"some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible..."
- Doug Larson
This is the story of two young Canadians who set out to become The World's First Canadian Couple Under 30 to Cycle Around Australia on a Unsupported Tandem Recumbent Tricycle in Under Fifteen Months.
Unexperienced, unfit, and against all odds, we did exactly that.
It's always been our goal to challenge ourselves and prove to others that you can do anything you set your mind to. The best way to experience life is to bite off a bit more than you can chew and let yourself rise to the challenge. In other words, No Excuses! Give it a try! Stop thinking up reasons for why you can't, and just do it! Boy, do we sound like a couple of motivational speakers! Hot diggity!
Join the Start of the Adventure at the Big Pineapple!
Where is all began one sunny day in September...
our route into the unknown...
Starting point: The Big Pineapple 2002
Ending point: The Big Pineapple 2003 (Eep!)
Distance: 16,342 kilometers (Double Eep!)
Timeframe: 15 months
Our basic cycle route followed Australia's Highway One (except for between Townsville and Katherine, where Highway One is still but a twinkle in the eye of the Australian Road Commissioner). We also went down to Tasmania and did a loop route down to Hobart and back.
the daily grind...
Facing daily temperatures of forty degrees made us change our schedule so that we did the majority of our Outback cycling in the evening. This meant that we stayed in our solar-protected tent (eating, reading, writing) until around 3pm when we'd pack up camp and begin riding. We usually rode until midnight or 1am at which point we'd be about ready to collapse and quickly find a bush camp to settle into for the night.
cycling the hot in the hot and the cold in the cold...
Most cyclists do this expedition so that they're cycling the northern end of Australia in the cooler winter months and the south end in the summer. Due to circumstances beyond our control we were forced to begin at the beginning of summer. Why didn't we just go clockwise in that case? The prevailing winds of this huge continent go counterclockwise. So they say. Dumb idea.
the trike that got us through it all...
Penninger Recumbents generously provided us with a couple of recumbent tricyles. Imagine one of those really funky three-wheel baby strollers with the offroad wheels, then triple the scale and add a gear shift. Now imagine two of those, one red, one yellow. Lastly, imagine taking the front wheel off one and snapping it onto the back of the other. By the end, you've got a comfortable, lightweight, five-wheeled, tandem juggernaut sure to turn the heads of Australian sheep.
as one adventure ends, another begins...
Well, kind of. We were very tired when
we arrived in New Zealand, and quite honestly, couldn't be arsed to write about my adventures working as a webmaster at the NZ Department of Labour (yes, it is as exciting as it sounds).
However, if you're joining beimers.com for the first time after doing a Google search of a series of seemingly unrelated words and stumbling across our site, it will seem to you as though no time has passed at all, and you can just pick right up with our most challenging undertaking yet... baby.beimers.com!
Hope you enjoyed the bike trip as much as we didn't!
Let's hope the dingos don't steal our baby!
(Fat chance since we live in the UK now)
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