Today is finally the day! I’m setting off from San Francisco and heading to Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada for my next bike trip.
For those not in the know, PEI is the smallest province of Canada and is part of the Canadian Maritimes on the Atlantic coast in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
My brother, Chris and I started planning for this trip back in February. I asked him if he was interested in going for another bicycle tour this summer. He mentioned wanting to travel outside of Ontario to see more varied scenery and escape the summertime heat and humidity.
We debated a couple of ideas, but after looking into the PEI tourism brochures with awesome, almost Adventure Cycling Association levels of details for bicycle tourists along with the gentle, rolling landscape PEI is known for, we were sold on going to PEI.
Our game plan for the trip is to travel to all four corners of the island over two weeks, while camping at PEI’s many provincial parks and PEI National Park along the way. I charted routes for the journey using the Komoot adventure mapping site. Have a look at the legs on my profile over at Komoot. The whole trip comes out to just a bit over 750km (470mi).
This trip will be the first time I’ve flown to a location where I have no base to store luggage or gear during the trip, so it will be a good test of what a trip to a completely new location would be like. The main change in preparations has been to pack all my gear in a cardboard box, so we should be able to assemble our bikes and roll away from the Charlottetown airport without leaving anything behind from traveling.
One last thing I was really happy to discover getting ready for the trip was that Air Canada has kept its bike luggage fees down to the base baggage fee ($30CAD/USD) plus $50CAD/USD, despite other North American airlines have gone to oversize baggage handling fees for bicycles, so that bringing a bike along on United would run over $300USD each way!
Time to go get the last of my stuff packed up and get ready to head to PEI! I’m looking forward to some local brews and fresh Atlantic lobster. Here we go!