the 13km-long engineering marvel Confederation Bridge onto PEI abord the mandatory “bicycle shuttle” - a Ford F-150 with a bike rack (it was actually a new Lightning, fully electric, to Sitka’s giddy delight as we packed our panniers into the “frunk” where the combustion engine would otherwise have been). Then we connected straight onto the Confederation Trail that cross-crosses the island to all the major points under a canopy of maple and birch on the route of the old PEI Railway with frequent rest shelters at the sites of old stations. The blissfully flat, wide, well-packed bike path doesn’t go all the way up to Cavendish, so we rode some rolling country roads past vast farmsteads of potato, wheat, hay and varied veggies for an hour to the north shore on the edge of PEI National Park. We were surprised to be passed by a steady stream of cars and mostly pick-up trucks, with license plates from other provinces and states - Québec and Massachusetts, Ontario and even Texas. By the time we arrived in the tiny tourist town, we knew there was something bigger going on. The Cavendish Beach Music Festival is PEI’s big summer show - 30,000 pairs of cowboy boots making pilgrimage from far and wide to see some pretty big names (or so we were told) and kick up a good ol’ ruckus. Now, as happens in every family (we figure), there’s a tiny tug-of-war between parents over the musical affinities of our kids. For Ed, it’s a cheesily ecclectic mix of 90s alternative, 80s hair rock, 70s funk, and the classics his Dad played for him: Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Diamond. Joce is a closet country fan - traces lingering from teenage years in Ontario’s Renfrew County - though she’s smart to the game and also embraces more modern genres that appeal to the boys’ ages and stages (or at least those tunes in the rotation of Yukon’s lone pop radio station). On one two-week ride through Washington’s Cascades Mountains when the boys were little, we’d picked a whack of songs but somehow only downloaded the Greatest Hits of One Direction. We still know that album word-for-word. On occasion, Ed makes a breakthrough. For a few weeks at age 11, Sitka got into Metallica, then Heron found Eminem and Public Enemy. But largely he’s followed Joce’s lead and embraced the boys’ rather astute tastes. As we travel together, we discover and discuss music together - in Europe we explored hip-hop in the language of each country we entered (Danish, Croatian and French being continued favourites), and this summer Mom and Dad are getting schooled on the modern teen’s Spotify playlist. “You can tap Release Radio and they play new songs from the people you’re following,” Heron explained to Ed after hearing about how CDs worked. “I guess you couldn’t do that since all your favourite bands don’t exist any more.” But on Cavendish Beach, all worlds collided on a Thursday headlined by Kane Brown - the current megastar of crossover country, pop and hip-hop. He’s the singer you’ve never heard of until you realize you’ve been listening to his stunningly diverse hit songs on the radio for the past year. Once we’d recognized much of his playlist while riding the rail trail, a plan was hatched: Joce would recruit her cousins in Charlottetown, who were driving up for a water-park day together with their teenagers, and Heron would see his first outdoor festival concert. And so it was that momma and son had their epic music moment, surrounded by thousands of fellow enthusiasts as the sun set in PEI. And that Kane Brown is now on permanent repeat on our bike speaker. Dad’s playlist no longer has a chance. Though the concert was awesome, the true highlight of our week on this charming island were those cousins - two families at similar points of adolescence who showed us their home province like no one else could. We tubed many times down our first-ever funnel water slide (“the toilet bowl” in local parlance) at Shining Waters nearby to where Joce, Paige and Sam frolicked together when they were teens; got whisked into the idyllic world of Anne Shirley at the Green Gables Heritage Park; gorged on gourmet island ice cream at a Cows with gluten-free cones (Paige’s family has been “GF” for over a decade, so Sitka was positively spoiled with edible treats); walked the sidewalk where Canada’s founders trod from harbour to the building where they agreed to our country’s creation in 1867; beached every afternoon at a different favourite spot for wharf-jumping and river floating - Covehead in the north and Basin Head in the south - and even got some quality catch-up time with Joce’s inspiring Aunt Nancy. Heron and Sitka were solidly in their happy place with five cousins to volleyball, soccer, daredevil and play cards with. “Cousins are so great,” Heron observed. “They’re like automatic friends you feel you’ve known forever.” Indeed, these cousins had last met in Ottawa thirteen years ago, so on Sitka’s initiative we recreated the picture taken as toddlers. And when we met back up a few days later, after our detour to les Îles de la Madeleine, the cousins had an announcement. “We want to join your bike tour in California next summer,” they beamed. “We’ve researched all the bikes and gear, and we have a training plan.” Ed’s already started Googling 2024 rock festivals.

