Despite all our bravado, Team Elephant can be decidedly woosey when it comes to weather. Although we don't let our schedule be dictated by weather, and we tend to get on and do what we had planned without regard to the weather, I am often guided by some advice my father gave me as a young man. One fractious night in the bar of a country pub, when I was about to slip off the bar stool at the invitation of a local, he put his hand on my arm and said: “Son, never rush into a beating.” Forty five years later it still seems like good advice.

It may seem surprising then that we loaded our gear out of a perfectly good hotel room in Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and stowed it on Elephant in the pouring rain  and let out across the island towards the east coast. In fairness, even the locals complained  that this was the heaviest rain they had seen in many years but whatever its rarity, it was  certainly rain of the very wet kind; the kind that made a mockery of thousands of dollars of  high-tech riding suits and left us soaked by the time we stopped for coffee half way across the island. We kept going for the remainder of the day mainly thanks to our new electrically  heated jacket liners and gloves. These at least kept our torsos warm while we ground out the  miles in soggy misery.

A week later and 800 km further north in Prince Rupert we watched with some dismay as the temperatures across Canada plummeted and it started to snow across large areas of the  country. We had ridden in the snow many times in Morocco and Europe and the cold didn't  usually bother us but Jo had picked up a chest infection after our Vancouver Island drenching  and a long day in the bitter cold didn't seem like a good idea. We rigged for wet and cold  running and made sure our electric nickers were plugged in and working then pushed on into the BC interior. It was freezing when we left and didn't climb much above zero all day but,  despite this, we were cosy enough wrapped up like the Michelin Man and plugged into the Elephant. We met other riders along the way who were suffering without good riding gear (it  doesn't look fashionable on a Harley don't you know) and felt with some satisfaction that our  hard won experience was paying off.

Jo's chest infection wasn't to be thrown off easily so we took the opportunity of the small city  of Prince George to rest up and give her time to recover. Jo kept indoors in comfortable hotel room with its own sauna (yes we did use it) while I scouted the town to do the hunting and  gathering to keep up the supply of food and (medicinal) wine. Prince George is the largest city  in northern BC and, like many north American towns, is very spread out. The shopping  centre was a five minute ride east but in Canada food shops don't sell alcohol. This must be  purchased from liquor stores which seemed to us to be placed to make it as inconvenient as  possible to access the demon drink. The nearest liquor store to our hotel was a solid seven  minute ride north. By the time I made additional stops for a replacement gas cylinder and  some parts for the bike and made a few navigational errors, a little shopping expedition  amounted to a 30 km ride.

Prince George was a solid, hard working sort of town populated by folk who wore sensible clothes and comfortable boots and who stopped us in the street to tell us how much trouble  they were having getting the bears out of the apple tree in their yard. By this time we had  concluded that the BC Canadians are the friendliest folk we have travelled among and that their connection to Australia at a personal level is far greater than we could have imagined.

We left Prince George with Jo's chest still troublesome and the snow still falling and rode towards Jasper and the long run down the mountains through Banff. These were a few long cold days but they were also spectacular days. The new snow was not enough to slow our  progress but it gave the land a glistening highlight and left us numbed by one stunning vista  after another. We ended our week on the high plains of south western Alberta and the photos of our ride down there tell enough of the story. As for the wisdom of our premature departure from Prince George, I can only fall back on the excuse that restlessness is in our nature and  we learned not to fight it too hard. A few years back the Horizons Unlimited organisation had a Tshirt with the logo: “If your mind wanders – ride after it.” Our minds tend to wander a lot these days.