PRINCE GEORGE TO VANCOUVER: Where Adventurers Meet
Ben Folds recorded the tune, "There's Always Someone Cooler Than You," a few years ago. That I know that much about Folds' music catalog makes the song title self-evident. Driving that point home, our Suzuki Kizashi entourage met much cooler, more adventurous travelers today.
We -- the two Kizashis and the Equator, with V-Strom bike rider Jack Lewis somewhere up ahead -- pulled into a rest stop about five miles south of Quesnel, on Route 72, the route from Prince George to Vancouver, only to find the rest rooms out of order. After employing alternate means, we met Laura Beko and Erich Schafermeyer (pictured at left). They're on day 34 of an epic trek from Palmer, Alaska, to Ushuaia, the southernmost port in Argentina (check out more about their journey at: polarbearstopenguins.com).
And they're doing it -- some 16,000 miles -- on bicycles.
Erich says he worked at a bike shop for a while to be able to assemble their bikes when they arrived in Alaska (Erich and Laura are from the Portland/Klamath, Oregon, area). They started planning the trip a couple of years ago, although it came together much more recently. Laura expects their journey to take about 18 months, although that's just an estimate, and accounts for summer in the Southern Hemisphere. They can go two years, if necessary.
They'll camp along the way, though they're not adverse to offers of overnight stays where they can get a bed or sofa for the night, and maybe a hot shower, a meal and some beer.
Laura and Erich are far from the first people to make this journey, of course. So why do it? They say they just wanted to ride their bikes. I can understand that.
So we were feeling quite humbled, photographer Brian Vance, video producer Gordon Green, and I, when we bid the couple a good, safe trip, and got back into our Suzuki and drove out of the rest stop parking lot. Except ... what's all the writing about on that VW Microbus? And wait, it's not a Volkswagen. It's a Mercedes. It's not even quite that.
You'd think one such couple in a Canadian rest stop would be enough. But no, we had to knock on the sheetmetal door of Penny and Bill Howe, "The Ageing Overlanders" (ageingoverlanders.co.uk).
In 1986, Penny and Bill (pictured at left) had a bicycle journey like Laura and Erich's, except they rode east-west, not north-south. They logged 26,754 miles, not including transport over water, the mathematically encyclopedic Bill says. It took two years, seven months and five days. They suffered more than 300 tire punctures (word to Laura and Erich) and changed 26 tires while visiting, coincidentally, 26 countries.
"It changed our life," Bill says.
The worst country for punctures was Malaysia, Penny says, "where rubber comes from." Economic self-preservation, I suggest.
Some 11 years later, Penny and Bill bought the 1974 Mercedes-Benz 206D, a diesel-powered, right-hand-drive camper van with a four-speed manual gearbox and no power steering.
"You'd have to be man-and-a-half to drive it," Bill says. "Or stupid."
Which are you? I asked.
"That's for you to decide."
I did. He is most certainly not the latter.
The 206D was designed by the East German manufacturer Hanamag, which was about to go under when Daimler-Benz bought the company two years before the Howes' van was built. They added solar panels to the roof, of which Penny is very proud, and a Webasto diesel-powered heater, of which Bill is very proud. It's the warmest heater, ever, he says. My wife will want one.
It has a stove and a pantry and a loo. The Howes once owned a restaurant and love to cook. They can live in it simply, with just a couple of changes of clothes. The Mercedes/Hanamag has 235,041 miles on it - "miles, mind you, not kilometers," Bill says -- and carefully printed names of various places they've visited painted on the exterior sheetmetal, plus a light, subtle mural depicting one of their favorite cities, Figeac, France.
Bill painted the letters, one of his many talents. Penny is a quilter, and often contributes to quilting magazines. They've both helped fund their peripatetic ways by writing about their travels.
"We're from Robin Hood country," Bill replies, when asked. Nottinghamshire, England. Their family business builds homes there.
And in 2008, they set out to duplicate their '86 bike ride with the 206D. They traveled east from the United Kingdom, through Europe, then Russia, Mongolia, and into China. Except, they couldn't get into China. Its government pulled their visas at the last minute, Penny explains. Each traveler must be assigned a minder, and all the available minders were being used for the Summer '08 Olympics.
To add another crimp to their travels, the '08 financial crisis severely hurt the family business. The Howes drove through the Ukraine, Hungary, Austria, France, Germany and Spain, and then had the van shipped back to the U.K.
As the economy and the family business slowly began to recover, Bill says, the Howes set out in earnest to complete their trip. They shipped the Mercedes/Hanamag to Baltimore, Maryland in March, so Penny could begin by visiting a quilt shop in "nearby" Paducah, Kentucky. From there, they drove back east, to New York State, crossing the Peace Bridge into Canada. They drove west, to Dawson Creek, British Columbia, then all 1,532 miles of the Al-Can highway. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who built that road in 1942, are the real adventurers, Bill says.
The couple will press on to the Grand Canyon, Mexico and South America, then will ship their van to either New Zealand or Australia, and to Southeast Asia. They'll try China again. If they're rebuffed once more, the Howes will divert to India, Iran and Pakistan.
After I finally drove the Kizashi out of the rest stop parking lot, humbled but encouraged, I realized that Penny and Bill never met Laura and Erich. The two young bicyclists were back on the road by the time I finished my conversation with the Howes.
I thought about how I wouldn't have met either couple if I had stopped at a gas station some five miles earlier, in Quesnel. And I decided that British Columbia possesses an intangible, unique quality as a place where adventurers, and people who like travel for the trip more than the destination meet each other in apparently random ways.
It felt like that in the Fall of 1991, when I took my 5,700-mile vacation up the California, Oregon and Washington coasts into B.C. and Alberta. I met several Americans and Europeans taking epic trips through those provinces, and like Laura and Erich and Penny and Bill, they were all happy to share their stories and learn mine, though only when approached. Perhaps it's because B.C. and Alberta are nested between California, the land of the last-chance dream, and Alaska, the land of the unknown frontier, where men and women who already have lost their last chances go to find one more. You have to go through here to get from one U.S. state to the other.
And so, that's where we are. We've started our leg of the Tokyo to L.A. journey in the States, only to return to the States.
We had lots of fun today, and that's even aside from my most memorable rest stop, ever. We began with what Tom Robbins would call Another Roadside Attraction, a flywheel, 16 feet in diameter, used from 1928 to '64 to power the Eagle Lake sawmill in Prince George. We found a rally stage-quality dirt road (pictured at top) as part of an alternative route to the magnificent ski resort of Whistler, then slalomed tasty, twisty and wet mountain roads to Whistler only to get there too late to see it in daylight (I've been there before, but Brian Vance really, really wanted to see it).
Tomorrow we leave Vancouver and the province where so many hard-core travelers and adventurers meet, and cross south into Washington.
-Photos by Brian Vance