Kelowna to Castlegar, 496km It was a challenge we’d never imagined. Standing underneath a rusty train bridge next to a highway overpass, we took turns scrambling to the top of a precarious pile of boulders. There, a lean teenager in board shorts would hand us a knotted rope whose other end was tied (securely, we hoped) to one of the girders 50 feet overhead. Our sweaty hands would grip as high up as we could. “You’re sure I’m going to clear it?” “Oh yeah, dude, just lift your knees up to your belly.” “What if I slip?” “Just hold on tight.” “What if I forget to let go?” “Oh don’t do that. Then you’re in trouble.” “How do I know when to let go?” “Oh, you’ll know.” “What if I miss grabbing onto the board in the middle?” “Then you’ll just keep on floating downstream… no worries.” No worries? There are certain moments when feeling truly alive requires leaps of blind faith. In this case, it was literally a leap off that dusty rock, down toward the rushing Slocan River, then swinging back up into the void and letting go, plugging nose and plummeting into the frigid waters. If we wanted to reach the true goal, though, we’d have to resurface within seconds and start front-stroking fast to reach the second rope dangling among the mini-whitecaps, where a bright orange wakeboard was affixed for the ultimate test of summer coolness in the southern Kootenays. Only a few of the assembled locals would succeed in grabbing hold, scaling up hand-over-hand as the raging river yanked their ankles toward the abyss beyond, then somehow finding the balance to mount the board for an epic ride on the fast-flowing rapids. Those who did were met with raucous applause from the sidelines. The scene felt like a thirty-years-later sequel to Stand By Me. But the best part was that those of us who flailed and failed - such as a family of four Yukon bike-tourists accustomed to canoeing down rivers of this speed rather than swimming in them - were heartily cheered for even trying. Thirteen-year-old Sitka, yet to hit his teenage growth spurt, grabbed hold of the very end of the wakeboard, clung tenaciously for a few seconds then was dragged downstream for the leisurely 8kmh float to the exit eddy 200m away. Big hoots from the crowd. Fifteen-year-old Heron, whose multiple spurts now have him at six feet tall, caught the rope gracefully and got to his knees before his balance betrayed him and the river claimed its victim. “Ahhhh, almost dude! Right on!” Ed spurted a bunch of river water out of his mouth but then muscled his way farther up the rope than the others, gaining confidence before tugging himself upright in one valiant pull, then slipping right off the board and getting twisted look all up in the rope and awkwardly tumbling back into the current. At least the local teens got some comic relief. Joce was thankfully laughing too hard to get pictures, and would later swing in undetected, not even bothering with the board as she bobbed blissfully along the beautiful river with spruce- and cedar-covered mountains in the background, just before its confluence with the Kootnenay River north of Castlegar, BC. It was a sublime bookend to a splendid week cycling over mountain passes, through forested valleys, beside vast lakes and along rail trails in the interior of British Columbia - the first leg of our west-and-east Canada summer tour of beautiful places and family visits. We’d plotted this BC expedition two years ago as the conclusion to our summer Rockies ride, but were turned back in Invermere by warnings of intense wildfire smoke further west. Sad to miss visits with Joce’s parents and dozens of cousins scattered throughout the interior valleys, we were relieved to hear later that their homes were spared - though barely, judging by the burnt treelines within view of kitchen windows. This year, we planned to ride in earlier summer so the fires couldn’t deter us, but a wet spring gifted us a lush landscape of lush BC mountain forests to ride through - and we took full advantage of BC’s Interior splendour. At Kelowna’s airport, we re-assembled our boxes bikes, and before even leaving the parking lot we’d connected with the newly developed Okanagan Rail Trail - only five years old and already a staple for active residents who run, walk and bike right along the shores of spectacular Lakes Wood and Kalamalka for some 50km north to Vernon, buffered from the blustery traffic on Highway 97 by sturdy basalt cliffs and thick evergreen stands. After some quality time with Joce’s parents and cousin Kristin’s crew (including an inspiring cooperative garden) got us grounded and spoiled, we pivoted eastward through farmland past Lumby, then up the serene Creighton Valley road and a less-leisurely highway ascent to an unexpectedly perfect campspot on Lost Lake, right at the summit signpost of Monashee Pass. There, legs gelatinous, we unfurled our camp gear for the first time on a lone flat patch with picnic table a few feet from the edge of the soft-bottom reedy lake, a couple hundred metres long and 50 across, lined with soaring spruce and pines we’d missed since moving north of 60. Our burgeoning bike appetites devoured a new bike-camping recipe: mango avocado coleslaw salad wraps with melted cheese and