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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

Our next family adventure begins on March 12, with a 10,000km bike tour from Morocco to Norway It began on a beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Just a few days before returning home after a six-month bike tour across New Zealand, Australia and French Polynesia - our Oceania Odyssey - our sons sowed the seeds of the next ambitious family trip. "We've decided we should keep biking and go to Europe!" declared Sitka. "We want to see a soccer game," explained Heron. "And eat pizza in Italy. When can we go?" Soon afterward the plotting and planning started, with Mom and Dad firmly on board. We bought the board game Ticket to Ride Europe to get familiar with the continent. We waded through the evolving EuroVelo web site for route ideas. Even as we moved from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Whitehorse in the Great Canadian North and became full-on Yukoners, in our dreams we were riding along the Rhine River with baguettes sticking out of our panniers. On the road again. Not long after a March Break cycling trip across Cuba, we sold our tandems to a lovely young family down the street. Now the boys have their own bikes and panniers, tested on summer tours of Alaska and the Canadian Rockies. Ed first asked for unpaid leave from his dream high-school teaching job in January 2020. By the time the response was due, the world was in the beginnings of pandemic lockdown, so we pressed pause - knowing in a few weeks we could call "Time in" like kids letting a car pass their street hockey game. The car became a fleet. A full year passed with no end in sight. We bided our time with oodles of Yukon exploration - canoeing the Stewart and Yukon Rivers to Dawson City, hiking in the Tombstone Mountains, mountain-biking the wild South Canol Road, then the even wilder North Canol from the border of the Northwest Territories. And here we are, two years later. Covid be damned, we're going to Europe. Ed was graciously granted that unpaid leave by his supremely supportive principal and school board. Jocelyn is wresting herself away from her busy naturopathic clinic for a well-earned rest. And the boys have their eyes on a soccer match in Paris on April 20th. Lionel Messi even changed teams so we could watch him play. Our Spanish visas came in last week. We have renters for our house, a new front pannier rack for Heron and a new zipper on our trusty tent. We're watching all the updates on restrictions and requirements to fly and get around Europe safely. It'll all change by the time we get there, but we're used to adapting as we go. Most of all, we are psyched. All four of us. It's family epic time. Check out our new Instagram page for fresh pics, and our new blog - on our new web site - for weekly updates on our European Epic. We're starting in Malaga, Spain, and we have a flight home from Oslo, Norway in August. In between, anything can happen.

It wasn’t only us who had been waiting for this moment. The 5am check-in line at Erik Neilson Airport in Whitehorse was packed with March Break travellers itching to finally fly “away”. Some hadn’t seen their family in Quebec for three years, while others were heading to Victoria to feel the spring sun and smell the budding lilacs. Regardless of destination, each eager individual wore the same expression of a wizened grizzly emerging from a longer-than-wanted hibernation, relieved and bewildered at the sight of natural light again. The big difference for our family was that we weren’t coming back to our Yukon home any time soon - six months, to be more precise. We were giving Covid the big ol’ bras d’honneur and strutting our way to Europe for an epic bike tour we’d been planning for years. And it had been a rollercoaster last few weeks wrapping up our Yukon lives and getting to the start line. Our collective family cheer could probably be heard in Europe when Denmark declared that Covid was “no longer a socially critical disease” in late January, and soon others like Spain followed suit. Then Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Asshole. Could we justify a family fun trip in the midst of such global tragedy and turmoil? “Are you sure it’s safe?” was again the first question our friends and family asked. Should we could postpone again and wait for a better time? Life is always uncertain, we decided. The present is all we know for sure that we have. So “away” we went - with a one-week pit stop in Ontario. So far, it has certainly been the right time. Three years away from one’s hometown makes the nostalgia hit that much sweeter. The narrow, maple-lined streets of a childhood in Niagara whisk back a reassuring calm ahead of an epic journey. Walks and waffles and dinners and getting shoes caught in tree branches, with parents and great-grandmas and siblings and nieces, fill one’s bucket to the brim and confirm the wisdom of living for the present. In the midst of all the troubling news overseas, Ed’s aunt Linda told us her stem-cell donor was coming to meet her - from Germany - ten years to the day that Linda’s life was spared from leukaemia. Anke had volunteered for screening in hopes of helping a stranger. But the conventional collection method didn’t work, so they needed to take the riskier route of taking blood from her main artery. She agreed without hesitation, and Ed still has his beloved aunt who brings inappropriately large bags of jelly beans to her great-nephews for long flights to Europe. We found more reminders of human kindness when Andrew the Air Canada agent at Toronto’s Pearson airport offered to check our heavy carry-on panniers for free so we could wander more freely in Geneva, which we did after a rough overnight flight (Sitka choosing screen over sleep for a while until Joce noticed the light through her eyelids). Ed plotted out a four-hour tour of the lively, delightfully European city - with its 100-metre-high fountain, progressive political history and life-sized chess boards at the Parc des bastions. En route to Malaga, the rollercoaster jolted us again, as Ed lost half of this blog to a new app glitch, and Sitka lost half his lunch after going six full flights without barfing - a new record nonetheless. Our months of planning and document prepping led to a stunningly smooth path through Spanish customs (we were sure someone would chase us down once we emerged into the cool Mediterranean night without showing our $2,000 Spanish visas to anyone), then we coaxed Juan our cabbie to believe in our family car-packing plan (all four bikes, plus us, into a minivan!) and finally arrived to meet the truly magnificent Ramon, our AirBnB host who had so far made police inquiries, booked visa appointments and ordered camp fuel on Amazon for us. We must stop asking him how we can do stuff because he just goes and does it all for us. It would seem that those better times we considered waiting to happen are always there waiting for you when you seek them out. For us at least, we have faith that the light at the end of the tunnel is real. The long wait is over. Time to get away.

Malaga, Spain, to Altura, Portugal - 262 km cycling That first sleep after a long travel day is always sweet and deep - which is why we really should have set an alarm for our 10:55am appointment at the Malaga police station to confirm our six-month residency visa and avoid being deported midway through our trip. “I think it’s 10:30. What time was that meeting?” Joce wondered rather calmly as she nudged Ed out of the slumber of the century. The adrenaline hit was instanteous. Ed was on his feet and dressed with 24 minutes and 15 seconds left to get his family of four, on their first day of vacation, across an entirely foreign city… in the teeming rain. By some inexplicable miracle, two boys who typically required a quarter-hour of coaxing to open their eyes in the morning were ready at the door, armed with umbrellas, by T-minus 16 minutes. Joce had unearthed our rain jackets from the piles of exploded luggage spewn across our spacious apartment, and Ed had collected and waterproofed passports, paperwork, directions and keys. We navigated the halls and stairways of the building we’d first entered hours earlier in the pitch dark, and sprinted through the cobblestone alleys of Malaga’s labyrinthine historic district, with no worldly clue which direction was which, in desperate search of a taxi. Each frantically selected turn seemed to lead to a narrower street until we finally emerged into a road and commandeered the first parked we saw. Luckily, it was indeed a cab, and even better, its driver had clearly watched a few Bond-film car-chase scenes, darting brazenly through morning traffic after hearing about our breathless conundrum. At 10:56, eyes now wide open, we burst out into the rain again and charged toward the entrance to the Estacion policia - into the throngs of Spaniards waving papers behind a cordoned doorway, shouting for the attention of the lone female cop coordinating the chaos. Turns out Ed’s months of intricate planning and e-mail exchanges with all levels of Spanish immigration bureaucracy had produced just the right document to skip the crowd and go straight inside. We then wrestled with a self-service machine for ten minutes until giving up and finding a nearby waiting area, where ticket number 48 flashed on screen. The soaked papele in our hand that we received on the way in read “47”. Mierde. The gentleman with ticket 48 was dismayed as we convinced an officer to squeeze us in, but he smiled when he saw Sitka’s beaming 11-year-old grin under his dripping rain jacket. Then, after hurdling every barricade in our way, we hit a five-foot, middle-aged brick wall with librarian glasses. “No es la buena cita.” Not the right appointment? We checked the date and time, and showed her our carefully curated documents again. “Es el malo tipo de cita,” she elaborated, unflinching in the face of Sitka’s grin. What we were able to discern over the next several sentences of dizzyingly fast Spanish for our first day, basically amounted to a wrong click in a drop-down menu back in January in the Yukon. We had booked an appointment to pick up our TIE - foreigner identification card - rather than an appointment to apply for one. Can we just do the right cita now, then? She left us to confer with some colleagues. Joce and Ed exchanged knowing looks: Yes! Another win for talking our way out out of trouble. “La proxima cita es en abril,” was the result of her meeting. April was more than two weeks away. “No hoy?” we began pleading. “No, el 8 de abril.” On we valiantly went for a few more minutes as we tried every brilliant trick in our travel-problem-solving book. We knew we were done when we asked about being a special case because we were leaving on a bike trip to Norway in two days. “No estas un caso especial. Bicicletas no es un caso especial. Infirma es un caso especial. Muerte de la familia es un caso especial. No bicicletas.” It was the first of several dead ends that we would encounter over the first week of our Europe Epic. But we don’t discourage easily - we just keep looking for ways around. And we fill our days with awesomeness to make the hurdles worth jumping. We found another taxi in the downpour after leaving dejected from the police station, and we took on Mission #2: getting a European Covid passport that would allow us into other EU countries without testing and quarantining. Ed had similarly plotted out a health centre and all the necessary paperwork. This time, no special cita was needed, and an hour later we had a promise of printed documents within 48 hours. By then, the sky was blue and we set out to explore Malaga, finding the elaborate 8th-century Castillo de Gibralfaro from the first Islamic empire in Southern Europe, overlooking the city’s bullfighting stadium and our first glance at the Mediterranean Sea. On the walk home we happened upon a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheatre, and the next day more castles and the birth home of Pablo Picasso. Then the real fun began on our first bike day - a Day One for the ages. It started out rainy as predicted - Malaga’s first stretch of any precipitation at all in four months - but we were decked out in our rain gear and tickled to be pedaling our fully-loaded steeds once again. We picked up our printed EU Covid passports (Spain 1, Ed and Joce 1) then found a perfect bike path along the beaches, cranked up our Spotify playlists, and ran to dip our