Good drivers, bad cyclists and a new kind of traffic

Published in the November/December 2009 issue of Momentum: the magazine for self-propelled people.

Do bicycles change the way we communicate?

With no windshields to mute it, this traffic talks to itself.

I was really looking forward to my dental appointment – the adjustment to my night-guard would be pain-free; but more importantly, I would enjoy a long ride across town on one of Vancouver’s traffic-calmed commuter bike routes to get there. I hadn’t done a good spin on it since before I’d left to live and cycle in India a year ago. When I returned I worked from home and – you’ll only hear this from a cyclist – I no longer commuted as much as I wished. I was curious: had traffic changed while I was away?

I set out in golden autumn air that shimmered off storefronts selling felt hats and pumpkin spice lattes.  One foot on the road, one foot on my pedal, I waited for a green light at a busy intersection. A coal-gray Pathfinder pulled up along side me at the white line.

“Hey, hello,” called the burly driver across his girlfriend in the passenger seat. I peered into the open window of the SUV, not quite sure what to expect.

Cycling Culture in Vancouver

Published in the Spring 2009 issue of Vancouver Review, a nationally distributed quarterly magazine that focuses on ideas, culture and arts from Canada’s West Coast.  A collaboration with Museum of Vancouver’s June – September 2009 exhibit Velo-City: Vancouver and the Bicycle Revolution.

• Listen to Ulrike Rodrigues and JJ Lee discuss cycling style and fashion on CBC  Radio One’s Fashion Mondays (YouTube audio, 6:30 minutes).
• Read what The Business of Fashion editor Imran Amed has to say on Vancouver’s new Fashion Cycle
  

It’s the New Normal

By Ulrike Rodrigues

Three things happened in Vancouver’s bike scene  in 1991: Lance Armstrong won the Gastown Grand Prix, Richard Campbell founded Better Environmentally Sound Transportation, and an elderly gentlemen on Bidwell Street sold me his silver Nishiki bike for $300.

I didn’t know anything about Lance, BEST, or Vancouver, but I did know the quickest way to acquaint myself with my new city was to touch it – metre by metre – with the treads of a bicycle. Starting from my new home on Guelph Street (the same name as the Ontario city I’d just departed) and armed with a vague BC Transit map, I surveyed my Mount Pleasant neighbourhood on two wheels.

In the following months, my circles widened and I became familiar with the alleys, warehouses, dirt lots and secret gardens that radiated out from Main and Broadway. I ventured across each of the three False Creek bridges and joined segments of paths that followed the water’s edge. They led me to even more cycling adventures: soft, wooded paths in Stanley Park; goldenrod-lined dykes near Science World; breezy, crunchy gravel on Locarno Beach; and a maze of hard-packed forest dirt in the UBC endowment lands.

“It’s like hiking through the forest!” I marveled as each pedal stroke revealed a new turn of trees, “Only faster! And funner!” I was ten again – on my Supercycle, a lettuce-and-mayonnaise sandwich in my blue plastic basket, shoe laces coming untied, hands wrapped around white plastic grips with blue-and-white striped streamers.

I was free, flying, laughing out loud, grinning at dogs. I was in a new city – Vancouver! – and in a familiar place – on a bicycle! It was so simple. Could it get any better than this?

Keep it natural with “green” sex products

Put some environmentally virtuous lovin’ into your healthy living

A more environmentally virtuous way to get some healthy lovin’ into your healthy living

Published in the February 2006 issue of Shared Vision Magazine.

Designer Christi York was thinking about her organic lifestyle one day, when she had a naughty thought. “I’m really into organic foods and the learning process of what we put into our bodies,” says the founder of Vancouver-based Buenostyle, “so the idea for this graphic just popped into my head.”

That idea was a bright, stylish response to the “granola-coloured boring styles” and “depressing environmental messages” she saw on store shelves: a line of sassy, organic cotton panties emblazoned with a just-try-me challenge to Eat Organic.

