It is 11:00 pm on Thursday evening, and we fly out of Vancouver in exactly 12 hours. Everything is packed and ready to go, including the bike. The above photograph illustrates my custom packing method for bicycles about to travel by air: pedals removed, handlebars removed and fastened securely to the top bar. Essential bits are padded with a combination of cardboard, bubblewrap, and copious quantities of duct tape. Both tires (and the cranks) have been tied to the frame using lengths of old inner tube to immobilize them. The theory being: if wheels won’t roll, then the gears won’t get jammed up, and the ground crew will need to carry the bicycle (carefully, I hope) by hand or on a cart. My fingers are crossed that both bikes arrive intact in Paris…

This will probably be the last entry here for a while. As I said at the opening: I’m not expecting to make frequent visits to Internet cafés while on vacation. This is meant to be a holiday away from computers, after all! Out in the fresh air, on an open road…

If you’d like to write though, I’d love to find an Email message or two awaiting when I check my mail. For this trip, I’ve temporarily abandoned my SFU email address: too much Spam; too many reminders of things I’d rather not be thinking about.

So my email address for these next three months will be mhhayward at yahoo.ca (replace the ” at ” with an “@” sign, of course: this is my probably-vain attempt to get around Spam email-address-harvesters).

I’ll also be (foolishly! optimistically!) checking for real mail at some of the Poste Restante stops along the Camino. So if anyone reading this still knows how to put pen to paper: please write! Here’s a rough guide to the places that I intend to check for snail mail, and a (very rough) estimate of the expected schedule. If my estimates are out by a lot, or if my plans change, I’ll try to come back to this entry and edit the necessary details. Any Poste Restante mail that is unclaimed after 30 days is returned to the sender, so be sure to include a return address (and save it for me when I get back to Vancouver!)

Up to Sept 7: Poste Restante, Arles, France
Up to Sept 5: Poste Restante, Toulouse, France
Up to Sept 15: Lista Correos, Plaza San Augustin 1, 26080 Logroño, Spain
Up to Sept 17: Lista Correos, Plaza Conde de Castro 1, 090080 Burgos, Spain
Up to Sept 20: Lista Correos, Jardines de San Francisco s/n , 24080 Leon, Spain
Up to Sept 25: Lista Correos, Calle General Vives 1, 24400 Ponferrada, Spain
Up to Sept 30: Lista Correos, Calle Calvo Sotelo 183, 27600 Sarria, Spain
Up to Oct 1: Lista Correos, Travesia Fonseca s/n, 15780 Santiago de Compostella, Spain
Up to Oct 12: c/o Lori Thicke, 104 Rue de la Roquette, 75011 Paris, France

Note: estimated Poste Restante schedule revised September 6, Toulouse…