feet into the Mediterranean to symbolically start our journey. We lost our way a few times and had to execute a long and strategic highway crossing, but soon found our way to beachside biking, a French fry shack and eventually a couple hours slaloming through crowds of vacationing retired British couples strolling hand-in-hand by the dozens on the boardwalks between restaurant meals and apparently buying knock-off high-top sneakers from 20-something African men. As the afternoon wore on, we struggled to master our new bike-map apps (mounted proudly on our handlebars), which led us to several dead ends on path-less beach and finally along a “Calle Corrallon de Cano” that was a dirt path through killer thorn bushes and ending at a slurpy mud lagoon with no civilization in sight. By then it was 6pm and we had no choice but to brave the last 20km by highway. Ten kilometres into our harrowing freeway dash, the light of day had faded almost entirely. Choosing safety over our AirBnB reservation, we pulled into the first available exit and saw a shining sign of hope in the now pitch-black night: Hotel los Monteros - the only building around. Turns out it was Hotel los Monteros Spa and Golf Resort, with a family suite at $500 or two adjoining rooms for $450 - leaving nothing in our budget but air for dinner for the next week or two. Exhausted physically and mentally from the day, already at 70km of cycling, we saw no alternative to busting the bank. Ed was about to put credit card to tap machine when the light bulb appeared above Joce’s brilliant curls: ask the resort to keep our bikes, and taxi to our AirBnB for the night, then back in the morning to brave the highway in daylight. So we did: our cabbie got lost en route, and Ed got locked outside for 15 minutes with our Indian food dinner order, but we finally found rest, hoping for slightly less adventure in our near future. The subsequent biking days featured more fun and fewer dead ends. The highway was safe and simple in broad daylight, and we improved our bike-map app-ing to find many kilometres of picturesque seaside boardwalk riding in between increasingly low-stress freeway jaunts. We dined on pasta and salad out of pots after sunset on a gorgeous rocky beach at Torreguardia, took our first full swim in the Mediterranean at La Linea de la Concepcion, and popped into the UK at Gibraltar, where we climbed the famous Mediterranean Steps, peered longingly at Morocco (still closed to ferries from Spain and thus off our route for the time being), and befriended dozens of chilled-out macaques - one of whom cozied up to Sitka, then proceeded to unzip his backpack and pull out a sandwich container before we could react to the lightning-quick, brazen inter-primate thievery. We also got left behind with our bikes on a train platform in San Roque, and at a ferry dock in Ayamonte within view of the Portuguese border. But those are stories for our next book. We have now reserved the correct tipo de cita back in Malaga on April 11th, and the transportation to get there. And we will most certainly be setting our alarm. ——- We cannot end our first-week story without a shout-out to the remarkable Ramon, our Malaga host who was endlessly generous with his time during the months before and the days after our arrival in Spain. Ramon investigated all of our visa questions and found critical answers, stood by his phone for an hour in January to help book our fateful police citas, ordered camp fuel from Germany on Amazon because Spain’s stores were out of stock, and printed all of our documents for our next cita in April. Every time we said Gracias he replied “No thanks needed.” Unfortunately, Ramon had us believing that every Spaniard we would meet would be as fantastically friendly (and very many, it must be said, came close), so we may have felt a little let down after such an extraordinary reception.

Vila Real de San Antonio to Setùbal, 454km (total 716k) Algarve is a rising vacation mecca for wealthy Europeans - rivaling Ibiza, Nice and Amalfi for its sun-soaked beaches, dramatic coastal cliffs and ritzy resort life. Certainly not the place for a family of sweaty cyclists on a budget requisite of a six-month tour. Except for in March, that is. “Look at this one, Mom!” sounded a common refrain this week from that day’s accommodation researcher. “It has a pool and a waterslide and a ropes course, and it’s only 32 Euros for a family suite!” “That’s the cost for extra pillows?” “Noooo. For the whole apartment!” “Per minute?” “Noooo. For the whole night!” This may have been our most affordable non-camping week of the whole trip - actually, the nearby campgrounds were more expensive, for what amounted to a muddy patch in a treeless campervan parking lot. Each night we had a spacious suite (we even brought our bikes up the tiny elevators to join us) with multiple rooms, full kitchen and fancy soaps. We first thought the bidets were foot-washing tubs, but thankfully didn’t try them until after we discovered our resort-newbie ignorance. The only downside (other than no fluffy housecoats) was that the waterslides and ropes courses were under yearly maintenance, and thus off-limits for our bummed-out young beach bums. The outdoor pools were open - but one ecstatic pair of cannonballs revealed the frigid reality of why no one else was enjoying them at the moment. Otherwise, we were in cycle-tourist heaven with multiple pillows and ultra-comfy beds to rest our acclimatizing muscles in between stunningly scenic days exploring this natural paradise. Like the resorts, the beaches were largely barren - still quite a healthy cohort of retired Brits enjoying the calm before the summer tourist tsunami, but loads of vast open shoreline to change into our bathing suits mid-beach and ride the warm(ish) Atlantic whitecaps before biking on to the next view. After all, we didn’t come for the waterslides. Algarve is home to staggering cliffs and stunning limestone grottos carved by the mighty salt tides over millennia, just waiting for us to come explore. We are now experts in navigating the EuroVelo route maps and bike paths that come in all colours of painted asphalt, but still often end in abrupt dead-ends, like train bridges left unfinished mid-crossing. We did visit one especially fascinating tourist-trap attraction that worked perfectly well off-season: SandCity in Logoa has Madame Tussaud beat with its unbelievable sculptures created over months by visiting artists from around the world. Their playful themes featured life-sized Asterix, Yoda, The Simpsons and Bob Marley, along with the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and Viking warriors. We took our time to marvel at the intricate detail, the extraordinary patience and planning invested in a project so fleeting (a few heads and noses were missing like modern-day Sphinxes) and above all why we can barely make a beach tunnel that lasts five minutes before crumbling. Our discount tour through southern Iberia’s tourist district also helped us shift languages from Spanish to Portuguese - which has frankly left us near speechless. Sure, reading billboards and grocery labels seemingly confirmed the similarity: some n’s become m’s, like una becomes uma, and sin (“without” - handy for those of us allergic to gluten) becomes sem. But when we tried our first Ola, bom dia, we got back a deluge of sounds we had no worldly idea how to put together - with an inordinate amount of “sh” and “ch” like the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe. It’s as though our new Portuguese friends are messing with our heads by speaking an entirely different dialect than the ones on their signs. Fortunately, since they speak English to tourists all summer here anyway, they quickly switch over when our glazed eyes make clear that our well-rehearsed greetings are as far as we go this early in our visit. While our language skills may be lagging, our bike bodies are gradually gathering strength. After working so hard to keep up with the pack for the first week, Sitka took a nasty tumble down the slippery stone stairs at our hostel in Lagos. He was in so much pain that he was shaking and throwing up, which was equally traumatizing to Jocelyn, who stayed up all night researching tailbone injuries and how we might take care of “the little one!” as Portuguese people admiringly refer to Sitka. But true to form, our little energy-ball bounced out of bed the next morning, bruised and sore but eager to prove he could press on. He bounded gracefully about the cobblestone streets on an early-morning test ride with Ed, then Heron offered to absorb his little brother’s pannier contents into his already-second-heaviest load. For the past week Sitka has been merrily keeping pace with his much littler legs as we’ve hit successive 100km days including snack breaks, beach swims and ocean vistas. Heron is equally keen to show off his teenagerly strength, sneakily packing the heaviest panniers (all our spare protein bars) onto his bike and giving Dad an easy day. He has even taken on the morning bread run all on his own - though he often comes back with additional sweets for his daily “Desserts of Europe challenge.” Mid-week, we reached the very southwest tip of Iberia at the Farol do Cabo de Sao Vicente, with 270 degrees of ocean beneath breathtaking cliffs, before heading north and immediately finding a wholesale change in mood and feel up Portugal’s west coast. Gone are the swanky resorts, hectic highways and convoluted route-plotting - now we’re gliding along simple, straight country roads lined with vast open fields, citrus orchards, vineyards, rice paddies and distant rolling hills. Cows, sheep, and even ostriches stare back at us, and the occasional car slips past, often with hands, arms and whole torsos hanging out to wave and give thumbs up. Every dozen miles or so we meet a winding, brake-burning descent to a peaceful, almost dormant vila of pure-white, terracotta-topped houses clustered onto the steep hillside, next to a postcard rugged beach - then back up sometimes unrealistic grades of road back to the countryside again. Midday, all the mercados are closed, so any Canadians seeking lunch groceries should have stocked up after breakfast in the last village. On Saturdays and Sundays, we’ve also been joined by streams of fellow cyclists, of all ages, shapes and outfits - from the lean spandex-clad race trainers (and the working-towards-lean spandex-clad), to the retired gentlemen in their everyday plaid shirts and work pants out for a rip to pick up veggies from the store. They all perk up when they see us, applaud us vociferously at the tops of hills, and shout all forms of encouragement (at least we think that’s what they’re shouting) - part of that universal connection that comes from getting around on two wheels. At one stop next to a lighthouse at Cabo Sardao we found the only place in the world where storks nest on rocky outcroppings a hundred feet above the ocean (looking after their own offspring, we presume, and not incubating baby humans for later delivery). Occasionally one will stand up, contort its rangy neck backwards and clap its long red beak together repeatedly in a captivating display of we know not what. Later down the road, we spot similar massive nests perched with some brilliant engineering on top of successive electrical poles, and then the telltale white head and red beak of these remarkable graceful birds pop up to check us out. On these narrow, quiet roads we can often cycle two-by-two and chat away the afternoon - theories on how to pronounce Portuguese words, hopes for next year’s basketball tryouts, how many seconds there are in a year. It’s even greater biking bliss than off-season resort suites, even with the fluffy housecoats. ——- On our final day in the countryside before Lisbon, we were reminded of just how exceptionally fortunate we are to be on our European Epic. At a small village park in Melides, we met Julia, a mom from Ukraine and her two young sons who had just recently fled the war with a group of women sharing a house of a friend-of-a-friend in Portugal, and who had to leave the men behind to fight the Russian invasion. The boys - early school-aged - were playful and curious about our bikes. We shared strawberries and Yukon pins, and Heron showed them how to solve their Rubik’s cube. We’ve felt pretty powerless to do anything about the news lately, but for an hour we could give friendship, human connection and distraction to feel a smidge of normalcy in what must be an impossible time.

