The start of our adventure hasn’t been as smooth as we’d have liked. Firstly our flight arrived way later than we’d anticipated. Secondly the luggage firm at the airport couldn’t ship our empty bike bags to San Diego. So we had to take a taxi to the large UPS depot near the airport. They were able to transfer the bags (for a princely sum) but getting to the courier company, unpacking and building the bikes, packing the bags into one another and filling all the forms to despatch them to San Diego took four hours, so by the time we were heading into Vancouver it was dark. Fortunately, we had lights and hi-viz bike bag covers, but it was not a nice ride in. Navigating a city you don’t know at night when extremely tired is tough. Well done to Mike (and Garmin) for getting us to our first Warm Showers host – Matthew Cooke. We arrived at his house gone 10pm but were welcomes warmly by Matthew and Rex the dog (once he’d had a good sniff and lick – that’s Rex, of course, not Matthew). We were pretty pooped by then after nearly 24 hrs travelling with little genuine sleep on the plane, so we turned in almost straight away.

Morning. Feeling bit fresher after a night’s sleep – looking forward to some coffee. We set off on our first leg of the journey proper today to Mount Vernon. I think navigating our way out of the city will be the trickiest bit, followed by getting across the USA border, (arranging to send an empty bike bag parcel across the border was complicated enough). After that hopefully a good 80 mile ride lies ahead of us, fingers crossed.