Over the past year, I’ve been riding routes in Surrey, Delta, Richmond, New West, Burnaby, and Vancouver. This spring, I’ve decided to connect some of these routes together into longer rides.

It takes a long time to drive from South Surrey to Vancouver (or vice versa), so making that trek by bike has felt daunting. However, it’s only a 50-60 km ride, so I decided to try it.

I brought my bike along on a recent shopping trip in East Van and planned to ride from there to a bike shop in Vancouver, then ride home.

The adventure started with brunch at Mah Milk Bar (two blocks east of Commercial Drive). Once I finished their amazing sandwich and coffee, I made a quick stop at Bici (excellent store for adventure riders), headed west to pick up my bike parts at JV Bikes on Expo Blvd, then rode home on the Central Valley Greenway, the BC Parkway, over the Queensborough Bridge and Alex Fraser Bridge, then along the Delta Greenway before getting on the Elgin Heritage Park Trail along the Nicomekl River. My route took me through Van, Burnaby, New West, Delta, and Surrey. A great urban/rural ride on pavement and gravel.

See below for more field notes from the ride.

You can view my ride on Strava.

More field notes.

I rode my Brodie RoMax Steel. I bought the frame and fork set at BikeBike in Calgary in 2020 and it wound up being a pandemic project. The current 1.95” Gravel Kings (650b) are great on the chunky gravel sections of the Delta Greenway, and also roll well on the pavement (and potholes). The Dura-Ace road crankset combined with a mountain-bike cassette is a perfect setup for high-gear ripping on the flat roads and low-gear spinning up the hills and bridges.