Porto to Santiago de Compostela, 341km, total 1,620k “Six-point-nine!” The kilometre countdown was getting more precise and frequent as we dragged our chamois-padded butts to the finish line. “Six-point-five!” It was a dreary, drizzly day, well away from the designated cycle route through gorgeous Galicia in Spain’s far northwest. We had last sheltered at a countryside bar for fries and soup 30km and two hours back. We were wet, sweaty and exhausted. “Six-point-three!” But we were also ecstatic. One more outrageously steep climb out of town, and we were gliding steadily down toward the coast and our destination: a two-day respite at a mystery cottage that Sitka had exhaustively researched months ago. “Three-point-nine!” Downhills are awesome. “Two-point-nine!” Joce likes to know when we’ve dipped below a given kilometre-marker. Any psychological advantage counts when you’re this zonked. We forgot the rest of the countdown as our neighbourhood for the weekend came into view. Long sandy beaches. Massive, rolling waves and raging whitecaps. Rocky islets being pounded and enveloped by the surging tide. “Three hundred metres!” We felt like we won a dream vacation on The Price is Right (well, Ed’s mind conjured the image of a woman in a gown revealing the scene before us with elegantly animated wrists - the rest hadn’t a clue what he was talking about). The “Bull House” is a beautiful stone cottage standing all alone on a narrow strip of grassy field that slants gently toward a boardwalk stretching along a vast beach 100m in front. The waves should have dozens of surfers riding them, but we’re too remote to be thought of. It’s exactly how our newly-minted 12-year-old envisioned spending his birthday. After all, it was all his idea. The house itself is shaped like a three-storey slice of birthday cake - its point facing the ocean, all windows for a full 180-degree view. The icing for Ed and Joce is the master bedroom that occupies the entire top floor, wide multi-pillowed bed facing seaward. The icing for the boys is found downstairs: an unexpected ping-pong table and boogie boards for body surfing on the wicked tide. Six years to the day, Sitka celebrated turning six in New Zealand. His big asks that year were petting a sheep, a kiwi cake and setting a new daily km record (see our Oceania Odyssey book to find out if we succeeded). “This whole trip is the best birthday gift,” he said then and again this week, when his wish list included a live soccer match, a boat ride between countries and a dream stop on the ocean. There is a special kind of magic when your kids do the bulk of the trip planning. We would never have considered tracking down tickets to a real-life European football game - the ultimate cultural experience for two young sport fans and their closeted sports-nut dad. By some diligent web research and dumb-lucky scheduling, we landed in the magnificent city of Porto on a bi-weekly GameDay and scored online tickets in the midst of the Portuguese crowd. The mammoth, modern stadium was packed with the most people we’d been around in a half-decade (our whole Yukon Territory has barely more than the 30,000 souls in those seats, let alone the global distancing pandemic). We were not disappointed to find that Euro soccer fans were less rioting hooligan and more boisterous partisan - much like a pumped-up hockey or basketball crowd, motley but not dangerously so, with enthusiastic sing-alongs and team chants - nor by the 3-0 score for the home team that allowed us to witness, then actively participate in the jovial “Go-lo, Go-lo, Go-lo!” celebrations. After a final ride along Portugal’s postcard Atlantic coast, we bade Adeus to our favourite country (for now) on a 12-foot rowboat with an outboard motor, our bikes and bags stuffed all around us. Hardly how we pictured traversing an international border (why did we bother with all these visas and EU Covid passports?) but exactly as Sitka had imagined in his now-fully-realized imagination. He giggled pretty much the whole way until we were ceremoniously dumped on a reed-lined beach on the other side of the inlet. Bienvenidos en España. Sure, we would soon experience another mind-boggling snafu with the Spanish Renfe train system (live ticket agent assures us there’s enough time before boarding, but must split up between two trains an hour apart due to three-bike rule, then Ed and Sitka find metal detector, must remove bags so miss train, but couldn’t have taken train anyway because no camp knives allowed on trains, Ed re-mounts panniers, Sitka runs off to tell Joce, Ed can’t find Sitka, train man assures Ed there’s a non-metal-detector station 2km away for bikes with knives (while Ed panics seeking Sitka), Ed finds Sitka, we all go to other station, live ticket agent says no space for bikes, train man from before spots us and lead us to train, where there is plenty of space for ten bikes, let alone three, if you’re still reading this part you may have the patience to survive trains in Spain but we still don’t recommend it - we wish we had have just biked the busy highway instead). But we did see the purely delightful side of Spain - its landscape and its people. Our first Warmshowers stay was in Pontevedra with the calmly wonderful David, who met us at the train station and guided us through town to his backyard where we set up tent for the first time, and his lovely parents who brought out a birthday tarta de abuela for dinner. David even took the day off work to help us navigate our next step of visa epic at the local bank. “La burocracia en España es un deportivo,” he explained to us. “Pero entre ciclistas, nos ayudamos.” (“Bureaucracy in Spain is a sport, but we cyclists help each other out.”) And then there was the Bull House - two gloriously relaxing days (the first of which we awoke to a vicious storm that we watched over a feast brunch - how’s that for perfect timing?) reading in cozy chairs by the huge windows, playing ping-pong tournaments, daringly body-surfing when the warm sun returned, gorging on just-cycled-three-weeks-straight levels of food, biking pannier-free into town to watch surfers and re-stock on snacks, and plotting our next stages across the Camino De Santiago, the coast of France (for Heron’s surf-camp birthday) and a whirlwind tour of Paris. It’s so exciting that we convinced Joce’s sister to come join us for a couple weeks! It’s been a significant evolution to have the boys plan the trip - not just help, but actively plan the whole itinerary while Mom and Dad were fully occupied with flight plans, visa procuring and packing. Sitka’s fastidious research for Portugal yielded an awesome itinerary with extraordinary moments and highlights we would never have imagined. Now we can’t wait to see what he has in store for Italy and Denmark. Heron is all devious smiles about France (“Le Louvre est essentiel.”), so we’re assuming that means fun, right? More input has meant more buy-in, and it’s actually the boys who are carefully curating the budget, tracking every daily expense and calculating average spending to ensure their plans can fit the financial and logistical frame. They will often price-check and seek out cheaper options (city bus over taxi to airport, groceries over restaurant) to save for their bigger priorities. And we’ve come to trust them to know what they’re doing (and it follows that they trust themselves and grow confidence beyond their years) - that their well-laid plans will lead us not only to places that exist, but to even more fantastic adventures than we would have otherwise dreamed of. Like a cake-shaped birthday cottage on the Atlantic Ocean. With all the icing. —— For those following the saga of our Spanish visas - the long-term solution to touring around Europe for longer than the oddly restricted three months in the so-called Schengen region - we have a happy and hilarious update. You may recall from our Week One blog that we clicked the wrong box online in January when reserving a critical cita previa at the provincial police station - leaving us slack-jawed before the woman who insisted we had to return to the same spot four weeks later when the next appointment of the correct type was available. We had to start our bike tour and fly back to Malaga in order to extend our three-month Spanish residency to the full six we would need to not be ejected somewhere in Scandanavia. Well, fly we did - from Santiago de Compostela, on a pair of hyper-discount Euro airlines, cheaper and faster than a high-speed train. We arrived back at the same airport and arrived at the same police station (minus the teeming rain) and held out our Cita previa documents to the officer in charge of the crowd. She led us directly to her cubicle, two to the right of where our old friend had refused us almost a month earlier. Ed was armed with all the right forms, but we were clenched from head to toe, praying to Saint James of the Camino that we didn’t do anything wrong this time. She took all the forms and photos and nodded, betraying no indication as to whether they were correct. She had us press and roll our fingers (all four of us) on the fingerprint machine. She took out her stamp and started stamping. We were athletes in the sport of Spanish bureaucracy, and we were winning! But then, the other team made a substitution. Ed didn’t notice in the moment, but Joce and Heron recognized an old nemesis - the Brad Marchand to our Maple Leafs - the woman we now know as “The Supervisor of No.” She sat down next to our nice officer and began chatting quickly, shaking her head and grabbing documents. We tried following and are sure we heard an “este familia” or two - was she trash-talking us? Just as the nice woman was finishing Sitka’s prints and stamping his form, The Supervisor halted her. “Do you have the birth certificates for the children?” we understood after a few times reciting the boys’ birthdates. Uh-oh. Joce shot Ed a desperate look. Ed had packed the copies we received back from our initial visa application, for no reason other than excess caution. But they were in a pannier back in Santiago. Mierde. “En este momento, no.” We received a detailed explanation about how we needed to prove that our kids are our kids. “How are we to know?” she finished. “The government of Spain needs proof.” “Yes, we sent proof to the Spanish when we applied for our initial NIE visas.” “I need proof.” That dejected feeling came flooding back. Then, Brad Marchand threw us a lifeline. “Vale! (Fine!) When you return in 40 days to collect your residency cards, you must bring the birth certificates.” “Si, si, gracias, si.” Phew. We double- and triple- and quadruple-checked that photocopies were okay (that was apparently a dumb question - “Claro que si!”), then exactly the forms and documents we needed. We were pushing then upper limits of their patience, even the nice officer. Hands raised like we just won a conference championship (we know the Stanley Cup is still 40 days away), we paraded through Malaga for a picnic lunch and back to the airport for our return flight to Santiago. We had won this round, but we still have one more return date to Malaga to plan. For now, though, we’re starting to feel like our Spanish residency is well earned. 110 percent.