smoked tofu, made possible by borrowing the lighter of our neighbour and new friend in the camp trailer on the far side of the lake, Millivan from Serbia. We were back in our family nirvana. Next day we enjoyed the lengthy descent with a picturesque creekside lunch stop en route to Needles, where the free ferry whisked us to Fauquier and a gorgeous pedal overlooking Arrow Lake, with its mammoth talus cliffs opposite holed with curious caves and dotted with resilient conifers. The boys were distracted by a passing rally of dozens of souped-up speedster cars that blew past us in the opposing lane for over an hour: freshly-glossed Porsches, Ferraris, Corvettes and a Lamborghini revving and rocking along the winding lakeside road. Exhilaration for drivers and passing teen cyclists alike. Our run of idyllic sleep spots continued with a rental camp trailer on an Arrow Lake beach, complete with paddle boards and inflatable kayak to bliss the last afternoon away; then the hidden-gem lakeside municipal campground in super-cute Silverton, where the locals called out warm welcomes to town as we pedaled past them walking their dogs; and finally a cozy cabin at Karibu Park in Winlaw, where Chris and her husband have greeted campers for over 30 years with a hot tub, sauna and lawn games. In between we earned our evenings over several steep and sweaty passes: out of charming little Nakusp we climbed 15k to refreshing Summit Lake for a chilly late afternoon dip, then out of Silverton our legs and lungs awoke over an hour-long, early-morning winding ascent to a glorious viewpoint over Slocan Lake; and the backroad route to Nelson along Blewett Road took us past impressive hydro dams and far up onto the hillside before dropping us back down next to the west arm of Kootenay Lake. But the two-wheeling treasure in these parts is the Slocan  Valley Rail Trail: fifty kilometres of flat, winding two-track through calm countryside and mostly astride the swift flow of its namesake river. It was fast and fun side-by-side cycling over various packed-dirt terrain, sometimes through long-grasses and others among the birches, hemlocks and cottonwoods opposite parcels of farmland - great for meandering conversation in pairs without checking our mirrors for traffic. It’s where we found Karibu Park and also the funky Frog Peak Cafe, with its ultra-hippie vibe, divine fruit smoothies, sasquatch statue and walls covered in framed drawings by local children amongst the posters of Hendrix, Kramer, and witty sayings like Sitka’s favourite: “Zombies eat brains - you’ll be fine.” We concluded our ten-day journey with two day-off stops: in Nelson, renowned community of eco-happy artists and outdoor lovers, we hiked up to iconic Pulpit Rock with our old pal Suzanne (who has now met us at various points of three consecutive summer bike trips on two continents), ziplined back and forth across the stunning Kokanee gorge (at 300 feet, 800m and 100kmh, our highest, longest and fastest zips of all time) and stayed two nights with our new buddy Raz - a beloved local obstetrician with a phenomenal knack for bringing people with lots in common together for scrumptious communal meals around his dinner table. Then on our July long weekend in Castlegar - an outdoor playland at the confluence of the Kootenay and the Columbia - we picked huckleberries, jumped off bridges, played community pick-up soccer, and snuck in some teenage hide-and-seek (“Did he really fit in the dryer?”) with Joce’s cousin Sky and her family who felt like kindred spirits to ours: playfully ready for any adventure. Indeed, as our sons grow into their teens, big moments on bike tours happen when we encounter other teenagers to hang out with, dive off docks with, exchange Spotify playlists and recount stories of how sick their respective hometowns are for biking / skiing / chilling. And, of course, swinging off of train trestles into rushing rivers while grabbing at wakeboards.

Dear friends: we're back! As with all great bike tours, Dad dusts off the old Willie Nelson album (figuratively, on Spotify, of course) and begins singing: "Just can't wait to get on the road again, Goin' places I ain't never been, Seein' things that I may never see again, The life I love is cycling with my family..." ... and then he's off into heavy paraphrasing and his three fellow riders tune out. But still. Our bikes are boxed, our panniers are stuffed, our meals are dehydrated, and our playlists are up-to-date. We're ready to get on the road again. Ten months after returning home from our 10,000km, 20-country Europe Epic, we're embarking on a nine-week summer journey on two wheels across central British Columbia (Kelowna to Castlegar through the Slocan Valley) and Atlantic Canada: New Brunswick, PEI, les Iles de la Madeleine, Cape Breton and the east coast of Newfoundland from Gros Morne to the first known Viking settlement in North America at Anse-aux-Meadows. About 2,000km in seven provinces, visiting a couple dozen aunts, uncles and cousins across this spectacular country of ours. You can catch our regular photo updates on Instagram @yukon4explore, and our weekly blog at yukon4explore.com. We can't wait to share the ride with you! Ed, Jocelyn, Heron and Sitka