ok... well, a lot of stuff about the trip i've already been putting into my journal. but i figured since i took all these pictures and there's usually sort of a story that goes along with each one, that i'd sort of present them & explain them. also the pictures here are only ones that i've taken since i was in quebec. the ones before that i have yet to get digital images of. here goes...

just to start things off, i'd like to introduce you to the bike. this bad boy was invincible. i took it all kinds of places it just shouldn't have gone. not once in the whole trip did i have any drivetrain problems, bends, cracks, spoke problems, or even... (believe it or not) flats. yup, i've been extremely happy with this bike.

you guessed it... this is where it really shouldn't be. i think i mentioned somewhere in the journal about traveling through a drainage pipe at the end of this atv trail that i went down. well... this is it. this was in riviere du loop, quebec.

found this sign on the road somewhere between riviere du loop and quebec city. not too sure what the heck it means, but hey... optimists are always cheerful folk...

um, i was a tourist in st. germain... i figured i was being clever when i took it but, oh, nevermind...

i took this picture the moment i could see across the st. lawrence. it didn't come out all that well, but you can see the other side of the river. this represented one of my early accomplishments... "i can see land!"

this was when i was trying to get the heck into montreal. you'll notice the complete lack of photos from when i was in quebec - no idea what the hell caused that. this bridge was a killer though... way too many stairs. think i wrote about this in my journal somewhere as well.

this was a picture i took of the street when i was in montreal. but check out the stairs... like all over montreal, streets and streets of houses would all have these elaborate staircases coming out the front of them. it was pretty cool.

in ottawa, i jumped on this cool bike path. ya, cool until i came to this tunnel where the whole damn thing was flooded. i went through it anyways... the clothes in my trailer smelled funny afterwards.

      
of course i just had to take pics of our capital buildings. it's ottawa!

the scene of the accident. this was just outside of ottawa and it was a smokin hot day.

nice little pic i took at a campground two days west of ottawa...

a field mouse was scouting around for food and so i put my oatmeal bowl down & it crawled on in. i guess i could've killed it and cooked it in the same bowl, but i just ate a lot of oatmeal. that, and i imagine it would take me the whole morning to figure how to do it.

ok, in north bay (which is about 100km east of sudbury) they were holding this whole day event to create the worlds largest strawberry shortcake. ah yes, this would captivate tourism, i'm just sure of it. apparently the current record holders (the town of tallahasee, florida) were somewhat cheesed at these north bay upstarts. whatever, the really unfortunate part is that i couldn't stick around to eat any of it.

this is in a park in sault st. marie... gorgeous day.

got to see this lake quite a few times. the pic didn't turn out all that well, but this whole area was really beautiful.

the halfway point of the transcanada highway. if you read it though, it's halfway from st. johns to victoria, not halifax to victoria. bah, whatever... i still thought it was cool. this was between sault st. marie & wawa on highway 17.

ok, this was kind of funny. see, a while back when i was working at getty, david petiot made some comment about my trip in reference to forest gump (in how he ran across the country). for some reason, it was one of those kinda things that stuck with me... and so when i spotted this, i had a pretty good laugh.

me taking a break for some lunch beside a stream...

beautiful shot of lake superior again... gorgeous day, big downhill in front of me (i think it was a 9% grade), and a big fat shoulder to ride on (which was bloody rare for ontario). how totally sexy...

monument to the great terry fox where he was forced to stopped his marathon of hope. this was just outside of thunder bay. every time i seriously think of what this guy did, i have to fight back the tears... a marathon every single day with a prosthetic leg, dying of cancer. he would constantly say that he's one of the lucky ones... that some people have cancer and can't even get out of their beds.

there were a lot of these. in fact, i've got a lot of other waterfall pics that i didn't even upload here. it was kind of funny because you'd look over at these things and think, "god, how beautiful" but then as a picture, they just look all flat and ordinary. how weird...

crossing the standard time zone border. this was just prior to entering manitoba and was the first time i'd seen a time zone barrier in the middle of a province.

met these two guys who were doing the same trip but going the other way. this was in kenora. we split a campsite seeing as how it was the last one. found out they're from victoria and work as computer programmers. said i should give them a call if/when i look for work in victoria.

manitoba border. wow. and if you can believe it, i was pretty damn happy to see it. biking across ontario took me forever.

fields of canola. tons of them. there were like kilometers and kilometers of the stuff... just these blowing fields of bright yellow canola plants.

ya... um, more flat land. i figured i should have at least one picture of saskatchewan. alright then, moving on...

wohoo! i was getting closer to calgary! yay! i'm close to seeing friends!

this couple was cycling across canada as well. i met them in a tourism info place in alberta. turns out though that they were travelling the same direction i was but i just kept missing them. they left the same time i did from halifax... they were in regina at the same time i was during this massively windy day... we had all these similar stories. creepy... then, just after meeting them i found out they were going to lethbridge and i was going up to calgary so we were already parting ways. how totally bizarre.