Setubàl to Porto, 563 km - total 1,279k “Here comes another cove climb!” Our shoulders would slump each time one of us uttered the dreaded warning, curving left and gliding joylessly downhill away from the oceanside cliff, only to meet a hairpin 160-degree turn at the bottom, brake almost completely and then begin the sharp ascent back to the elevation we had just left. It was the summer of 2005, our honeymoon bike tour along the Pacific Coast of North America from Victoria to Tijuana. Following our hearts and Route 101, we marvelled at the majestic sight of ocean meeting land, and learned much about life while partaking in the great metaphor that is travelling by bicycle. This week, our family now enriched in endless ways with our increasingly strong tween and teen, we rode a different west coast - Portugal’s Atlantic. A lot has changed in bike touring over the last seventeen years, but the immutable beauty encountered while travelling on two wheels, and the personal growth involved in our favourite pastime that we’re now passing along to our sons, remain timeless. The biggest logistical difference we’ve noticed comes from our handlebar-mounted cell phones. On our honeymoon, we would write out the day’s directions from our guidebook onto an old receipt, cram it into a plastic cover on top of our handlebar bag and hope for the best. If we glimpsed an intriguing sign, we might detour briefly, but we probably missed a few highlights not far from our trail. Now fully comfortable navigating the little blue dot on our BikeMaps app along the green line designating EuroVelo Route 1, we bound from one spectacular vista to the next - like the wave-carved hoodoos of the Peniche peninsula, and the dune-mound-covered beach with kite-surfers at Foz de Arelho. On the somewhat frequent occasions when the app has misimagined a boardwalk along a beach, or not updated for unexpected construction, we zoom in on the digital map and improvise our way back on route. More than once, our little onboard computers have navigated us thorough complicated cityscapes that would have otherwise taken us days to untangle. In the suburbs north of Lisbon, we avoided busy streets and highway crossings via cul-de-sacs, dirt-bike trails and footbridges and even found a favourite-ever adventure park of high ropes and ziplines. In coastal vilas urban-planned by drunk Romans, we darted through narrow one-way cobblestone alleys and around multi-prolonged roundabouts like a Mario Brothers game. Then, rushing on our way to the last ferry before 11pm from Forte de Barra to Sao Jacinto, Joce led our crew in a mad dash through a series of sudden turns, random bridges and picnic parks to the ferry terminal behind an old port warehouse, with minutes to spare. On our honeymoon we may have been happy to pitch our tent in that park or under that bridge - but with children (or, more honestly, at our age), we’ll take the GPS and getting there, thank you. Speaking of arriving, in 2005 we would typically come to our planned town and track down the closest campsite - if it was raining, we’d take the first place we found with a roof, regardless of the cost. But now we have several apps that show us the places within our budget with a kitchen and room for four, and how to get there. We get cheaper rates because we use the same app regularly, and good deals for booking last-minute. We get our check-in instructions and all our questions answered on What’sApp so the host doesn’t have to even live in the same city. Then we GoogleMap the nearest grocery store or bike shop and get our errands done in a snap. Instead of tracking down stamps for postcards that arrive two weeks after the fact, we send real-time photos and even do quick video chats with siblings and all the grandparents. Our phones have also changed the way we visit big cities. In Lisbon, we picked up a old school paper map for our day off, but found it easier to follow our phones through the old town, search up details on the church we were staring at, research the schedule, fare and best station to hop on the famous (and famously busy) Trolley 28, and even - get this! - pay online to rent electric scooters, then tap the first ones we found standing idly around town, which activated them for us to ride merrily around town until our payment ran out. Then we just left them there for the next person to tap. Thankfully, our phones haven’t hindered the happenstance touring moments, like when a community choir emerged from out of thin air in a square one Sunday morning in Setubal, singing a short set for the spontaneously assembled crowd. We would surely butcher the lyrics that we had no hope of understanding, so instead we hummed the catchy tunes in our heads as we climbed out of town and onto the next. Most importantly, though, our phones haven’t impaired our abundant enjoyment of the spectacle of west-coast nature. California has its redwoods and Big Sur - and Portugal has Nazare, where just weeks before our overnight visit, the world record for largest wave ever surfed was vaulted to 97.3 feet. A mammoth 5,000-metre-deep underwater canyon just off the fine-sand beach causes immense swells that collide with the tides over the continental shelf just to the north, forming Godzilla waves ideal for the new extreme sport of tow surfing. From Nazare’s medieval fort on a thousand-foot-high rocky overhang, the ocean feels like an unearthly beast biding its time. Inside the old walls, a makeshift surfing hall-of-fame has a rainbow of boards hanging side-by-side, signed by the daredevils who now annually seek the elusive hundred-foot wave at the end of a rope pulled by their equally crazy friends on jet skis. We were a day late for the end of the three-month festival when the tidal height peaks, but could still feel the energy in the town and in the sinister current below. To the north and south of Nazare, we stayed each night in a cozy beachfront town, in modest contrast to the resorts of Algarve, and watched the sunset over the water as the tamer waves lapped our bare feet and flushed the sand from under our heels. By day, we rode the coastal ridge, often with ocean to our left and the vast valley to our right, with splotches of orange and white vilas huddled on the hillsides. Often our route would drop us into one of these centuries-old towns, half-dead but half enlivened with fresh paint jobs and with splashes of modernity - a surprising number of solar panels on roofs and windmill farms atop the rolling green mounds. One afternoon we found a saltwater marsh with white flamingos, sparrow hawks, glossy ibis and even a purple heron taking flight. This cyclists’ paradise is no accident: during the Covid pandemic, Portugal intentionally bolstered its Europe-leading bike manufacturing industry and built hundreds of kilometres of dedicated bike paths - vividly painted, abundantly signposted, and some wider than the car lanes beside them - in towns and in between. We frequently went hours along these smooth, flat paths without a break, getting lost in the scenery instead of lost in our route. For all the beauty of Portugal’s geography, Mother Nature couldn’t be all kindness. Despite our diligent research, we faced headwinds like the waves of Nazare for days on end - especially in the late afternoons when the consistent gusts passed 50 km/h. Ed and Heron generally rode up front, with Joce to the west to keep Sitka as sheltered as we could. We blared our Spotify playlists but couldn’t hear them for the gusts blasting past our ears. Each night we arrived exhausted after riding those gloriously straight bike paths straight into a gale-force wall for hours. In Pedrogao, after 15km of a gorgeous straight shot through scrubby plains, we found the beachfront boardwalks and half the roads buried in dunes, and later our homemade Greek salad dinner had a gritty coating by the time we abandoned our picnic mission just after sunset and played euchre on our beds while feasting. But it’s those daily épreuves that truly make bike touring such a magical metaphor for life in general - as recalled to us in unlikely fashion by a local curmudgeon in Nazare as we passed by his cafe patio table, out of breath after plodding our way back up from the surf museum fort. “It’s all uphill, my friend,” the motorbiker-sized man with the goatee called out to Ed the family caboose in heavily-accented English. “And not just on your bike.” Just like life, this week’s rides had their uphills - literally some absurdly steep ones that had the boys asking out loud whether we really had to go back down (just like those honeymoon cove climbs), and also figuratively like those headwinds, long stretches on deeply potholed country roads seemingly last maintained by the Visigoths, a dead odometer and our first flat tire in Sao Pedro de Moel just as we were departing a late-afternoon lunch fiesta. But just like life, we’re coaxing our boys to build resilience through the uphills and notice the upsides that come along. While patching our flat, a charming old man stopped to check on us - first in Portuguese then in a blend of French and English. We haven’t had many lengthy encounters in Portugal so far, as the language barrier provokes a certain shyness on both sides. But Antonio had lived and worked in Cambridge, Ontario for several years, and was elated to tell us about his work in tool machinery and life in Portugal. His son Joao, whom we had subtly greeted with a Boa tarde back on the beach, later joined us to share his experience growing up in Canada then moving back to Portugal as a teenager. Without that flat tire, we would have missed this uplifting exchange. Life lesson learned. But it was Heron who schooled us the next day, when our map app led us astray onto a postcard crescent beach in a bay protected by huge natural breakwaters. “The boardwalk re-starts in 200 metres, I can see it!” he shouted down from the lookout dune he had just effortlessly scaled. “Let’s just bike on the beach!” “Nope!” came the quick, skeptical parental reply. We’d slogged through too many quicksandy patches in our time to agree to a half-hour of sweaty pushing. But soon Sitka joined the campaign, running down to stomp on the dark part where the tide was going out. “It’s hard enough I think!” Once we calculated the equally daunting distance to go the long way around, we aquiesced. Within minutes, the boys found their rhythm and were cycling on sand. Soon after, parents were joining the giggly fun. We got our rims washed with saltwater and our cogs clogged with grit (the boardwalk Heron spotted was under construction, so it turned into more like a half-kilometre venture). But it was worth the tune-up session later to have tried something new and succeeded in overcoming another of life’s speed bumps, together. After all, with pain comes gain. Our last day this week into the stunning city of Porto was gloriously smooth. At one point we were flying side-by-side as a family on one of those uber-wide bike lanes with the waves crashing beside us, like a Tour de France team in training. Looking between us to our grown-up boys so contentedly and capably partaking in our favourite kind of day, we felt blessed beyond belief to be back on a west coast again.

