Vancouver

Success! I'm now in Vancouver, with my bike and all of my stuff intact. For some reason, the ticket agent only charged me $25 to check my bike, instead of the $50 that it was supposed to cost. Oh well, I certainly didn't complain.

When I got to Vancouver, it took me about an hour to reassemble my bike and get everything ready. (Note to anyone planning to ship a bike on an airplane: make sure that you know where you packed your bike tools! I had a couple of minutes of panic because my bike tool wasn't where I thought it was.)

The ride to the hostel was quite nice; the area around the university is particularly pretty. I quickly got two firsts out of the way: First, it rained on me during this ride. It wasn't bad at all, especially since it stopped raining within 15 minutes or so. If all of our rain was going to be like this, it would be no problem at all!

Second, I ran into my first friendly locals. While biking through a residential section of Kitsilano, I started to pass a couple on their mountain bikes, and they started talking to me, asking about where I was headed, etc. It felt really good to be able to say, "San Diego," and they seemed quite impressed. (I felt a little bit bad passing them, though. Here I was with 40 pounds of gear on my bike, and I was still able to pass them while going uphill?)

Anyway, looks like we're going to be leaving Vancouver on Friday now instead of Thursday; that's actually kind of nice since it gives me more time to explore the city.

Total distance so far: 17.6 miles