Stage One: Prince George, BC to Larrabee State Park, WA

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From the Frozen North to the beaches of Washington. 800 km out of +11,000 km

So it's finally happening. After deciding about a month an a half ago that I needed to do something big with my summer, I'm finally ready to start. My bike is packed, my gear is gathered, and I've been going on practice runs until my legs are ready to fall off. Sunday morning, it begins. Even if it's snowing. Which, given the weather so far this week, it probably will be.

I'm giving myself a lot of leeway in terms of time for this stage of the journey, once I start heading east I'm going to have to be covering a full 700 kilometers a week to get back home before snow flies. But considering that even alone this leg of the trip is going to be longer than anything I've ever done before, giving myself some slack seems like a good idea.

The route is going to be taking me South from my own driveway Northwest of Prince George along the Cariboo highway, which I'll stick to until switching to the Trans-Canada Highway at Cache Creek. Once I've reached Hope, I'll take the Lougheed Highway west, then follow minor roads down to the border and through the upper extremities of Washington. In Larrabee I can dip my wheels in the Pacific Ocean and officially start my trans-continental journey.

As I said in the intro, I'm going to be logging my day to day progress on Twitter since my smartphone frankly isn't smart enough to handle blogger without tripping over its own eyeballs. (It's an Android, in case someone out there wants to feel justifiably smug about their choice of phone.) You can still see the updates on this page though via that handy-dandy Twitter box on the right. Blog updates are going to be limited to whenever I can borrow somebody's computer.