(Credit: Joce’s fabulous cousin @redsandsam) Santiago de Compostela to Pamplona, 784km in 8 days - a new family record! Trip total to date: 2,404k Every year, more than 300,000 brave souls set off on a trek of hundreds or even thousands of kilometres, from all corners of Europe towards the same city in northwestern Spain. It’s the Camino de Santiago - the Way of St. James - the human equivalent of the great wildebeest migration, march of the penguins or incredible salmon run (without the rotting flesh and dying at the end). Ostensibly, the objective of these backpacked human hordes is to visit the remains of one of the twelve disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, said to be housed in the resplendent cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. In truth, however, the modern adaptation of this thousand-year-old pilgrimage is all about the journey itself - to commune with those who have trodden these medieval paths before, and to connect with those currently treading alongside. Back in 2008, we joined the walking-stick masses with four-month-old Heron on Jocelyn’s back (and everything else in Ed’s foolhardy 25kg pack), starting on le Chemin de St-Jacques in Le Puy-en-Velay in mid-France. “Le plus petit pelerin” was the star of the trail, sparking countless conversations with our fellow wanderers (ideally not during nap time, when we could pack in the most distance between play breaks). Passing grandparents would offer their best advice to the new mom and dad. Villagers would come rushing out of their homes to offer breadsticks to soothe his newly-teething gums. And over communal dinners at each night’s albergue, the little one in the onesie would be passed all round the table to be fussed over, on the pretense of allowing his parents to dine in peace. That inaugural touring-with-kids experience taught us that the world’s love of children is the perfect icebreaker with total strangers, allowing us to get to know the places and people we were exploring like we never could alone. What we didn’t yet realize was that this specific path of pilgrims held a special power to bring wandering spirits together. That first time, our Camino stopped short, as the snow came early to the mountains beyond Burgos, and we were forced to head south to Ronda and east to Amalfi for more baby-friendly hiking climates. So when we planned our Europe Epic bike trip fourteen years later, we plotted out a return to The Way - in reverse, from Santiago de Compostela to Santo Domingo de la Calzada - to finish what our nascent family had started. We first got that communal feeling north of Porto when we spotted the telltale blue sign with a yellow conch-shell symbol on an old stone wall. We had unwittingly been following the camino portuguese for a few hundred kilometres already, so we decided to start collecting sellos - ink stamps in special Camino passports that prove we have completed the minimum 200 kilometres (biking requires double the 100km needed for walkers) to receive our “compostela” finishing certificates when we arrive in Santiago. Our overnight at the pilgrims’ albergue in Caminha ignited our enthusiasm, and we replaced Bom dia with Bom caminho as our daily greeting when we biked by large backpacks with conch shells attached. Arriving in Santiago, we whisked through the narrow cobblestone streets and strode proudly up to the ancient stone Pilgrims’ Reception office in the shadow of the grand cathedral - where we were promptly turned around to upload our journey’s details on our iPhones using the QR code posted outside. Soon afterward, we held our compostelas 14 years in the making (rules state that one’s name must be written in its Latin form, which for Jocelyn is apparently “Guadelenam” and Ed is… well, Ed, while Romans appear to have not experimented with nature names just yet, so Heron and Sitka’s were likewise unchanged), and we quickly changed into less-sweaty attire for the evening pilgrims’ mass. It was exhilarating to participate in this age-old rite, hearing the long list of countries from which today’s arriving pilgrims (us included) had come, and getting confirmation of what had been slowly dawning on us all day: we were about to travel along Christianity’s most famous pilgrimage route over the eight days between Palm Sunday and Easter. It was La Semana santa (Holy Week) on the Camino de Santiago. Like some higher power had planned it all along. Our reverse pilgrimage began in an angry rainstorm out of Santiago - thankfully there’s a EuroVelo bike route on mostly paved road that parallels fairly closely the often rugged, mostly dirt (now muddy) walking trail. On that first day, we cycled past throngs in the hundreds of soggy hikers in plastic ponchos - their finish line within days or even hours, some had the look of those aforementioned salmon struggling gamely on bruised and blistered feet. But the vast majority were surprisingly ecstatic in returning our “Buen camino!” greeting without questioning why we appeared to be headed in the wrong direction. The level of good cheer we absorbed from these pilgrims who’d trekked for days or weeks would have seemed absurd in any other setting. But the Camino has a certain magic that can only be explained by the word communion: sharing in a mutual, spiritual experience together unites strangers for a fleeting moment of connection. It’s a little (750km-long) bubble of human fellowship that makes even the most agnostic feel a tug of something bigger. Of course Ed is into this kind of thing. He’s the guy who offers a hearty (often startling) “Good morning” to everyone he passes over his bike ride to school in the pitch-black Yukon winter, and waves at every car he passes driving on the highway. In everyday life, the response rate is 50/50 - decent but disappointing. On the Camino, now, everybody returns the gesture, leaving Mr. Friendly grinning and bopping and waving all day long. It feels strange to cycle the Camino backwards, having previously gone the conventional pace and direction. The medieval pueblos encountered every couple hours on foot now arise every fifteen minutes - always a noble stone church tower standing above a cluster of mismatched ancient houses. Sometimes they stand atop a steep hill, others are an oasis among the plateau’s canola and wheat fields, and our favourites like Vega de Valcarce are nestled into deep, verdant valleys with mossed-over stone fences and convex bridges that the sun doesn’t touch until noon, leaving us to feel immersed in the 15th century until we emerge back into the present again when we climb up and away. Just like the repetitive “Hola! Buen camino” human contact, cruising through these fascinating hamlets always gives a fresh rush of seeing something unique and particular, where lives have been lived and pilgrims have found communion for centuries - even if the time elapsed between passing the rectangular nameplate on the way in, then the same rectangular nameplate with a red slash signifying the town exit, is now a mere few minutes on bike instead of an hour or more by foot. Indeed, the Camino’s hosts contribute greatly to the spirit of the place. Many like the lovely Dutch couple Martin and Merel in Villara de Orbigo are past pilgrims who settle along The Way so they can “give back” by offering comfy shelter, scrumptious homemade meals and warm welcome to the next set of wanderers. Others like the beaming Maria at Pensìon Fernandez in Vega de Valcarce find pure joy in hosting strangers with broad breakfast platters of two-bite, homemade cake niblets, fresh waffles, and egg-and-avocado-topped toast. Then there was Ivan and his son Yuri at the Pata de Oca in Torres del Rio, who claim their place as the last vestige of Knights Templar who’ve protected pilgrims since the Middle Ages. And finally Natalia in Iruña (Pamplona) who openly shared her fascinating Basque culture with our family of eager history buffs (then readily offered to mail ahead Sitka’s left-behind journal and e-reader). Conventional Camino-goers tend to encounter the same people every evening at each albergue, so we backwards cyclists needed a conscious effort to seek out communal dinners and dig deeper into the stories of our fellow pilgrims. We were shy at first to invite ourselves into others’ mealtimes - especially without a baby icebreaker - but on Night Two we dined with two engaging Belgians and a Brit, and thereafter Joce started moving tables together and initiating conversations on all topics and all languages (folks were especially interested in hearing the boys’ perspectives on their Camino experience) until the nightly lights-out call signaled our return to the shared bunkrooms before our next early rise. Turns out the collective 6:30 wake-up worked to our advantage. Having booked a birthday cabin in France for Heron’s big day in ten days, we had an ambitious pedal schedule to keep. Over the first five days we averaged well over 100km, no small miracle given that two of those days featured merciless mountain climbs with endless false summits. We were awed by our boys’ resilience, endurance and deep well of enthusiasm. Maybe it was all the knock-knock jokes being invented and re-invented. Or maybe the rewards (ice cream and other) at every glorious summit. So it was that we did say “Holy” often over the past eight days, and admittedly not always followed by “week”. Sure, some of the road grades - both up and down - were pure evil, but it was the captivating views of extensive mountainous valleys and miles-wide farm plains that had us expressing ourselves. The Camino travels through such disparate and beautiful terrain that - even when it’s strikingly similar for long stretches - it’s impossible to be bored, especially at pedaling pace. But the biggest rush by far this week was returning to the places we’d seen fourteen years ago with baby Heron. We celebrated with a huge brunch in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, where we had regretfully paused our first pilgrimage, then atop the Alto de Perdon (Hill of Forgiveness) our full-sized teen posed on the same iron donkey sculpture he rode as a fleece-onesied tot. Mere steps from our albergue in Pamplona was the majestic castle gate where we recreated a favourite pic of Heron on Joce’s back. The flood of memories were near overwhelming as we reflect on just how far we’ve come - and all the places we’ve been - leading up to our baby’s 14th birthday next week. This place in particular is so magical we had to come back - like the caribou and the salmon, we are called a species to commune together. Our beloved friend Joe Opatowski use to point out that a world with record numbers of population shouldn’t also have record numbers of people who feel lonely. We all could benefit from more moments of connection and communion, and the Camino reminds us that we can all do a little more waving and greeting in everyday life - without having to trek hundreds of kilometres to do it.

