HRM Bike Week 2011, Part 1: Take A Seat

From May 27, to June 5, the best event of the year will be taking place at various locations around the city. HRM Bike week was developed to celebrate cycling and encourage and nurture a cycling friendly environment in the Halifax area, as well as to encourage new riders to give it a try and riders who haven't tried it in a while to dust off their old two wheelers and experience the joy of peddling once again.

I specifically remember seeing advertisements for this ten day event in the Farmers' Market on my first day out exploring when I arrived here last May. However, I was disappointed to see that the week in question would be the week I would be on my train journey to Vancouver. Consequently, I've been waiting with anticipation for this year's event for a full 12 months, and I don't plan to miss any more of it than I have to.

The first event I attended took place on Monday, May 30, on the Dalhousie University campus. The Halifax Cycling Coalition organized a showing of a film entitled Take A Seat, and for $8 I received admission, free cake, free popcorn, free apple juice (or Daveoline, as it's been called in the past), and a 3 year membership to the Halifax Cycling Coalition.

Take A Seat is the story of an amazing young man from England, Dominic Gill, who rode a tandem bicycle from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, 29 519 km down the western coast of the Americas until he reached the most southerly city in South America, Ushuaia. The bicycle weighed far too much for him to peddle the whole journey on his own, and so along the way he met, and was able to convince over 270 people to jump on the back of his bicycle and travel anywhere from a few minutes, to a few days with him to help him out. The whole journey took him over two years.

To get an idea of how long this is, find Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on Google Maps. Zoom in until the scale reading reads about 10km (bottom left corner of the map), and then commence clicking and dragging the screen all the way down to Ushuaia, Chile. The whole operation took me about eight minutes of constant dragging. I got lost a couple of times around Mexico, and ended up in the Pacific Ocean before I widened the image to see where I was.

How long did it take you? How many times did you get lost? How many clicks did it take? Now, imagine each one of those drags being about 2-5 days worth of peddling on a 100 kg bicycle.

Watching the film I remember strongly the sense of isolation he related feeling as he spent a lot of the journey by himself. To Dominic, being alone was the hardest part. Additionally, I was struck by his determination to push through, even after suffering hundreds of tube punctures, and breaking his bicycle numerous times in different places, not to mention having intense diarrhoea at one point.

Mostly though, I smiled at the people he met along the journey who recognized someone doing something special, and who wanted to be involved in it themselves. Watching Take A Seat has renewed my love of cycling, my love of people, and my love for the sense of adventure that prompted me to embark on this grand mission of living in every province, and visiting every National Historic Site of Canada.

Life Of An Ea-Pea, Episode 6: Apartment Gardening

Some time ago I wrote a Life of an Ea-Pea post on attempting to eat locally. I'm pleased to announce that I still attempt to buy only "locally" produced foods whenever possible, even if I haven't yet started on my Farmers' Market diet plan yet. Knowing though, when I wrote the post, that it would take me a while before I could graduate to that point I decided to do the next best thing: grow my own tomatoes... inside my basement apartment.

Meet EP Tom (short for Tomat - it's a European name), my first ever tomato plant. In this picture, he's a little green, but that's because this picture was taken back in the beginning of summer, shortly after I bought him.

(This was a momentous occasion, as it was EP Tom's first ever ripened tomato. And yes, it was the most delicious tomato I've ever tasted. You can also see my EP research books I borrowed from the public library in the background.)

Since the above picture was taken, EP Tom has produced a remarkable 15 tomatoes, without ever setting leaf outside of my apartment. I keep him growing with plenty of water, crushed up egg shells, and some tomato food pellets (and love). At the time of writing this, he still has some green tomatoes on the vine, which I hope will ripen up before he withers up/hibernates/dies, or whatever it is that tomato plants do in the winter. Next summer I will look to double my operation.

