Haines Report (Wendy)

YA-HOO! We just returned from a week in Haines, Alaska. We picked blueberries with the determination of blueberry lovers who didn’t get to pick last year. Now we have 18 “blueberry pie equivalents” neatly stacked in the freezer. Also, sour cherries and pesto made from beach lovage. We have jars of dried mushrooms –cauliflower, chanterelles and boletes.

Ken usually catches enough pink salmon to fill a cooler. Last week a young brown bear with blond ears interfered. This bear swam out to the island where Ken was fishing, chewed on his box of lures, and then returned to shore and lay down at the place where he would walk back. Ken realized if he caught anything he couldn’t bring it home. Our friends made up for our shortage of pinks. They gave us sockeye salmon, halibut and crabs. We are lucky ducks.

The front page story in the Chilkat Valley News was about the outdoor ping pong table that our friend Eric built out of concrete. We helped rig up a canvas tarp over it – the tarp weighed about as much as the concrete table. We had a table tennis tournament while a winter wren chirped from the wood pile.

When we landed in Haines, curtains of rain glistened in front of the dark green forest. This has been the coldest summer there since 1974, with only 16 days reaching 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I put on all my long underwear. I thanked Malkolm for reminding me to bring rain pants. I got chilled, riding the ten miles out to our friends’ place outside town.

Cruise ship passengers also cycled in Haines that day. One guide led a bike tour along the Chilkoot River.”I apologized about the rain,” he said. “But they did not mind it at all. They were happy to experience rain. They were from southern California.”

All Media is Good Media (Malkolm)

“Admittedly, there are few would ever undertake a year-long journey in search of different species of mice.”

That was printed in the Yukon News, just after we arrived home in Whitehorse, Yukon. We were joined by friends and family for the final 70 mile ride back home, after we cycled over the White Pass from Skagway. Then we were greeted by a flurry of interviews. But that whacky statement in the Yukon News was not the first of its kind.

Supposedly any press attention, whether it is positive or negative, accurate or riddled with errors, helps your project. We’ve been blessed with plenty of media attention during our travels, but nearly every time there have been mistakes, such as:

A TV program from our home in Whitehorse superimposed a silent clip of us all chuckling, when our voices were discussing the decline of Spotted Owls.

A news station in Florida showed footage of a Turkey Vulture while I said, “There’s a Bald Eagle!”

A newspaper in Florida wrote that the big year world record holder traveled 100,000 miles, (he traveled 270,000 air miles) and mentioned that he raised 60,000 dollars (as far as I know he raised no money, though probably spent way more than that amount on travel expenses).

An article that was syndicated to big city papers throughout Texas diminished Ken’s 57 year old age to 16.

But not all articles about us are flawed. Jane Braxton Little, the author that wrote the Audubon Magazine article (March/April 2008) meticulously went over every quote with us, and Audubon’s fact checker made sure the article was completely accurate.

If you find any inconsistencies in this blog, shhhh!

Memory Lane Blues (Ken)

Yesterday we cycled north down Memory Lane. Memory Lane, aka Chuckanut Drive, just south of Bellingham, Washington. The Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Swainson’s Thrushes and Winter Wrens were singing, just like a year ago when we were heading south.

“Today I feel sad,” Wendy told us. “When we were here before we had a year of feedom before us, and now it’s almost over.”

Malkolm looked into his bowl of cereal, bananas and orange juice. We had forgotten to buy milk yesterday. “I don’t know if I can finish this,” he said, gazing into the brownish-orange glop in his bowl.

I didn’t ask him if he was missing the freedom of the road.

Later today we are boarding a ferry north to Skagway. We’ll taste freedom again for a couple of days when we ride over the White Pass back to Whitehorse. Then, I hope, we’ll start thinking of the next adventure.

CBC, Kiwis & a Coincidence (Wendy)

A security guard buzzed Malkolm and I through the bullet proof doors at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Vancouver building. He directed us down a long corridor to Studio 5. We passed a lot of other studios on the way, but what I noticed was the large room for storing bikes. At studio 5 we met Rick Cluff, who has a huge smiling face. He interviewed us for “Sounds Like Canada”. It airs right across the country.

