We spent about two months getting ready to go on the trip once we had all decided to go. The work we did on planning the trip, of course, had to go on while we were at school full-time and doing fundraising and media promotions on the side, so it tended to fall a little on the wayside. We didn't find that there was all that much we needed to do once equipment was figured out, anyway, so it all worked out.

Some of the documentation we have on the preparation we did prior to leaving follow:

• Minutes from a few meetings (dunno if they'll mean anything to you);
• Research on what to take (this link created by Ben Law, one of the C4O cyclists);
• Equipment we took; and
• Training research (as prepared by David Clarkson, another cyclist).

Six out of the seven of us bought bikes for this trip (this may answer a question some of you may have about just how much biking our group did before the trip: let's just say that that visit to the bike store taught us a lot about what bikes look like nowadays...). What we decided to do was go to a few stores with a list of what we needed and negotiate a group discount. It ended up working pretty well between us and the Cyclepath store on King St. in Waterloo.

Mountain Equipment Co-op ended up being our other big stop for purchases. Good raingear, we had decided, was important.

After quite a bit of discussion, we decided to take a car with us as a support vehicle. This meant that we would be taking the easy way out by not carrying our gear on our bikes, but on the other hand, the trip would be safer and we could do more sidetrips to see things that weren't directly in our path. The car would drive ahead of the cyclists to scout out good stopping places and set up camp, buy groceries, run errands, etc. As a system, it worked out fairly well.

We took two cell phones with us (they were indispensible) with one being in the car at all times with whoever the driver was that day (we rotated each half-day) and another with the last cyclist.

And so, after deciding on our itinerary (the one we decided on is in our infosheet, and is different from our actual route), we all set off in our separate ways for Vancouver to begin our cycling adventure.

This page authored by Sarah Kamal on July 22, 1999.