A Purposeful Semi-Recumbent Tandem Tour in Western Canada by Peter and Serap Brown from Canada, www.riverriders.net
My wife likes water, specifically she likes rivers. I like bicycling, specifically I like long-distance cycle touring. Can we combine our interests? Of course! Thus we do long-distance cycle touring trips alongside rivers! We like to start at the very source of a river, and ride all the way to the ocean if possible. We have done several trips like this in Europe (Danube River, Loire River, Seine River). Some of these trips are shown on our website at www.riverriders.net. Spectacular to see the pure glacial water cascading down from the glacier.
Serap hiking up towards the Bow Glacier carrying the movie camera and tripod.
Bow Glacier Vancouver
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Saskatoon Calgary Medicine Hat
2019-2
Since my wife likes rivers and I like cycling, in order to be sure that we stay together, it is obvious that we need to cycle using a tandem! The tandem has many advantages, such as we can chat while we ride and she can take photos and compose poetry while we are in motion! She can even reach into the panniers and feed me while we are cycling! Maybe the best part is that we each put in however much energy that we have, and we both arrive at
our destination together. What could be better? Our current tandem (unbelievably this is our 6th tandem in 27 years of cycling together!) is a Rans Dynamik Duo semi-recumbent tandem (some people call these crank-forward bikes, and a few wonks have commented that the crank certainly does seem to be sitting forward on our bike!). Unfortunately Rans stopped making this bike after just a few years production, so it is a pretty rare bike. And I think ours was the only one ever painted in Metallic Corvette Red, thus we gave the name Big Red! We typically ride 70 to 80 km per day. And we like a cycling trip that lasts about 2 to 3 weeks, thus allowing for a few days of rest stops and a few side trips, 1000 to 1200 km is a good length for us. That is one way that we choose which river to ride along. Recently, I was researching some possible rivers in Europe to ride (Elbe River in Czech Republic and Douro in Spain), however my wife announced that since we live in Canada, this summer our river riding trip would be along a Canadian river! For a few months she had been hinting about visiting the Rocky Mountains, and she had casually mentioned that she had already arranged to meet friends in Calgary, exhibit poetry at an art show in Medicine Hat, and meet two university professors in Saskatoon. I rather easily connected these dots,
Big Red in the parking lot of the Bow Glacier ready to start our trip. Note all the gear on the back! and realized that we would be following the Bow River! Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for! The Bow River is born near the top of the Rocky Mountains. So in early July 2019 we drove 12 hours from Vancouver, parked our car, and hiked two hours to get to the source of the river, which is the Bow Glacier. After a few hours of absorbing the view, and refreshing ourselves by drinking litre after litre of the ice-cold bubbling fresh water directly from the source, we hiked back down the trail, lifted Big Red from the rack on the back of the car, packed our gear into the panniers and prepared to start cycling! Normally we do ‘credit card’ cycle touring. This means that in Europe, we don’t carry camping gear, because every 10 or 15 km there is always a nice little guest house right beside the bicycle