Pamplona to Saint-Brevin-L’Ocean, 767km; total 3,171k “Il y a toujours ce vent d'inconnu et d'aventures qui nous talonne tous.” We were pedaling through Rochefort - a “ville nouvelle” by French standards, its long rectangular architecture built for royal administration by the Sun King Louis XIV in the 17th century - when we rode past a modest, embossed metal tribute to the early travel diarist Pierre Loti, with this quote that was strikingly pertinent for the moment. The “wind of the unknown and of adventure” has hooked us in its claws yet again over this latest epic family bike tour - with all the unexpected discoveries that blow into our path making our journey all the more invigorating. The same could be said for the wild ride that is parenthood - always surprising with new trials and new rewards at each age and stage. And these two concepts merged wonderfully together this week as our teenager, Heron, turned 14 on the Atlantic coast of France. It’s said that motivating a teen to do anything is a tough slog - but once you find that thing that gets their motor revving, watch out. Case in point: this past Tuesday afternoon. It was just after 1:30 and we still had 31km of biking to catch the 3:15 ferry across the Gironde estuary from Pointe de Grave over to the beach-lover’s resort town of Royan. Our phone apps predicted an arrival time of 3:12 with no stops, and the ferry’s website warned to arrive 30 minutes ahead. “Unrealistic,” thought Ed, thankfully to himself as he glided alongside Sitka, French pop hits blaring from the speaker. “Impossible,” thought Sitka, thankfully only within earshot of Ed thanks to the volume of Stromae’s mesmerizing lyrical cadence. “Pretty doubtful,” Joce kept to herself as she noticed Heron begin accelerating at the front of the pack. “Gotta make that ferry,” decided our teenaged tour leader, who had diligently plotted this whole week around a singular goal. Surfing. As often and at as many different spots as possible. For months, this stretch of sandy crescents had stirred the passions of our intrepid extreme sports fan, who’d ditched his toboggan for a snow-skate (essentially a skateboard without wheels) this winter and left his downhill skis at home to spend his babysitting money on snowboard rentals. Ever since his first foray on a whitecap at age seven, in Australia with our Warmshowers friend Rod, Heron longed to ride waves on a board again. After Day One on Mimizan Beach - his long-planned 14th birthday rest stop - he sounded just like those blonde-maned dudes in the YouTube videos he’s been scouring for tips. “When I wake up, I just want to surf, man.” Okay, so he didn’t say “man,” but he may as well have wagged his hands in Hawaiian “Hang Loose” mode, because he was hooked on the wind of adventure. We would cycle long days of 100km or more (including a new family record 123km day!) to allow for a few hours of surfing on the best beaches at the perfect tide times, like the dreamy Lacanau Beach on Monday where all four of us - even the notoriously surf-inept Ed - caught a few fleeting moments of serene glide atop a rolling wave (Ed would later notice a deep purple hue to his longest toe later that evening - the price of surf glory for a 40-something newbie). By 2:30 Tuesday afternoon, then, Heron’s three bikemates had each decided independently to dare not raise the spectre of missing that ferry. Our phones predicted an arrival of 3:20 but we valiantly kept pace with our galvanized group chief. A two-hour window at world-famous Bud-Bud was at stake. There had already been an emergency bathroom pit stop in the pine forest at 1:45. A suddenly nasty headwind pummeled us on the coast at Montalivet at 2:05. The perfectly paved and sign-posted bike trail was frustratingly busy with children on France’s weeks-long spring holidays. Then, at postcard-pictoresque Soluac-sur-Mer, construction along the beachfront boardwalk. We pleaded with the unsympathique neon-vests, then darted backwards and down several sidestreets, coming to dead-ends each time. Surely the dream was over. But our dude refused to wake up. Having clearly absorbed his parents’ bike-tour problem-solving mantra - “There’s always a way” - Heron zigged and zagged and bike-bell ding-dinged a path through the frolicking families, the rest of us trailing behind like cartoon characters offering friendly “Bonjours” to reassure the startled vacationers. Suddenly we emerged from the forest at a rocky point, the ferry terminal 200m away. It was somehow only 3:13pm, but would the bonhomme at the ticket booth let us pass? “Not if we were in Spain,” we each thought, images of finger-wagging train conductors still scarring our psyches. “Est-il trop tard?” Heron gasped at the stunned man in the booth, the sound of skidding bike tires still echoing in the salty air. “Mais, bien non,” came the surprisingly calm reply. “Vous êtes arrivés juste à temps.” Off whisked the Canadian surfer to his boat, his family trailing behind with the tickets. We stood in utter, exhausted disbelief for the first few minutes after the bridge lifted and the ship set off. 3:15 on the dot. “That was awesome,” beamed Heron. “What do we have for lunch?” Indeed, bike touring with kids changes significantly between the ages of 5 to 8 - as our boys were during our Oceania Odyssey - and 11 to 14 as they are on this Europe Epic. The volume of food consumption is a larger issue for a future blog post, but it’s the level of eager participation in decision-making that was so noticeable this week. Teenagers have a lot of opinions - many are very well thought-out and productive, and many are very not. As parents, it is requiring a next level of patience to discern which is which, and to respond with appropriate levels of appreciation. There are moments when a hastily snatched cell phone leads to some teenaged tinkering that is entirely counter to what was needed - and others that produce helpful high-tech shortcuts that parents would have never imagined. Sometimes a teen can step in and intuitively figure out how to start a microwave with a German-only manual, and sometimes they can, say, reserve a campground on Rochefort Avenue in Avignon on the other side of France instead of the town of Rochefort along your actual bike route. What is certain, however, is that every enervating insertion of unrequested opinion is by far offset by the many moments of emerging competence and engaging companionship. How fitting, then, that this week’s route led us to dozens of sightings of those majestic marshland birds after which our Heron was named. When we last brought our boy to the west coast of France, he was five months old. We would peer together out over the Atlantic and wonder what the future would hold for him as we dipped his baby feet in the lapping tide. Now we know his horizon is as broad as the ocean before us as he masters those waves on his board, and life in general with the same grace and agility as his namesake. What a ride, indeed. Speaking of which, we did cycle this week, hitting the 3,000km mark along the absolutely ideal family bike route that France has labelled its “Vélodyssée.” Starting in the far southwest at Hendaye and winding along the Atlantic 1,200km to the north coast at Roscoff, the path we found was almost all safely separated from main roads, largely paved, flat and smooth; and above all continuous - with few to no surprise dead-ends, and remarkably reliable sign posts all the way. It would be the perfect introductory bike-touring destination. The greatest challenge for families of all ages would be to convince the kids to not stop at every fantastically fun “Holiday Park” campground - dozens in each vacation paradise town, each competing for the coolest waterslide, multisport fields, games rooms and evening spectacles (complete with special rates for cyclists overnighting in tents, though strangely without picnic tables to eat on). Then there are the elaborate ropes courses and go-kart tracks in between miles of pristine beaches and fragrant bakeries. And that’s before you encounter Europe’s largest sand dune, the 100m-high, 500m wide, 3km long Dune de Pilat that could keep the average tyke in explore-and-roll mode for months. The hyper-pleasant route offers reprieve from the tourist traps by meandering frequently through coastal forest of towering maritime pine and oak, then straying inland through the below-sea-level marshlands of Charante and Vendée, with their fascinating labyrinth of medieval digues (similar to Dutch dikes) irrigating the vast fields of wheat, rapeseed and livestock from cow to goat. The symphony of birdsong blends with throaty frog calls from early morning to late night, and one’s reverie is frequently interrupted by a paper-white egret or our favourite heron springing into flight from their perches among the brush. We even spotted a muskrat-like ragondin and creepy masses of short-finned eels slithering and slurping over each other in the shallow muddiness. Back on the coast, we had the unique experience of riding along the Passage du Gois connecting the island of Noirmoutier to the mainland. This causeway is accessible only a few hours a day - at the lowest tide, since it is otherwise submerged up to 12 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean. We timed our ride to catch the driest moments across the concrete road, joining dozens of pêcheurs à pieds who fanned out over the exposed seabed to collect shellfish. Once a year, a foot race is held in this spot, with runners starting as the tide first rises over the road. Winners wrap the 8km return route slopping up their ankles, while slowpokes have to swim to the finish line. These kinds of quirky quests are what keep us all interested and engaged over months of bike touring. As we’ve mentioned before, our boys are keen for family travel because they’re full members of the planning team. And if our teenager is motivated by a week revolving around surfing, then we plan a week around surfing with them - even if it means a broken toe or two. It may also mean listening to French hip-hop all day, budgeting a daily dessert challenge, taking breaks to do 360s off of sand dunes and play horseshoes with our sandals, and ensuring evening game-time for mini-putt, beach volleyball, billiards or learning the quintessential French pastime of pétanque. Granted, we still have to give nightly reminders to brush teeth, and Ed is still the only one apparently capable of washing dishes. But our teens contribute in their own useful ways to the bike-tour team. They take better pictures than Dad, and they keep Mom’s mattress pumped up and her bike chain lubed. Their musical taste is actually quite eclectic, and they have great taste in European desserts. Best of all, they’ve become our greatest bike-touring buddies. Lifelong cyclist friends who, like us, have been hooked in by the winds of the unknown and all the adventures that come along.

