Fieldnotes

Kettle Valley Railway on Two Wheels – video

Kettle Valley Railway on Two Wheels from Maggie Woo on Vimeo.

Liked the video? Read more:

KVR Part 1 from Midway to Penticton

KVR Part 2 from Penticton to Princeton

KVR Part 3 from Princeton to Hope

Kettle Valley Railway Trail Blog and Riding Guide – Part 3 from Princeton to Hope

Day 9 – Princeton to White Sands Coalmont – 15.61km ridden (365.75km overall)

Our last easy day turned out to be a bit of a slog riding into Princeton so we decided on a half rest day riding out. We intended to ride only about 18km to Coalmont where we would relax the rest of the day. We had a…

Kettle Valley Railway Trail Blog and Riding Guide – Part 2 from Penticton to Princeton

  Day 6 – Penticton to Crump Siding Rec Site – 40.63 km ridden (267.64 km overall)

From Penticton, the first stretch to the Trout Creek Trestle in Summerland is in the process of being returned to the Penticton Indian Band. The trail is open but not maintained. It is a little tricky to get onto the…

Kettle Valley Railway Trail Blog and Riding Guide – Part 1 from Midway to Penticton

“What did I get myself into?!” was one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind as we began our epic off-roading journey on the Kettle Valley Railway Trail that spanned basically halfway across our home province of British Columbia in Canada. Our neatly packaged bikes in cardboard bike boxes, bundles of panniers strapped together and ourselves were unceremoniously dropped off by the Greyhound…

A little Chichewa 101

Chichewa is a Bantu language and the main language in southern and central Malawi and some surrounding regions as well. As with other Bantu languages, the Chichewa language features noun classes that classify different nouns with groups. Consequently, if you look at the word Chichewa, ‘chewa’ is the noun and ‘chi’ is the prefix of the noun group. This is important because where in English, to…

Jet let life and settling in

  When I arrived at the airport in Blantyre, my bag unfortunately did not arrive with me. This became a bit of a theme for me over the next few days as I was settling in. I am familiar with the idea of jet lag, where the body’s internal clock is catching up to the new time zone. However, I had a bit of jet lag life where I always seemed to be just a little bit behind. I arrived in Blantyre, my…

Sunrise over the wingA single bead of sweat rolled down my forehead, following my hairline across my temple and down towards my left ear. In the heat of a warm Malawian afternoon, I finally stood at the front of the line before of a wooden booth with two immigration officers at the side of the one room arrivals terminal at the airport in Blantyre, Malawi. This large rectangular room of…

Why Camino? This was a question that I often asked myself as I wandered through the dark Spanish forests and country roads with a backpack strapped to my back. Here are a few reasons to do the Camino de Santiago….and a few reasons not to:

Don’t do it for the scenery.

Speaking just on the last 120km from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela, about a third is on a gravel path beside a highway. Another…

Day 6 – O Pedrouzo to Santiago de Compostela – 20.1km

I woke up and got on the road shortly after 5:30am. With sunrise around 9am, over half of my walk today was in the darkness or the soft predawn glow. I wanted to make it to noon Pilgrim’s Mass at the Cathedral since my time was limited with my flight leaving the next morning.

I walked up the hill of O Pedrouzo to join the eucalyptus forest…

Day 5 –  Boente to O Pedrouzo – 28.3km

I took a bit of a shorter day yesterday, walking about 16 km instead of the 24km I had planned. Well, it just meant that I had to make up the 8km today. It was probably for the best because there were a few steep hills between Boente and Arzua, starting with a steep decline out of Boente.

Starting in the early morning

The hills are never actually too bad,…

Day 4 – Ponte Campaña to Boente – 17.7 km

The collective 12 of us in the 18-bed hostel decided to sleep in until almost 8am this morning. We were in the quiet backwater of Ponte Campana where an epic battle was once fought in the 14th century and today cows graze in the lush green grass, demonstrating that time in fact does heal all things. By the time we got up, one of the other pilgrims said…

Day 3 – Gonzar to Ponte Campaña – 21.7km

The next morning, I woke up again to the bustling muted activity in the dorm of people trying to be quiet as they packed up but finding it rather impossible to be. Casa Garcia, where I was staying in Gonzar, is a family run place and didn’t start serving breakfast until around 8 or 9am. I strapped on my headlamp and ventured out into yet another dark,…

Day 2 – Barbadelo to Gonzar – 27.5km

“You get up too fast,” said a woman who had walked from France, “I wish I could trade you feet.” In the early morning darkness of the next day, I was eating breakfast at the albergue café, which was a surprisingly large slice of potato omelet and a café con leche, an espresso coffee topped with steamed milk. The café con leche was perfect on the dark, misty…

Camino de Santiago – Day 1!

A series on a week on the Camino de Santiago as I walked about 20-30 km a day from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain. If you’re curious and haven’t read it yet, click here for a previous post for an intro and a brief history of the Camino.

Arriving at the train station in Sarria

Day 1 – Sarria to Barbadelo – 3.6km

I had just arrived in the train station in Sarria shortly after…

Two weeks until the Camino de Santiago!

What is the Camino de Santiago?

Camino de Santiago translates to “The Way of St James”. Tradition has it that the remains of St James, the patron saint of Spain, is buried in a shrine at the Cathedral de Santiago de Compostela in the city of the same name in the province of Galicia in northwestern Spain. It was one of the most important pilgrimage routes in the Middle Ages, which followed an…