One of my favorite rides that Cascade organizes, the RSVP (Ride from Seattle to Vancouver and Party) happened last weekend, and the smoke from the regional wildfires cleared out just enough to give a beautiful two days of riding, though it quickly came back with a vengeance over the weekend.
One of my favorite parts of the ride is crossing an international border on just your bike. While I’m sure European riders probably think it’s silly to get excited about this, it’s not particularly easy here in the US.
The US/Canada border ditch is srsbsns.
Interestingly, too, as much as a fuss as the US makes about borders, a lot of the Canadian border is pretty unremarkable. My favorite part of the ride is coming up to the border crossing, and taking a hard left along Boundary Road, which parallels its Canadian counterpart, “0 Ave” with only a small ditch in between, and the occasional small obelisk border marker.
One of the border markers, from the Canadian side.
For the RSVP, Cascade has done an interesting job of working with the US/CA authorities to bring bikes through the border from this side road into the Lynden crossing. This year, there was even a small side area set up with folding tents and four or five border agents to the side of the traffic lanes to take us cyclists through. I can’t speak to previous years, but in 2017 we simply walked our bikes through the two rightmost traffic lanes.
As a rider that typically rides solo, I can find pacelines a bit dull; but it’s certainly hard to turn down a free pull when the pace matches what I was doing anyway.
Full album of the ride on flickr here
[FAGP id=884]