Organic lingerie it’s not, but cheeky entrepreneurs like York are starting to put the “wheeee” into green: her natural panties join the products of a swelling rank of daring marketers who bring you a more environmentally virtuous way to get some healthy lovin’ into your healthy living.

Shared Vision went in search of off-the-grid toys, trends, and tidbits and selected a few that seemed particularly playful, guilt-free, and non-intimidating. These mostly local treats are chock full of healthy goodness in one way or another, so go ahead and try a sample.

Backyard Whale Watching

Vancouver operators guarantee sightings with departures right out of the city

Thinking of hauling your out-of-town visitors to Tofino for some whale-watching? Think again. This summer, four local tour operators are guaranteeing sightings with departures right out of the Lower Mainland.

Vancouver Whale Watch and Steveston Seabreeze Adventures (both departing from Steveston), Wild Whales Vancouver (from Granville Island), and Pier’s End Adventure Centre (from White Rock) are all offering boat tours across the Strait of Georgia and down to the Gulf and San Juan islands to watch the whale pods play.

Central Valley Greenway for cycling

Vancouver area multi-use trail offers a bushwhack to bikers willing to explore

The name “Still Creek” may not quicken the pulse of southern B.C.’s white water paddlers; but the blackberry thorns that line the tributary’s urban bike trail are sure to draw blood from a Lower Mainland peddler or two.

Greenway looks like a country lane between Gilmore and Willingdon

Not only is Still Creek one of Vancouver’s original city streams, but it actually flows away from the ocean and toward the Fraser River. While municipal planners pore over a 50 year plan to rehabilitate the historic watershed; a Vancouver-based collection of cycling advocates have ~ with the support of VanCity, Translink, Transport Canada, and other private and public organizations ~ scratched up enough funding, support and publicity in six years to slam a multi-use trail down along its course.

When it’s signed, sealed and landscaped in March of 2007, the 22-kilometre Central Valley Greenway will span Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster and offer those cities’ residents an chance to travel to workplaces, shopping centres, schools, and transit stations without their cars; more Greenway, less Kingsway.

Until then, adventurous local cyclists have discovered that ~ as Richard Campbell of Better Environmentally Sound Transportation (B.E.S.T.) puts it ~ there’s “a functional interim route” just begging for a good urban bushwhack.

Healthy sex is all in the talk

Communication while you play is the only way, says the kink community

If you’re not tied up this weekend, Vancouver’s kink community would like to tell you a thing or two about safe, sane, consensual sex. Enthusiasts of the Lower Mainland’s BDSM, swinger, polyamory, and erotica scenes will be joining up with sexologists, politicians, filmmakers, and self-professed “perverts” at the Sex Conference to overcome what they see as the biggest threat to healthy sex: ignorance.

Soloists Team Up to Beat Singles’ Fees

Would you like a good spanking? Would you? Because if you’re single and like to travel, expect to get spanked hard when you go to pay for that fabulous all-inclusive holiday. In addition to the taxes, surcharges, and fees everyone else pays, solo travelers must submit to an additional smack called the “single supplement” merely because they have the cheek to journey alone.

A single supplement, in case you’re not experienced, is an industry convention that allows cruise, resort, and package-tour operators to pass on up to 200 percent of an accommodation’s double occupancy rate, on top of the rate. According to Paul Noble, an industry veteran and instructor at International Travel and Business College, “Most pricing for tour product is based on two people so [singles] have to pay more than if they were with someone.”

Heading for the Hills? Then Get on the Bus

Stress-free snow bus services to B.C. mountains for when you’d rather ride than drive

Mittens firmly in the 10 and 2 o’clock positions, I was driving behind a Greyhound bus one winter morning when an impatient driver turned a Celica from a side road in front of the coach, lost control on the icy shoulder, bounced off the side of the bus, and–shooting off fractured quarter panels and shattered glass–spun to a stop five metres in front of me. I realized then that I’d be better off inside the bus than behind it.

