Meet the Cast and Crew

Hi, It's Friday August 27th and I'm in Vancouver, BC.
Welcome to my new bicycling adventure.

We all arrived in Canada over the past few days and have spent our time gathering the last bits of gear (like a radio... did you know that Best Buy and Circuit City in the US do not carry hand held portable radios anymore? I tried telling the guys that I needed something without headphones, but all they carried were disc-men and mp3 players. Luckily I found the perfect radio yesterday at a nice drug store up here - whew, dodged a bullet there.) It was love at first sight as I walked out of the hostel in Vancouver. To me this city is close to paradise, for you see as I looked up the street there were restaurants featuring mid-eastern, Japanese, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Korean, Singaporean (SINGAPOREAN!) food... all in one block. This eclectic epicurean pattern is repeated throughout the city - the diversity of cuisines is unlike I've ever seen before. Besides the food, the city seems to be really lively and healthy, throw in a little duck pin bowling and you have a rollicking good three days.

On to the bike trip. Let me introduce who is here with me...

First we have Alex Macdonald. Some of you might remember Alex from such adventures as "Leigh bikes cross country" or "Leigh decides to go to the Dominican Republic and two days later she's there." Alex lives in Chicago and is a technical writer which sounds like the coolest job ever because he is able to take off for long stretches of time and then always return and get a job. During one of his hiatuses (he had just finished doing a stint as a ski bum in Montana) my cousin forwarded my bike trip emails to my aunt who forwarded them to Alex's mom who forwarded them to Alex. He promptly emailed me, introduced himself and asked to join up with us on the bike trip. He met us in Fargo and biked the last month with me. Key to Alex's success as a biking partner are: his extremely laid back style, good sense of humor and the strange ability to always be able to go on any adventure at any time. He just got back from a 2 week surf camp in Costa Rica, and has committed that he will start in Vancouver with us and possibly bike all the way to Nicaragua.

Next, we have Nina Krieger. Part NYC east village raised, urban slang talking, Knicks loving, city chick...part Jersey suburbs super athlete...part off the grid traveling, dred locked California girl. I met Nina when she was an 18 year old freshman, recruited to play basketball at Penn, but somehow ended up on the rugby team. Nina and I became friends because she would always be up to playing squash, basketball, flag football, lacrosse...with me the slacker senior. I love Nina because she can get so pumped and animated about a topic that it just pulls you in and because she has the courage to travel by herself all over Asia and Eastern Europe. She will be starting in Vancouver and hopefully be going all the way to Tijuana. Nina is also writing about this crazy journey we've got going on - you can read her thoughts at www.iamawinner.net. I must warn you that she is a much better writer than I am, so please don't compare our writing styles.

Lastly, we have Katie Wharton. Katie kicks ass because she has been a consultant at Deloitte, a forest fire fighter in California, worked on movie sets in LA, and now works in corporate communications in NYC..all by the tender age of 26. I met Katie at a summer rugby tournament where she totally endeared my entire team to her in less than 24 hours. Katie will be joining us for the Vancouver to Seattle leg of the trip and then she must return to new york and her job.

We leave tomorrow morning with the goal of getting to Seattle by labor day. Yeah, if you look it up on mapquest and do a little math you'll realize that we scheduled A LOT of padding in there.

I hope everyone is doing well.
Cheers,
Leigh