By Kayla Hounsell
He chatted with aboriginals, met a 60-year-old hitchhiking from Toronto to Regina, watched mountain goats walk along the Trans-Canada Highway, and had a near encounter with a bear – or maybe a Sasquatch, he jokes.
And David Kedrosky saw it all in Canada, from a spectacular viewing point – his bicycle.
At 24, Kedrosky had just completed a degree in mathematics from Carleton University. He was “free,” he says, so he hopped on his bike and rode across the country.
“I’ve seen a lot of the world, and I’ve never seen Canada in its entirety,” says Kedrosky, sporting torn jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. “So I thought before I keep travelling and checking out other places I might as well get a grip on what Canada is about.”
The trip began in Ottawa on June 6. Kedrosky hopped on his bike – a shiny black road-touring bike now stored on a bench in a hallway in his Centretown apartment – and rode down to Halifax, N.S. He then jumped on a plane and flew to Vancouver, before biking home.
He set out to learn about Canada and what it means to be Canadian, but 83 days and 6,500 km later he realized it was really a journey of self-discovery, says Kedrosky.
“The way I saw it, if I can do this I can do anything, so I had to see if that was possible.”
He says it wasn’t until after his trip that the reality of what he had done began to set in.
“No one will ever know what it took for me to get across the country . . . I’m so proud of myself,” he says, his voice cracking slightly and his eyes glazing over. “It was one of those things that took so much planning, and then so much effort to do it.” .
Kedrosky says he started planning in December 2005. Initially, he was weight-training, swimming and keeping up his habits as an avid snowboarder. As a student at Carleton he would walk – or run – the 45 minutes to school every day.
By the end of March, when people were still skiing, he was out on his bike. He tried to cycle at least 400 km every week prior to his departure.
And besides preparing his body, he had to prepare things to bring with him. Kedrosky says he spent nearly $4,000 buying cooking and camping gear for the trip. His bike cost $2,000, plus he spent money on food and accommodation throughout the trip. He did have some financial support.
Avaya, the high tech company in Kanata for which Kedrosky works as a software developer, encouraged him and sponsored him, giving him clothing and a cell phone to use along the way.
The company also let him take off for three months and come back to his job, though Kedrosky says he would have gone anyway.
David Bingham, Kedrosky’s manager at the time, says it was within the company’s policies to allow a leave. Besides, he says, they knew they wanted to keep Kedrosky as a part of their team.
“A lot of us had all of a week off when we finished school. So we gave Dave the advice to take some time off,” he says, admitting he was a little jealous.
With everything settled at work, Kedrosky finally hit the road. He started out riding six hours per day, to warm up his muscles and get used to being on the bike. But by the end he was riding 10 to 12 hours a day.
Kedrosky says that after being on a bike alone for that long, he just had to talk to people.
And talking to people was a big part of what he did throughout the whole trip.
“Since I was by myself I was always in a position where if I wanted to talk, I had to go and meet people, step out of the comfort zone, and find out more about people. Which was great.”
He says people were very friendly and some even took him home. They fed him, and even let him sleep and do his laundry in their homes.
He says the best part was seeing new things every day. “In the end it was my definition of freedom. Whatever I wanted to do, wherever I wanted to go, it was all up to me. I could do it. There were no limiting factors.”
But, it wasn’t all fun and games.
Kedrosky realized he’d save money if he stayed in the woods, and not at campgrounds he, but that didn’t always work out.
In Mission, about 90 km outside of Vancouver, locals told him there was no danger of bear attacks in the area, so he set up his tent, taking extra care not to cook near the campsite, and put all the food in a tree 3 km away – just in case. And that was fortunate because that’s when he heard a Sasquatch-like thundering coming through the woods.
“So here’s me in the middle of nowhere, by myself, thinking, ‘Oh my God. I don’t want to die from getting attacked by a bear,” he says. “I just laid there, quiet with a six-inch knife in my hand hoping that nothing would happen.”
Nothing did, but those few minutes frightened by a bear didn’t compare to what he endured physically.
Kedrosky says the most difficult part of his trip was climbing through the dangerous Rockies. He cycled 1,000 km just to cross British Columbia.
Mentally, he says the most difficult part of the trip was cycling across the Prairies. He rode 150 to 175 km a day for five or six days to cross the Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, staring at the same thing for 10 to 12 hours a day. He couldn’t have done it without his iPod; Jack Johnson for when he needed to mellow out, and the first Offspring album for when he needed to be pumped up.
“The winds across the prairie are just insane. The hardest thing in bicycling is winds. It can rain, it can snow,” he says. “But when it’s windy, against you, you put so much effort in, and you don’t go anywhere. Physically, that sucks, but then mentally that really sucks,” he says.
But after coming this far he wasn’t about to give up. “There was no quitting ever in the trip, That’s not who I am. Especially if I had set out to do this to see if I could, by me quitting that already gives me an answer right there.”
His mother says she was amazed at how upbeat he was when he called her a couple of times a week. “He would tell me about what he saw, the wonderful people he met, it was so exciting to hear from him,” says Debra Kedrosky. “We felt like we were sharing his adventure.”
And Kedrosky wanted his parents to share in his adventure, but only from the outside. He says he didn’t bring anyone with him because this was a self mission.
It was an accomplishment, but the trip didn’t make him want to become a professional cyclist.
For Kedrosky, it wasn’t about the bike.
“The bicycle was just the tool to get across the country,” he says. “If mankind had built some other sort of transportation device of that sort, like maybe a pogo ball sort of thing, I would have pogo-balled across Canada.”
He says he won’t do it again. At least not in Canada.
Now, he wants to see Mexico and Central and South America. He says he’ll probably bicycle across it, or motorcycle, or hitchhike, but he won’t know until that day comes.
“I said he will grow mind, body and spirit and that’s exactly what he did. There’s a more gentle side to him. He’s just grown. You can’t say that he’s grown in one way or another. He’s just grown every way,” says his mother.
She also says he’ll probably be doing adventurous things his whole life.
Kedrosky says he’d also like to go to Africa one day. And this time, he might just let Mom come too.