Dom and Alice left Vancouver on Wednesday, off for a road trip into the wilds of British Columbia, and so I moved my remarkably paltry amount of gear from the hotel to the company apartment. It’s a big place — my rucksack lives in one bedroom; I live in the other — with a balcony and a view out over False Creek and Granville Island. Grand as this sounds, this relaxing vista is rather unsportingly spoilt by another high-rise apartment building planted slap-bang in the middle of the balcony’s field of view, complete with its own balconies facing back towards us. No doubt the occupants consider our building to be an unreasonable intrusion in the prospect from their own.

Unpacking, it transpired that the reason that I had so little stuff was that I’d forgotten to bring a load of it, left untouched on the drying rack at home.

The first few days were taken up by settling in at work and running various errands to get myself set up, notably scouring Craigslist for bikes and hiring a car.

Oh God, the car.

Pistonheads often talk about how Toyota and Honda, to name a couple of examples, don’t build cars but instead “appliances”: simple, easy to use transportation which doesn’t cost the earth and which keeps on going regardless.

These people are wrong. The Chevy Cobalt actually is a kitchen appliance. The dashboard is made out of indestructible toaster plastic, while the paltry one-line LED display is straight out of an oven timer and the radio is straight out of every other GM car made since about 1999. As for the outside, I’ve seen — hell, I own — more attractive salt shakers.

The driving experience is also precisely as exciting as waiting for the kettle to boil. Granted, when beaten with a stick it will accelerate with reasonable alacrity, and the brakes are mostly present. It will not, however, corner at the same time. Starting, stopping and turning are mutually exclusive; just like driving a racing car, in fact, only without the attendant fun of actually driving a racing car.

And don’t get me started on the car insurance.*

Anyway, the search for a bike on which I can attack the 26 kilometre round trip to work yielded more tantalising fruit. A few phone calls landed me a 1982 Peugeot road bike so obscure that even the aptly-named retropeugeot.com makes no mention of it. The seller arrived in a little Subaru hatchback festooned with racks bearing bikes in various states of repair. “I’m trying to make a business of it,” he explained as he pulled the Peugeot out from a further tangle inside. After a brief test ride, I bargained him down from $300 to $250, handed over the money and brought my prize up to the apartment to inspect. It seemed to be in perfect nick; according to the seller, its previous owner had been an old man who’d bought it new and left it in his garage for the intervening quarter century. I had in my hands a pristine piece of cycling history.

Unfortunately this history, like that of the French motor industry, is one of Gallic eccentricity in the face of bafflement from the rest of the world. Citröens, for example, have at various times sported such idiosyncrasies as wider seats in front and narrower seats in the back (why, for men and women respectively, of course), bouncy hydropneumatic suspension, and swivelling headlamps which turn to follow the front wheels. Peugeot bikes, on the other hand, look normal but positively explode with nonconformity as soon as one takes a spanner to them. The wheels are a weird size. The handlebars are a weird diameter. The wheelhubs are a weird width. Every threaded part is threaded just fractionally differently from any and all accepted standards. I’ll save the details for a grip(p)ing future post, but for the moment it’s sufficient to say that the seller is probably snorting his way through about two hundred dollars’ worth of profit right now.

Perhaps I’m being churlish; it is, after all, still a bike, and one which works reasonably well at that. My grand plans to do a single speed conversion on the cheap may have been temporarily scuppered, but at least now I’m eco-mobile and the city’s surprisingly bike-friendly streets are that bit more accessible.

Feels like I’m finally settling in. No doubt in time for my first bout of crushing homesickness and existential angst, but you know, s’cool.

* Alright, since you asked, and since I’d already penned a rant about it. It turns out that there are a number of facepalm-inducing wrinkles to the business of obtaining a rental car in British Columbia. Let me help you understand the needlessly ball-twisting horror of it all. First off, there’s a government insurance monopoly in BC: you can buy car insurance only from ICBC. Next, the actual rates are punitive, matching or even exceeding the actual daily rental cost of the car: “fines” would be a more accurate term. (In fact, Canada boasts a further three state-run car insurance providers but ICBC is far and away the most expensive of the lot.) Lastly, people living off the company dollar (cf your humble correspondent) are shafted by the policy which requires that the named driver pays up front on their own credit card, rather than have it all taken care of by the finance drones back in the office. Sigh. What else are they supposed to do?