Student takes the long way home from London to Saskatoon.
When asked what he did this summer, Jody Bailey has a great story to tell – he biked nearly 3,000 kilometres on a single-speed, fixed gear bicycle.
Bailey, a third-year Media, Information and Technoculture student, is not one to back down from a challenge. When friends asked the everyday cyclist if he was going to ride his bicycle home to Saskatoon, Sask., for the summer, he thought, “Why not?”
He never tried long-distance riding before, but “I was sort-of training for this for the last 10 to 12 years,” he says.
“My bike has been my car. It’s what I ride every day.”
Those who know Bailey were supportive of the idea. But like any mother, Bailey’s mom was concerned her son was just trying to save money on a plane ticket and offered to fly him home so he didn’t have the hit the road. He assured her and others the decision was not about money, it was something he had to do.
On June 9, he set out from London heading for Saskatoon with only the bare essentials strapped to his bike. “Every extra gram, every ounce means more work,” he says.
His goal was to pedal 150 km a day (about nine to 14 hours daily), stopping only for meals, bike maintenance and to set up camp for the night. It may sound like a lonely ride – just a man, his bike and the white line on the road – but it proved to be a journey in social psychology.
“Everywhere you stopped or pulled over on the side of the road, people would honk and wave or people would want to communicate with you on some level. Being a motorist, that doesn’t happen; you don’t talk to other motorists. For me, it was a people trip.”
The first night he arrived in Kincardine and dropped by the local tattoo shop – what he refers to as the barbershop of today – to get advice from the locals. He ended up getting a place to sleep, a hot meal and a new friend in one of the tattoo artists.
“People opened their doors to you,” he says, noting he met several others like the tattoo artist during his days on the road.
Although he expected to share the road with passenger vehicles and transport trucks, Bailey was surprised at the number of other travellers on two wheels – many were covering more distance than him.
One day, he met up with a mother-daughter team as well as another biker, all travelling in the same direction. The group decided to get a campsite together at a nearby provincial park for the night. “I thought it was going to be a solo trip,” he says, “but I wasn’t alone.”
Anyone who has made the east-west or west-east trip through Canada is aware of the sometimes rough and hilly terrain staring down the front of a vehicle. The fact Bailey tackled this challenge without any gears to shift up or down and instead relied on the strength of his legs, makes his journey even more remarkable.
Although he packed spare tire tubes, an extra tire and tools, he wasn’t prepared for some of the challenges of the gruelling highway. In one day, he blew out three tire tubes because of the road conditions. Unlike gas stations, bicycle shops cannot be found as frequently along the highway.
No matter what situation he found himself in or how mentally draining the ride would be, Bailey was reminded of advice from a friend: “Don’t make bad luck worse or compound bad luck with bad decisions. You are not allowed to lose control because there isn’t enough time to react,” he says.
In total, he was on the road for 18 days, including two days he rested in Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay. He arrived at his home in Saskatoon on June 26.
Although he thought about making the return trip to Western on his trusty bike, he decided against it because of time constraints. “Surprisingly, it went smoother than I thought,” he says of his trek west. “What this has done is open doors. I can bike anywhere now.
“I’m already planning for next summer.”