Like hoboes on two wheels we lay our heads where we can

My day usually begins at 5:30. I’m slow in decamping. I struggle to get into my bike kit and struggle even more to unrig the tent.  We’ve had a lot of rain so it’s often been a soggy job. Even when we’ve had glorious sun and temperate nights, the temperature drops so that dew and condensation eagerly collects on the fly vying with the rain for which can create the greatest volume of moisture.

How the day goes depends a lot on how the night went. We are camping except on rest days.  For some of the riders, it seems to be the most accomplished ones, the challenge of the trip has been camping. John, from England, is a formidable cyclist. He wonders why he’s not doing his usual cycling in Portugal or France with fine little cafés and patisseries and lovely chateaus in which to spend the night. “Camping is not my favourite thing,” he says with a touch more emphasis than one expects from the proverbial British habit of understatement.

We began camping in Tuktoyaktuk on the shores of the Arctic. We reached the northern point of the continent and were very excited at the prospect of a wide open space by the ocean, a view to die for and a breeze to blow away the super nova clouds of mosquitoes. As Robert Burns put it “the plans of mice and men gang agley.”  For mysterious reasons the local authorities told us we had to move away from the spectacular peninsular point to a piece of waste ground several hundred metres awy. The site turned out to be next to kennel suburbia with about twenty hounds happily baying through the night. Of course, there wasn’t any night as such. Twenty-four hour sun blazed through our thin tent walls. As we were clearing space for our tents a fork lift came trundling by with two port-a-loos for our use.  We had less of a breeze, more of the mosquitoes but, at least a view of the Arctic Ocean.

A couple of days later we were overnighting in Tsiigehtchic, a village of about 190 inhabitants with a broad stretch of tall grass sweeping up to a modern gymnasium cum rec hall. The village had mowed the grass making for a comfortable set-up. The great delight was being allowed to use the indoor toilets and showers of the gymnasium. A young girl of about eight or nine biked around while her brother and a friend  clambered onto the roof of a nearby building to get a bird’s eye view of the strange proceedings unfolding beneath them.

The next day we ferry across the river and ride to a park the other…