For four years now I’ve hosted a small group ride with the same friends on the Saturday of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, which lands around my birthday. This year it happened to land on the day.
The weather this time of year is far from reliable, but we’ve been lucky in previous years. However this time we got rain – lots of rain – for the first couple hours.
First order of business was to stash the 5L keg of Paulaner lager that Rob graciously provided and lugged. He stashed it down by the river to keep cool, which was somewhat laughable since the air temp was only about 8C anyway.
It was so rainy that even our stubborn selves were recalculating the planned route to reduce the time we’d be out in the elements. We rode out to Cypress Bowl Rd via Rob’s infamous fence line, but bailed on the plans to ride all the way out to horseshoe bay and check out a variety of little connector trails in west van.
Well, we did carry on a bit further from Cypress, up and over a particularly brutal service road climb that dropped us into the Cypress Falls trail network.
After Cypress Falls it was a twisty road descent down to McKechnie park, a beautiful park in West Van that I hadn’t visited in a couple years.
Leaving McKechnie we anticipated the remaining twisty road descent down to the ocean, but noticed a trail off the road shortly after the park – which ended up being a straight-down gravel descent down to the rail tracks, the down a set of stairs and connected right up to the quiet seaside bike route without touching the main road – magic! It was only two blocks long, but it was a great find that I’ll definitely use as a link in the future.
We stopped for sandwiches (and a Märzen) en route to retrieving our mini keg – successfully!
Once we had the keg in hand, we started to scope for a good restful place to enjoy it. After our river-front spot wasn’t quite right, we decided to bring it over the bridge to enjoy in Stanley Park.
However Graham’s derailleur had other plans, exploding as we climbed up to the bridge deck. It even ripped a spoke out of the rim, so instead of trying to rig up a single speed setup we just opened the keg right there on the bridge deck and afterwards, Graham loaded the helpless bike onto the front of a bus.
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