Ski-tour operators and bus companies agree. Moose Travel Network, Destination Snow, Canadian Outback, Snowclub, and even Greyhound have hit the highways with stress-free bus services to B.C. mountains. Cheap and flexible, the ski-bus trips are ideal for adventurous skiers and snowboarders–both locals and tourists–who’d rather ride than drive.

Unlike the SUV driven by your mom, boyfriend, or buddy, these vehicles are steered by professional drivers. Other benefits? They’re righteously HOV, they often include movies, giveaways, and discounts, and (ahem) they’re a great way to meet new people with similar interests.

Village Hostels on the Sunshine Coast

Three coastal “backpacker B&Bs” welcome budget travelers north of Vancouver

Marney and son Coulter of Up The Creek Backpacker's B&B in Roberts Creek

I used to sell panniers at Vancouver’s Bike Doctor and when novice cyclists would come in and say they were going to spend a “relaxing” weekend biking the Gulf Islands, I’d cringe. There’s got to be an easier way for these people to discover the simple joys of bike touring, I thought; a destination with less gravity-defying hills, a shorter ferry ride, comparable island cachet and cheaper accommodations.

Since then I’ve thrown my bike on the #257 Horseshoe Bay bus and confirmed that this place does exist but the catch is ~ it’s not an island; it’s the thirty or so kilometers between Gibsons Landing, Roberts Creek and Sechelt known as the Sunshine Coast.

Each of the three villages are spaced fairly evenly apart and are linked by the Georgia Strait coastline, the paved-shouldered Highway 101, and a bike-rack equipped Sunshine Coast Transit System. The curious traveller can sample a day’s worth of arts, eats and adventures by bike or bus, then settle into an cozy hostel-type accommodation when it gets dark.

Merridale Cidery in Cobble Hill, Vancouver Island

Family-run apple orchard grows, squishes, ferments and pours their own ciders

Terry and I were waiting on the corner of Granville and Broadway for the #601 bus to take us to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal, when a grey pony-tailed fellow in mirrored sunglasses rode up on a blue ten-speed with two shopping bags hanging from the handlebars. He said he was going to Jamaica.

“How are you going to get to Jamaica once you’ve run out of land?” I asked him, motioning to his bike. He looked at me hard. “What are you, writing a book?”

“Er, no,” I back-pedaled, “I was just wondering in case I want to try it myself.”

Our journey ’s motivation was much simpler: we’d take our bikes on the ferry to Vancouver Island, cross the Saanich Peninsula, jump on the Mill Bay ferry, and cycle the rolling hills and smooth blacktop around Cobble Hill’s Merridale Cidery.

The family-run cidery grows apples, cultivates honey, and squishes the two together to make a sweet, hi-test cider called Cyser. I wanted some, and I figured it was worth a weekend of camping and riding to get it.

Cycling to Pitt River Hot Springs

Vancouver-area pools are accessible by boat and bicycle ~ but not by car

[Updated July 2009. Originally published in Adventure West Magazine, October 2004. Photos by Luke Moloney. ]

My trusty B.C. Backroad Mapbook refers to the Pitt River Hot Springs as one of the most scenic hot spring destinations in Southwestern B.C. Having been to a few over the years and this one in particular in August I have to agree; and the best part is that it’s gurgling away in our own backyard, yet utterly inaccessible to the car-bound.

To us crafty multi-modal adventurers, however, it’s a simple matter of combining bus, bike and boat. The reward is a sweet, sand-bottomed pool carved out of a canyon shelf that overhangs the rushing Pitt River. An upper, hotter pool holds the spring water until it is ready to be sluiced down a rock crevasse into the river-side pool. There, six or seven cyclists can get naked, settle in, and watch shreds of cloud slip down between the canyon’s fern-and-moss-covered wall to meet the river’s milky spray.

Urban Orienteering on the Central Valley Greenway

Spray-painted artwork along the Central Valley Greenway

The spring I turned 35, I found out that four ligaments join the bottom half of my leg to the top, and that when two of them snap on a damned bike descent of a Grouse Mountain trail, it’s a very bad thing.