Think globally, act locally. Neil and Hazel MacMillan are sheep ranchers near the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. Hazel volunteers in the annual kiwi census, sitting up at night and listening for the whistles of these rare birds. They wrote to our website. “We have fenced one area of native bush this year (from our stock getting in there ) and are about to do a second one where we often hear the kiwi” Habitat protection at home....Way to go, Neil and Hazel!

Flashback - We rode the Greyhound bus from Ft Stockton TX to El Paso. Lugging my bulky, heavy carry-on bags, I sqeeezed into the last empty seat, near the back of the bus. The bus was full of young families. A baby squawked. Beside me sat a friendly young man heading home from auto mechanic’s college. “Where is Albuquerque?” he asked. Anticipating the long ride to Vancouver, I had decided this was the right time to tackle my book club’s chosen book. I pulled out War and Peace. Pencil in hand I started to read, scribbling notes in margins and cross referencing names. The man behind me tapped my shoulder. “Want to see something funny?” he asked. He showed me his book: War and Peace. Two War and Peaces in one Greyhound bus. What are the chances of that?

Boring Blog (Makolm)

Its a cold and nippy 70 degrees here in Vancouver. Brrr! But its a nice change from 110 degree heat that we were slogging through a few weeks ago. I know that my blogs are getting repetitive so I promise that I will I never mention the"heat", "degrees" or "110"again!
In Vancouver we've seen things that we haven't seen in ages, a Yukon liscence plate and thousands of cyclists (are there that many cyclists in all of Texas?)
Then we'll take the ferry down the coast to Skagway, Alaska and cycle over the pass back home. Then we'll embark on the task of figuring out who gets the Bird Day Challenge prizes. That will be fun. Sorry about this boring blog.

You know it ain't easy . . . (Ken)

We thought that the challenging part of Bird Year was behind us. We’d survived January’s bitter cold and headwinds. We’d dodged drug-runners and illegal immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. We’d coped with the searing Texas heat. We should have known that we faced one more hurdle: getting home from Big Bend.

We didn’t have time to cycle since Malkolm has to be back for Grade 11 at the end of August. We knew that jetting north would be the least fossil-fuel-friendly. Eventually we decided to take a Greyhound bus to Albuquerque, a train to Vancouver and a ferry to Skagway, Alaska. Then we could ride 110 miles over the White Pass back home to Whitehorse.

We quickly learned that ground transportation isn’t as easy as it sounds. When we tried to switch busses in Fort Stockton, the driver calmly informed us that the bus was full. It didn’t seem to matter that we had reservations. In El Paso, our bikes and duffle bags were almost left behind. Today we learned that our train is 6 hours late. We don’t know what that means for our connections, and no one is answering the phone at Amtrak.

I wish we were still cycling.

Building Character (Wendy)

Big Bend National Park was every bit as hot as we were afraid it would be. Three good things about the heat: (1) We learned that we could survive in that harsh environment - it built our characters. (2) I never had to use a towel for the last 6 weeks of the trip. (3) Dousing yourself in cold water is fun.

We stayed one day longer than we had planned at Rio Grande Village, the hottest place. Beside the Rio Grande I felt like I was inside a salon hair dryer, set on “high”.

We ended Bird Year at Carolyn Ohl-Johnson’s oasis in the Christmas Mountains. The day after Bird Year ended, we rode into Alpine: 71 miles into a head wind and up 2000 feet. That built character too.

We have become strong riders, but not strong bike mechanics. Ken, Malkolm and I attempted to remove pedals, seat posts and handlebars that were firmly fused to our bikes after a year of hard use. After 2 hours of struggling we had removed 2 seat posts. Humbled, we carried our bikes around the house to where Carolyn’s husband, Hugh, was working in his shop. “Hand me that cheater”, he said. Within minutes, he had our bikes apart. Dismantling bikes is about as stressful as a moderate headwind.