HRM Point of Interest #14: Halifax Farmers' Market (260th Birthday)

Founded in 1750, the Halifax Farmers' Market is the oldest continually operating Farmers' Market in North America. Located inside the Alexander Keith's Brewery, the "Old" Halifax Farmers' Market (a new one opened just last month on the Waterfront) celebrated its 260th birthday on October 2, 2010.

In honour of this momentous occasion, many of the vendors donned "period costumes". In the picture above a vendor sells some of her home-made fudge to an eager customer. Incidentally, the chocolate covered peanut butter balls in the front left corner were amazing, as was her vanilla fudge. Furthermore, this vendor also sold me the best tasting Jona Gold apple I have ever tasted, way back in May, just before I headed to Vancouver on the train.

Fall is upon us, and with thanksgiving and Halloween coming soon, the pumpkins were out in full force. After I work through my backlog of potatoes, beets, and turnips I plan to buy a large one of these and live off of cooked pumpkin for a month. On this day though I appeased my hungry stomach by eating delicious samosa from a Greek vendor, triangle kimbab from a Korean vendor, and some sort of soft round moist bread-like patties from a South American (possibly? I'm not sure exactly where she was from actually) woman.

Life Of An Ea-Pea, Episode 1: The 1000 Mile Diet

When I first arrived back in Halifax on June 4, after the conclusion of my cross-Canada travels, I told myself that I would try to buy all of my groceries only from one of the various farmers' markets around the region. In fact for my first three days back, when I was living at a hostel, I ate nothing but beets, beet greens, carrots, carrot greens, and rye bread that I had found at the nearby Halifax Farmers' Market.

I had been inspired by the dedication of authors like Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon who wrote the 100 Mile Diet, about only eating food that had been grown within 100 miles of their home, and numerous other "locavores". I was convinced that eating locally was not only healthier for the environment (think about the damage done by shipping those apples in from South America or cantaloupes from Costa Rica, etc., when they might even be grown in your own province). A problem with my plan arose when I moved further away from the Famers' Market, and realized I did not have the carrying capacity to cycle my groceries back home (or failed to come up with a way to do it). Additionally, the Farmers' Market is only open on Saturdays from 9 AM until Noon, and even though I may be an ea-pea, I just wasn't ready to give up my Saturday mornings when there are four supermarkets within walking range of my current house. (Note: I recently discovered a Thursday afternoon farmers' market even closer to my home than the closest supermarket.)

Enter plan B: The 1000 Mile Diet. I had to be realistic with myself. While eating food only grown 100 miles away might be realistic for middle class yuppies from Vancouver, I was dirt poor, had no capacity to build a garden, and was not mature enough yet in my ea-pea ways to figure out all of my options for buying my food directly from the local farmers. The 1000 Mile Diet involved a pledge to myself to only buy groceries that a) was grown/produced in Canada, and b) came from no further away than Ontario. In a pinch though, I have purchased carrots from New Jersey (roughly 1000 miles away), but only as a last resort.

How do I do it? What does my fridge look like? Well, on any given day I have apples, milk, eggs, potatoes and blueberries from Nova Scotia; delicious, nutritious, organic oatmeal from New Brunswick; and cucumbers, red peppers, and tomatoes from Ontario. On special occasions I even find Nova Scotia carrots, strawberries, cantaloupe, and any of the Ontario vegetables being grown in Nova Scotia too at my local Sobey's, and numerous other Atlantic grown goodies like corn or green and yellow wax beans, or turnips. If I'm patient I can even find peaches from Ontario. In short, I eat a complete diet from food grown/produced only in Eastern Canada.

It's not perfect, but it's a start. By this fall, I hope to be making it to the Farmers' Market on at least a monthly basis, especially now that I have a new bicycle with a basket on the back (more on that in a later Life of an Ea-pea post). Ultimately even, I will eat nothing but hand picked vegetables from my own backyard garden, and hand picked eggs from my own backyard chickens, and even hand squirted milk from my own backyard goat (okay, maybe that last one is a little too ambitious). In conclusion, I am Dave and I am an ea-pea; hear me roar!