When you travel with someone, you learn how to share a trip’s rhythm
"Take a moment to enjoy the simple pleasures that surround you every day"
The Canadian customs line was moving slowly. Most of the passengers coming up from Seattle on the Greyhound waited sleepily in line, but I was curious about the unusual baggage of a couple of travellers in front of me.
Gurney-style, they’d carried a couple of beaten-up and duct-taped cardboard boxes out of the bus’s luggage compartment. They also unloaded two old canvas backpacks, a milk crate with a wire basket bungyed inside it, and a plastic Chinatown-style shopping bag. The tip of a bike’s front fork peeked out of one torn-up corner of one of the cardboard boxes.
Standing behind them in the line, I helped push their considerable pile of gear forward each time a passenger stepped forward to be questioned by a customs officer. I turned to one of them and asked if they were in the middle of journey. Her eyes shone as she explained that they’d just biked down the Baja Peninsula and would be finishing their trip in Coquitlam.