saw several of these things on my trip. and man were some of them long... like i'm not sure if you can zoom to see how long this one is, but it was going by for like forever.

basically, this was the flattest i ever saw the horizon during the entire trip. this was between the town of brooks and medicine hat alberta. once i got to calgary, once again, the camera disappeared and wasn't used. um, shoot...

my cousin aaron who lives in banff. he's a pretty big guy. had a good little visit with him & checked out the movie triple x. definitely not a movie i'd see twice, but whatever. aaron seemed content not only to smoke in the theatre but to empty a mickey of vodka into his large coke. interesting dude...

wohoo!

this was a nightmare to ride up. this is looking to the east and that road goes downhill a bloody long ways. it took me 50 minutes non-stop to ride 7.5 km.

a river i passed by somewhere in the rockies. what's weird about this picture is now that i look at it, i can't really tell how big those rocks are. like i could be just two feet away or 20. but anyways, those are some really big rocks... i was more like 40 or 50 ft away.

hung out with these guy at a hostel in vernon, bc... from left to right, that's christian, uli, a dude from belgium (forgotten his name... shoot), and yours truly. that christian guy's a cool dude... hope he gets some better luck w/ the ladies cause from the stories he told me, it sounds like the women he meets are just plain weird. well, not exactly, but something like that...

this was a weird thing for me... as i was riding down near summerland, i found the road to be almost identical to the fulford-ganges road on saltspring island... as it creeps towards mount maxwell coming from the fulford ferry terminal. it was kinda trippy... not like most people would care, but whatever...

shortly after checking into the hostel in penticton, i met this gang of really friendly ppl. from the left, it's karsten uitz, me, laura rowland, and karsten's brother roland. karsten was doing the ironman as well and him & his brother had flown here from germany. laura's a super cool babe from england.

one of the guys that works at the hostel noticed me eating this bowl of oatmeal out of a large salad bowl. he was just kind of standing there for about 10 seconds before he said anything and then just kind of asked me, "hey, can i take a picture of that? i've just never seen anyone eat that much oatmeal... jesus."

the girl on the right's name was melanie. she was also from germany and was just over on a vacation. she took all the race photos for me - THANKS MEL! can't remember the name of the girl on the left, but she's from abbotsford. her dad was racing in the ironman as well and he was staying there with her. he was 52 and i guess he had ran a lot of marathons prior to this. his name was marc & he sure didn't look 52 to me, but whatever. he had this bike that was straight out of a workshop... all stuck together with electrical tape & had strange little containers for him to put his stuff. definitely not a top of the line bike. one of the other guys i didn't have a picture of was steve... when he walked in, we totally figured this guy for a sub-10hour guy. i mean, this guy was *fit* lookin. i was sitting with laura when he came in and i could see the expression on her face just completely transform... hahaha... ya, so i guess he was hot. anyways, this steve guy had just the opposite - a 7.5 thousand dollar bike. his frame was one piece ultra thin fiberglass with some kick ass expensive carbon wheels. at the end of the day, marc had finished in 10:26 (a bloody phenomenal time which qualified him for hawaii) while steve finished in 14 or 15 hours. i think there's a moral in there somewhere...

me & karsten back from a swim a couple days before the race. swimming in a wetsuit is pretty damn cool. you become all floaty!

prior to the race, i was really nervous and just plain on edge. like the whole tapering thing that i was doing (basically just slowly decreasing the amount i was working out over the span of two weeks) was giving me so much damn energy, i was like this explosive freakish idiot. my emotions were also going crazy... like honestly, the smallest things would set me off. it was downright freaky. ya, so i think someone noticed that i was being kinda weird or something so they asked for my crazy face. i guess that's it. :-)

and they're off! race day swim start and it was bloody nuts. i've never been in that kind of crowded situation while swimming before. took a heel to my lips, several arms to the torso, etc, etc... i can't tell you how nervous i was before that gun went off...

i was sent this picture by a guy who actually biked across canada in the same direction i did. met him in a hostel in winnipeg and he took off ahead of me for the coast while i slacked off & prep'd for the race. so he went to vancouver island and then came back out to penticton to watch this race. his name's paco & he's from quebec... really cool dude. anyways, this is me just coming back from a really long ride. i wasn't sure how my run would feel because the muscles in my butt were kinda sore. ack!

at the start of the run, the glut pain disappeared (cause i wasn't using them) and i was on top of the world. i was feeling pretty damn good.

another running pic... gogogo!

paydirt. i was so damn happy... i could see my time was under 11 hours... i had this smile on my face that just hurt. :-)

the home stretch...

me passed out on the couch back at the hostel. i think the medal thing is on the coffee table there.

got to the tsawwassen ferry terminal in vancouver after a good rest back at the hostel & 3 days of cycling from penticton. had a short visit with my cousin andrew (in his toxic apartment... the place is messy to the point of hazardous mold spore emmissions) before checkin out and heading to the island.