Day 4 - Monday June 26th, 2006 - Leechtown to Victoria

I had a hard time sleeping and was up at about 6am. I found John crawling out of his tent and the two of us took off with our unloaded bikes to find an easier way back across the river. About 2km south of our campsite we found a much easier crossing that allowed us to roll our bikes right down to the river, unload them and carry them across, then roll them up the other side into the campground (near campsite 32 I think). By 8:30am we had packed up camp, loaded up the bikes, crossed the river, and were sitting at the campground where we had been only 22 hours earlier.

We enjoyed another relaxing breakfast at the campground and headed back down the Galloping Goose trail. You don't really realize it on the way up, but you are slowly climbing a small grade. This makes the way back out very fast and we quickly ended up back down by Sooke. We took a small detour to get a little food and check out bus schedules (to see if bussing back to Victoria made sense). I discovered that my rear wheel was out of true and stopped to fix it in the bus terminal.

The ride back into Victoria was very hot. We stopped for a well deserved ice cream break and used their large bathroom sink to wet down our jerseys and hair.

About 10km outside of Victoria (just after the worst road crossing on the Goose) the rails on John's saddle (a Brooks B17) broke. He had to ride the rest of the way into town where we stopped at the first open bike shop that we could find and bought him a saddle called ARS (quickly renamed to "arse").

Our plan was to ride up to the ferry terminal and go to Salt Spring Island, but while getting the ferry schedule at the info booth we decided to stay in town for a day or two. We got the last room at the hostel and had a nice night out on the town eating both dinner and supper and having a few drinks. During this time we decided that rather than continuing on that this would be the last night of our tour.