Thank you Karin at 10Adventures for this super-fun opportunity to participate in our first podcast. We talked about our favourite moments (and desserts) so far in Europe, as well as our new book chronicling our Oceania Odyssey bike tour. Check out our first 30 minutes of fame here: https://adventuretravel.podbean.com/e/bike-touring-with-children-yukon4explore/ o

Saint-Brevin to Paris: 465km; total 3,636km Another week, another mad dash to a must-reach destination. This time, however, there was no possibility of a next ferry. Our pricey, once-in-a-lifetime tickets to see the Mona Lisa were set to expire in 40 minutes - that 500-year-old coy smile waits for no one. And this time, there was no straight green line on our BikeMap app guiding the way. Paris is a city-cyclist’s dream, but only once you get to know it. Fresh off a train for our weekend tour de force in the City of Lights, we were stuck on a busy mid-town route, 6km away, with stop lights every 50 metres - that seem to switch from rouge to vert to rouge again in far too short an interval for a string of five newbie Parisians to ride across. Every intersection split our group in two, then the next light would go red just as we arrived again. This time, “there’s always a way” didn’t seem to apply. But this time, we had Auntie Brook - Joce’s sister whose long-anticipated two-week visit from Whitehorse has been a turbo-boost of sunshine for the past seven days. Brook was naively chirping optimism from the back of the bike train, keeping us all from losing all hope. And cette fois-ci, we realized… we speak French. “Hé bonjour, Monsieur,” Ed asked the biker ahead of us in the traffic line, in his best, calmest impression of a Parisian accent. “Si nous voulons aller au plus vite jusqu’au Louvre, comment le ferions-nous?” A quick peek over his shoulder and he knew we were foreigners: nobody wears bike helmets in Europe. But: we were foreigners with fluent French. A big, reassuring smile. “Bien, vous prendriez le Parc Rives de Seine. Suivez-moi!” Soon we had dashed across several crosswalks, descended an old exit ramp and were floating along the bank of the famed Seine River, weaving briskly through the weekend walkers on a thoroughfare recently reclaimed by the city to replace heavy car traffic with a cyclist-and-pedestrian paradise. Brook shouted that she knew all along we’d make it. As we pressed to keep up with our new friend, he explained the remainder of our route, which would include a long tunnel before dropping us near the gates to the famous museum we’d been planning for weeks to visit - including securing time-sensitive tickets to avoid the long day-of line-ups. As he accelerated ahead and bade us Bon courage, he paid us the greatest compliment an anglophone Canadian family from the Yukon could ever hope to receive in France: “Vous êtes du Québec?” So far on our Europe Epic family bike tour, we’ve gotten by fairly well with our Spanish, and we’ve wrestled gamely with Portuguese. Communicating has been a wonderful learning experience, but always an effort. But for the past two weeks, we’ve felt completely at ease in la langue de Moliere, going about our daily travels without a second thought in our second language. It’s partly because we’ve each spoken it since we were very young, but mostly it’s because French folks - once they realize we genuinely speak French and understand what they say back - welcome us into their world like family come home. When we moved to the Yukon in 2017, we were nervous about fitting in to a new community. Teaching jobs were scarce for Ed, and Jocelyn was a new naturopathic doctor seeking new patients among strangers. By stroke of fortune Ed nabbed a semester-long contract at the French-first-language high school, where his francophone colleagues seamlessly included the new Grade-12 French teacher with the most English-sounding name of all time. Arriving the first morning after gaining permanent status the following autumn, Ed felt like Norm walking into Cheers, accosted by each passing adult with hearty greeting and startling excitement that he was “de retour chez nous.” Joce happened to treat a couple francophone women in her first month of clinic and subsequently began seeing dozens more who heard par la bouche à l’oreille about the new médecin fabuleuse in town. As such, we have been proudly declaring to everyone from campgrounds in Blois to traffic lights in Paris that we’re not actually from Quebec - we’re Yukonnais. And the reception we get after that is just as warm and enthusiastic. Aside from all the traditional arguments for encouraging your kids towards an immersion program or to learn a second language, then, there’s the purely social reason that life can so much more vivant when you can communicate fluently in another land. It could also just be something about France, too. There’s a je-ne-sais-quoi uniquely special about the way France-French women seem to sing the word « Bonjour » when you pass by, and France-French men unfailingly offer a sincere « Bon appetit » whenever they notice you eating. We certainly felt French this past week especially, as we cycled carefree along the marvellously flat and uninterrupted Eurovelo route along the famous Loire River. This peaceful stretch of country riding is highlighted by its series of majestic feudal castles that dominate the vast wheat fields, recalling childhood fables and Disney princesses, Jane Austen novels and Netflix episodes of Bridgerton. The Chateau d’Usse could well have had Rapunzel’s mane dangling from a high tower window, but instead it housed an elaborate telling of Sleeping Beauty (which it claimed to have inspired) over several rooms up and down a fantastic spiral staircase. Ed’s not-so-inner history geek pranced jauntily through the various castles’ grounds, running his hands along millennium-old walls, envisioning the daily lives and thoughts of the seigneurs who’d stood in those same spots over the centuries, and staring out at the fields and villages below where hundreds of peasants would have been bustling about, making the whole system work. Sitka, for his part, noticed that the ceilings were very tall, yet the beds were very short. Heron was mesmerized by the lavish decor and wondered what they had for dinner on those golden plates. Joce smiled quietly to herself, and we all knew she had the voice of Lady Whistledown narrating the whole thing. Just as fascinating as the castles were the nearby caves that had been carved out from 40-foot-high escarpments to provide the tufa stone blocks to build those ritzy estates. Back in the day, peasants might have lived in the small niches - but most recently, the excavated escarpment faces have been renovated with windows and extensions to create actual homes, restaurants and art studios. On a date night celebrating 20 years from the day we met (in addition to Brook’s endless well of encouragement, she’s gone above and beyond pitching in with dishes, dinners, bike maintenance. groceries and babysitting - the ideal bike-tour buddy!), Ed and Joce peeked into one such workshop in Turquant and met the ingenious Max Orlu, an artist who creates uniquely cool columns and other abstract sculptures from molten aluminum - and is literally a modern troglodyte. Of course, we couldn’t have had such a fascinating interaction with Max in Portuguese or Spanish, with sentences cobbling together our growing vocabulary. But in French, we could dig deeper and truly get to know this funky old soul. The utility of our French fluency would also come in handy while discussing some mechanical bike complications we’d been waiting to fix, with local whizzes Pascal in Mimizan and Aurélien in Saint-Brevin; when deciphering that the unattended floating platform at the dead-end of our bike path outside Angers was actually a DIY ferry (!) across the river to the path on the other side; and when scoring the lowdown on local must-sees by passing (helmet-less) cyclists who inevitably slow down to ride alongside us for a while to hear all about our trip. We’ve partaken in quintessential French life by ordering a croque monsieur (Sitka had dug into the ham before Ed could explain that the ubiquitous menu item is more than a regular grilled cheese), visiting the patisserie every day for our desserts of Europe challenge; playing near-nightly games of family petanque (the French version of bocce that is played in every campground, park, and even in the middle of bike paths), and making fun of the British (“Ah, oui, ils sont fous ces Anglais…”). We didn’t mock the Brits who showed up to the Chateau d’Usse in a line of eight Porsches, however. That was awesome. Especially when Ed started into his (usually embarrassing) going-over-and-striking-up-conversation routine with his new buddies in the Porsche Owners’ Club of Great Britain (turns out that’s a thing), who then offered Heron and Sitka a turn sitting behind the wheel in those legendary bucket seats for a little photo shoot. Seems Dad’s small-talking charm comes in handy every now and then. And then there was Paris. An intimidating city, even for a family who hasn’t spent the past five years in the northern Canadian wilderness. The inexplicably shaped intersections, tobacco smoke hanging in the air everywhere, and the labyrinthine subway tunnels were causing our bumpkin heads to spin. For the first time in our bike-touring lives, we had a heckuva time trying to get off of a dedicated bike path and onto a regular street - all the green lines on our BikeMaps app crossed in two dimensions, but they were 20 feet apart in height with all the overpasses and tunnels. Ed gave it his best shot as tour guide, and we were never lost for too many minutes at a time. We checked out the restoration effort at Notre Dame cathedral, still reeling from the fire that ripped out its roof; returned to that pedestrian thoroughfare in a less stressful state and discovered a whole world of live music and weekend revelry; rented electric scooters (Heron has now mastered the app) at the Egyptian obelisk and scooted the length of the Champs Elysées - even braving the treacherous 12-lane roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe; made Mother’s Day calls lounging on the Champs de Mars at the foot of the Eiffel Tower; and watched Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar Jr. play live for Paris Saint-Germain at the Parc des princes. Oh, and we made it to the Louvre just in time. Actually, ten minutes late. But Ed’s forethought (not normally his strong suit) still got us to the front of the line, and we spent two glorious hours in complete sensory overload. It takes becoming a parent of two teenagers to really notice that classical art entails an awful lot of breasts and penises. Nevertheless, we all marvelled in appropriate measure at the Greek statues (Sitka could name all the gods and goddesses represented after reading voluminous amounts of mythology over the past year), intricate Egyptian sarcophaguses (“sarcophagi”?), and paintings of Biblical scenes. We took selfies next to the Venus de Milo, Ed’s favourite painting Liberty Leading the People, and of course the Mona Lisa (Heron’s pre-Louvre reading assignment was The DaVinci Code, so he found extra interest there). In the end, though, our wise eldest son summed up our experience neatly: “I really liked the history of it all. But I don’t get why some pieces of art are any more special than the rest of them. Especially when they don’t have any arms.” We took a train away from Paris after our 36-hour whirlwind tour, happily back in the peaceful French countryside next to the Canal de Centre for another week of smooth riding before we begin climbing into the Swiss Alps. Then, in a town we can’t remember, we saw perhaps the most French thing of them all. Two middle-aged people, then a half-dozen more, were chasing a duck up and down the street. One had a cloth grocery bag. Another had a butterfly net. We stared for a while, wondering if we should offer to help. But we weren’t sure what exactly we would be helping them do. As we rode away, Sitka saw a man catch the duck, dangle it briefly over an open sewer grate, then place it in the woman’s grocery bag. And they all walked calmly away. Sure, we speak French. We could have asked and understood what that whole scene was about. But there are some things, we figured, that we don’t really need to know.

