Day 16: Abbotsford – Vancouver
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Total Distance Travelled: 55KM
Total Distance Travelled Entire Trip: 818KM
Total Time: 4:48
Moving Time: 2:58
Today is the last day on the road, and I have a bit of a tight schedule. My train back home leaves at 8:30PM, and I’m meeting a friend for dinner at 6:30PM. Before dinner I need to box my bike so it can be transported on the train. Given the tight timeline, I’ve set my destination as the King George Skytrain station in Surrey – close enough to say I biked to Vancouver. I had considered using the Trans-Canada trail route into Vancouver, but it’s over a 100KM from my B&B in Abbotsford. There are some urban cycle paths I could of taken for the last 25KM from King George to Pacific Central station, but at the end of the day after biking through the wilderness for a couple weeks I’m fine with skipping the last 25KM of urban cycling – especially since it goes through Vancouver’s east side.
The breakfasts at the B&B’s along the way have all been great, today it was crepes with nutella and an omelette. The B&B gave a checklist and you could pick out exactly what you wanted for breakfast, with choices of cereal, toast, french toast etc. When I’ve asked the B&B owners what it’s like to run a B&B, they’ve all said it’s a full time job, and I can believe it given they are the cooks, cleaners, concierge for the area etc.
You would thin the Fraser valley would be fairly flat, but it’s not by any stretch. The first thing I had to do coming out of Abbotsford is get over a range of mountains. The railways were smart and took the water level route south of the Fraser to bypass the mountains, but there was no room to squeeze a road in as well. I had a climb from Abbotsford which is at around 14M up to around 150M at the peak to get over the mountains, after that things were relatively flat into Vancouver. One interesting thing I didn’t realize is they grow wine in the Vancouver area:
Wine in Vancouver!
The scenery was a nice mix of rural farmland and mountains:
Mountains and farmland
For the most part the Trans-Canada trail followed seldom used rural roads, I encountered virtually no traffic on them on a Friday morning.
The trail
The climbs weren’t bad, and I finally got to the last piece of the trail coming out of the mountains into the Fraser valley and there was a warning sign for a 15% downgrade, in a minute I lost all the elevation I spent 30-40 minutes gaining. Looking back, these are what the mountains looked like – they don’t look like much but they were high enough for me:
mountains
From there the Trans-Canada trail follows a dike trail to near the Fraser river:
TC Trail
From near the Fraser, the Trans-Canada trail ran right next to the CN railline I would be coming back on this evening:
rail line
It didn’t take too long to arrive in Fort Langley, a small town with a historic Hudson’s Bay trading post and a heritage railway station.
CN station
the station
I grabbed some lunch at some of the shops in town, and I headed off to the old fort:
inside the fort
There wasn’t tons at the fort from what I could tell, many of the buildings were mostly empty. They had a few York boats on display and some period items. The staff were mostly focused on a school group going through.
The fort wall
You don’t have to get too far west of Fort Langley to hit the furthest reaches of the urban sprawl of Vancouver. Luckily the streets had good bicycling infrastructure (bike lane or dedicated bike path), so the last stretch into Vancouver was fine and only had a small hill. I reached my final destination of King George station:
King George Station
The station was well equipped with elevators, and the train wasn’t too crowded since I was heading in the opposite direction of rush hour traffic. A short while later I was in downtown Vancouver near the train station:
Vancouver
It wasn’t too difficult to package my bike into the Via Rail box, and I got changed and went for a well earned coffee before dinner. While walking near Canada place I observed a cruise ship departing:
Canada Place
Mission accomplished, 16 days and 818KM later I was in Vancouver.