Once the reconstructive surgery was completed and I had learned to walk again, I decided that my cycling energy was better spent on more moderate adventures.

I pored over TransLink’s Regional Vancouver Cycling Map & Guide and discovered that the Lower Mainland’s immense Fraser Valley floor offers an extensive network of flat-earth forest paths, linear parks, dike trails, and greenways. (For a list of retailers who sell the guide [$3.95], visit www.translink.bc.ca/ and click on Maps.)

Some of them, like Stanley Park, Pacific Spirit Regional Park, and the B.C. Parkway Trail, are well-known and well-used; but many, such as the newly christened Central Valley Greenway, are largely unpaved, unsigned, and unexplored.

A Two-Wheel Odyssey to a Table by the Sea

Ulysses can attest that sometimes the longest journey begins with a single malt. Not long after they set out on their fabled odyssey, Ulysses and his crew found themselves lingering in the land of the lotus-eaters for spirits and nosh by the sun-warmed sea.

It kind of sounds like patio season on the sea wall, doesn’t it? Like Ulysses, you set out with the best of intentions: your bike is tuned and you’re determined to ride hard, but the cafés, by God, the outdoor cafés! Their breeze-blown tablecloths, tinkling glasses, and promises of sublime indolence make them nearly impossible to just…ride…past.

Fortunately, you don’t have to. The solution to combining hard-core and Hefeweizen is literally attached to our familiar Seaside pathway signs. It’s a stylized maple-leaf symbol indicating that by merely getting on your bike and pedalling a few bite-size kilometres, you are cycling the Trans Canada Trail, a 17,000-plus-kilometre, coast-to-coast recreational trail soon to be the world’s longest. The Vancouver section happens to include a smorgasbord of roll-in café patios that are entirely free of traffic and blessed with views of the North Shore mountains, the Pacific Ocean, and the Gulf Islands.

Monthly salons draw fans of flying solo

Where do you book an off-season college-dorm bed in Edinburgh? Which cruise lines don’t charge single travellers an extra fee for a cabin? Is it really possible to experience a fulfilling, worry-free adventure if you travel by yourself?

Advice, anecdotes, and appetizers fly across the table at the Solo Travellers’ Cafés. For those who have journeyed by themselves –or want to– this monthly salon offers up servings of solo-oriented tales and information at an eatery near you.

Created less than a year ago by “returned” traveller and workshop instructor Deborah Tiffany, the roving café, usually held on the second Wednesday of every month, has attracted up to 50 participants to neighbourhood tapas, dessert, and ethnic restaurants. A table of 20 café-goers joined Tiffany at Commercial Drive’s Artistico Greek Café recently. Prompted to describe their latest trips, the chatting travellers recounted tales ranging from a Canadian studies work term in Scotland and a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas to a road trip up the Yukon’s Dempster Highway and a cross-country tour of France’s valleys.

Hostels can be ‘lux’ for just a few bucks

West Coast accommodations debunk myths and welcome families

TOFINO, B.C. — It’s a characteristically wet, winter day and, as a Whalers on the Point Guesthouse visitor, you find yourself faced with a difficult decision so early in the day. Should you sip rosehip tea and watch for whales in the solarium, curl up with a thick West Coast guidebook in front of the massive stone fireplace or bake a batch of chunky cookies with some new British, Aussie and Brazilian friends in the kitchen?

Life is good at this exclusive, award-winning Vancouver Island hostel and — for the nominal cost of a hosteling membership — it’s yours for only $22 a night.

A hostel?

“A lot of people in North America are still unaware of hostels,” says Shelbey Sy, from Hostelling International’s Vancouver office. She and other staff realized that, despite its century-old history as a member-driven, not-for-profit association, Canadians still have a lot of misconceptions about hostels.

The staff started hosting workshops regularly called “Hostelling 101″ to debunk myths, share hostel basics and give “locals” the scoop on what five million worldwide travellers already know: hostels can be “lux” for not a lot of bucks.