Endurance
After 12,000 km together, Julie and her bicycle are dance partners
KITCHENER — Julie Van de Valk rested her right knee on the front wheel of her beloved bicycle.
“It’s a totally different relationship,” said the 23-year-old Waterloo-raised geological engineer, as she shared a moment of reflection with her “dreamcycle orange” bike at Victoria Park on Wednesday. “It is totally a dance partner.”
On the silver screen, Ginger could always count on Fred.
And Julie? She just did a two-wheeled tango with her Salsa-brand Las Cruces bicycle for 12,000 km, down-and-up-andacross North America for three months.
“It is the perfect bike,” Van de Valk said of her scenery-chewing partner. “I couldn’t have imagined anything better.”
The price of perfection? A thousand bucks.
That’s how much Julie, who just finished school at the University of British Columbia, paid a Vancouver mechanic friend in February for the saucy cyclocross model, with a jalapeno tattoo on its sturdy-and-straight spine.
Just a used 20-speed mule loaded up with saddle bags packed with Mr. Noodles, dry clothes and side-of-the-road sleeping gear.
She’s a Waterloo girl who got into cycling four years ago, when she worked a as a water technician in Cambodia, where bikes were the only way to get anywhere in the city.
Put them together, and the scenery and purple-mound mountains piled up behind them, on her internet travel diary www.juliesthereandbackagain.blogspot.ca.
The first 3,000 km — Van de Valk’s original vision for a little biking excursion south — flew by during 20 days in May. She pedalled one-way from Vancouver to Mexico, then flew home with her bike, wondering what else the duo could do.
So she settled on a 9,000 km Canadian leg, which ran two months and 10 days, before ending in Halifax last weekend. It began on Canada Day. They met a friend in Whitehorse. They hitchhiked to Dawson City, before tackling the legendary Dempster Highway — 750 km of dirt road into the Arctic Circle and Inuvik.
The two cyclists, Van de Valk and her friend, camped along a rain-soaked molasses road.
“The mud got so deep and so thick, my wheels would actually stick and stop turning,” she said. “You’d have to sit there and claw the mud out.”
And by Van de Valk’s late-July birthday, they all celebrated with vanilla ice cream under a midnight sun in Inuvik.
By August, Van de Valk had hitchhiked back to Whitehorse, took a bus to Prince George, and then started pedalling east.
The hitchhiking was no problem, she said.
“I was not expecting the limitless human kindness I saw.”
In Ontario, they stopped at her grandma’s dairy farm in Brighton.
“Can you do my laundry please?” she asked politely.
But by the time Van de Valk flew back home to Waterloo this week with her bike — she becomes a full-time water resource engineer in North Vancouver when she returns in a few days — the dents and dings of the trip had added up.
She dislocated a rib when a hailstorm sent her crashing into a fallen tree in Olympia, Wash. But it eventually snapped back into place. She also dealt with an infected blister on a big toe.
“You can’t ride 200 km a day on a 70pound bike and not feel that.”
Her collaborator had been dinged up, too.
Six chains. Three seats. A dozen flat tires. A cut back tire near Edmonton. The inner chain ring hasn’t worked since Saskatoon. Twenty gears is now down to ten.
But that’s all part of the dance of endurance.
“Probably the best days of my life were on this trip when it’s sunny. If I have a tail wind and you’re just scooting along, you feel strong and your feet are connecting with the pedals,” she said. “You can move the bike with your feet. You’re kind of dancing.”
More gravel road adventures are in their future — even if there is another bike in the picture. It’s the old bike she used to get around the university campus. It’s turquoise, matches her helmet and awaits back in Vancouver.
But both her two-tired dance partners get along.
“They’re good friends,” she said.