Paris to Varna, 531km; total 4,167km Maybe we should’ve stayed in France. For the past six days, we’d floated blissfully alongside meandering rivers and quaint canals, with a reliable routine, a familiar language and plenty of ice cream. Now here we were: 3000 feet above sea level amidst breathtaking mountains, late afternoon and 40km from camp, with a gear-shifter plastered in duct tape, negotiating our arrival time using Google Translate. “Wann schlieBt ihr Campingplatz?” Those aren’t typos. German has these curvy B-looking letters that sound like S’s (we think), and random capitals mid-sentence. Then came a mad flurry of words back into Ed’s ear. Some may have included curvy Bs, but how was he to know? We’d thought of how to ask the question, but not how to comprehend the answer. For way too long to be polite, Ed just stared into space, his mouth making the shapes of words but not actually vocalizing any. Then, an idea: just tell her when we hope to arrive, and hope Yes in German is audibly different from Nein. But… “I only know numbers up to five!” Ed freaked out, half at his family, and half at the woman on the phone. Then he hung up. Hours earlier, Joce’s temperamental rear derailleur adjuster was loose again. Given that we were climbing steeply and steadily into the Tyrolean Alps just outside Innsbruck, Austria, its insistence on continually rattling into the hardest gear was troublesome. So Ed whipped out his trusty multi-tool and tightened the screw, as he had several times before. Good as new! But was it too tight? Hmm, maybe it needs just one little, tiny, refining adjustment, and SNAP! Out popped a small metal piece that Ed had never before encountered, and the whole mechanism was left dangling from Joce’s handlebar. “Ooh, yes, that’s a problem,” confirmed the first English-speaking Austrian cyclist whom we waved down (among very many on this sunny Sunday morning) after Ed finally conceded defeat 15 minutes later. Are there bike shops ahead, though? We’re in the middle of The Sound of Music here - serene little villages in the alpine fields. “Oh, yes, everyone cycles in Austria, so there are shops everywhere.” Is there one before Brenner Pass (30km away and 500 metres up)? “Oh, no, none. But it’s not that steep,” reasoned the hyper-fit, spandex-clad dude on a racing road bike. Ed had planned on just holding the dangly bits in place while cycling (yes, it was Joce’s bike, but you know the rule: you break it, you ride it up the Alps). But our new pal had a better, quite Canadian idea. “Use tape. You have some tape, yes? Tape fixes all things.” Shamed that he hadn’t thought of it first, Ed valiantly set to cycling up the Alps on three gears instead of 27. The views? Spectacular. After miraculously making it up to Brenner and into northern Italy (where the majority still speak German, a century after the region was surrendered after World War I), we were treated to a thrill ride down the Iscaro River valley on endlessly paved bike path into the funky town of Sterzing, where our camp-booking snafued. But for most of this week, we had dreamily eased our way through Bourgogne and Franche-Comte in eastern France. The quiet countryside with endless fields, rows of leafy trees and medieval cottages felt like pedaling through the setting of childhood fairy tales. We would not have been fazed to spot a wolf in a bonnet rocking on a porch, or three pigs doing home renos. It’s a flat, well-signposted, whimsical ride - an easy place to get lost in one’s thoughts and almost plough into the retired French couples in matching spandex breezing on their e-bikes in the other direction. Here, the EuroVelo 6 traces the Canal de Centre, Saone and Doubs Rivers, and the Canal du Rhône au Rhin - an elaborate series of waterways developed in the strategic country-building days of Napoleon, with more than 150 smartly engineered, still-functioning locks. Among the near-constant spotting of herons and croaking of bullfrogs, we saw dozens of péniches - a canal’s version of a tugboat, converted from its working days pushing barges into a trendy recreational houseboat meandering the canals and navigating the écluses with a remote-control device that fills or empties the lock before their arrival. We even slept in one on our last night before continuing into Switzerland, to commemorate our ride in this sweet vacation spot, where the time goes by as quickly as the flow of the near-still waters. We still got our dose of surprise highlights, like cycling in a 400-metre-long underground canal flowing beneath a hilltop medieval citadel in Besançon, and frolicking around a gigantic, five-foot-hedged maze in Montbélises. But largely we basked in the warm sun and luxurious calm of chill bike touring, finding our rhythm with late-morning “second breakfasts” from scrumptious bakeries in charming town squares, escaping the heat in shady parks or cavernous gothic cathedral, testing uniquely French potato chip flavours (pesto-mozzarella, French-fry-sauce and Indian-curry were favourites), and playing nightly games of pétanque and ping pong in idyllic campgrounds - almost all of which had picnic tables. We were far from alone: this is a popular route for stunningly fit French retirees, cycling in merry packs of ten or more, decked out in vividly coloured bike outfits, and absolutely smitten when they see a family loaded for a long-distance camping trip. Sitka especially received multiple back pats, helmet taps and words of enthusiastic encouragement (“Salut, champion” was his favourite) every day. (Sitka has certainly enchanted French folks over our three-week visit. In the bustle of entering Paris’ Parc des Princes to see the boys’ favourite soccer team play last week, our little one dropped his ticket just after we got through the gate. Arriving at our section, the bonhomme checking our seats gave a stern look when he heard of this faux-pas, then grinned ear-to-ear and tussled Sitka’s hair and let us through. Later, after a halftime bathroom break, the same fellow whisked over to rescue us from his colleague who refused to let Sitka pass again. “Il a perdu son billet,” he explained, a coy grin in Sitka’s direction. “Il ne vas pas faire ça encore, hein, mon petit?”) Our final France week was extra special as the second half of our visit from Joce’s sister Brook, who slid in seamlessly to our family groove. “I like having someone different to talk to,” Heron told Ed, whose colourful history anecdotes have apparently become stale. More fascinating are Brook’s tales of surf adventures and her work as a lawyer, which has our young reader of a dozen John Grisham novels positively entranced. Not only is it fun to have family around - it’s another willing set of hands to tackle the daily chores, and an extra set of panniers to stuff all our food. We had no idea where those extra bags of chips would be packed when Brook returned home to the Yukon. But having now passed 4,000km on this Europe Epic, we’re a resilient lot. On a cloudless Saturday, we pedaled from France into a small corner of Germany, and then on to Basel, Switzerland, where we hopped a train through Liechtenstein and onto Austria. It’s an impromptu detour to ensure Sitka can maximize his time in Italy’s Alps and Dolomites, of which he’s been dreaming and planning for months. Our first day scaling upward may have snapped a screw and tested our language skills, but hey, we made it to our campground, which did exist after all, at acht o’clock - and we even found the showers using our nascent German. Easy and chill is nice for a while, but we’re craving some awesome. So into the mountains we go - even if only with three gears.