I had originally intended my second blog post to be on the topic of saunas, but now’s not the time. My carefully laid plans to get a sauna Sunday on the way through the village of Trois-Pistoles were disappointed by a closed facility. The website will tell you one thing. The schedule posted at the door will tell you another. Consequently, if I wrote a blog post today about saunas it would be a bitter and disappointing read, which isn’t at all how I truly feel about saunas. I’ll save that one for another day, preferably soon after I’ve had a satisfying sauna somewhere in the Maritimes. By now, Quebec saunas are a write off, my only options thus far in the province having been closed, too expensive, or providing a service that’s not really what I’m looking for (if you’re curious, go ahead and do a google search of saunas in Quebec City).

So then, what I’ll share with you today is an insider’s prospective on the lifestyle commonly called dirtbagging. This type of living has been called by many names in many cultures throughout history. It’s more gypsy than hobo, and in the modern parlance the word is usually combined with some pursuit that is the motivation for choosing this lifestyle (e.g. dirtbag climber, dirtbag skier, or, in this case, dirtbag cycle tourist). Living as a dirtbag means extracting as much experience from as little money as possible. This lifestyle becomes an art form that develops over time, and the combination of personal experience and knowledge shared between dirtbags can produce some truly spectacular results.

For myself, I enjoy the freedom of living this opportunistic lifestyle, as well as the interesting situations it brings about. When I’m travelling with Dad and Uncle, I get to stay in the campsites that they pay for, which suits me fine. Travelling alone, however, I will only pay for camping in extreme circumstances. I find camp spots off side roads, in city parks, at highway rest stops, and anywhere else where I can be decently hidden and get a good night’s rest.

This brings me to a story which I promised my mother I would post to the blog. It was early on in the trip, just after splitting from Uncle in Merritt, B.C. I was travelling slowly due to my knee injury, riding only about 30 to 40 kilometres per day. I came to the turnoff for a small provincial park up a dirt road. The surrounding land was cattle pasture, usually fairly good for camping if you’re careful about where you step. After some searching around I found what I thought would be a good spot next to a barbed wire fence up on a hill overlooking the highway. The sun was low in the sky, the clouds were sparse, and the air was warm. I started to set up my shelter.

During these first few days of the tour I was using a minimalist tarp shelter lent to me by my good friend Noriko. Uncle was borrowing the tent that I’m now travelling with, which is a free-standing shelter that doesn’t require much creativity to set up. By contrast, the minimalist tarp shelter needs to be strategically placed between two things to support it. These can be trees, fences, bicycles, or whatever else happens to be around. In this case I was planning to use a fence post at one end, and my bicycle at the other.

Then it got windy. Very windy.

As well, looking up the valley in the direction the wind was coming from, it was plain to see that I had about half an hour before the onset of the coming rain. The shelter is a suitable length for Noriko, but is a foot or so too short for me, and in the driving wind and rain would have been slightly more than a decoration over me as I got soaked and cold. Some other solution needed to be found. I looked around. The big, yellow motor graders parked in the gravel pit beside the highway caught my eye.

I quickly packed the bike and headed down to the gravel pit, past the “NO ENTRY” sign that had now become very easy to ignore. The tower of iron and rubber that looked promising from a distance looked even better up close. It was a perfect wind block, and a structure to build a lean-to off of. Using the tarp shelter as a lean-to rather than a tent would allow me to set up diagonally in a way that would keep my feet dry. Ideal. I went about tying strings to the various parts of the heavy machinery, and by the time the first rain drops began to fall I had somewhere dry to hide.

I slept well through the night, until early in the morning when I was awoken by a rumbling noise of the sort made by a motor grader’s huge diesel engine. I knew there was no way an equipment operator could have missed a bright green tarp stretched out from the side of the machine, but just to be sure that my shelter wasn’t about to roll away I crawled out to greet him. As it turned out, it wasn’t the grader that I had used as shelter material that was running, but the one parked just in front of it.

“Good morning”, I started, “it was getting dark and there was some bad weather coming last night, so I pulled off the road and set up here.”

“That’s no problem, nobody will be using that grader today, so no rush. Nice shelter you’ve got there.”

“Thanks, yeah, it did the trick.”

And that was it. No animosity, probably no need for me to even provide an explanation as to why I’d made a fort out of heavy equipment. This highway worker had no inclination to drive me out of a spot which I really had no right to be in. It could be that he pitied me for my spartan accommodations, or that he himself was a dirtbag at some point in his past, or perhaps just that he really couldn’t care less that I was there, so long as I wasn’t in his way. Whatever the case, we had a friendly exchange before heading our separate ways. This is most often the case when dirt bagging, only very occasionally does a less lenient official greet you on the far side of the “NO ENTRY” sign, and it’s not something I’ve had to deal with on this trip.

Although economics will always be the main motivation for dirt bagging, these sorts of interesting experiences are a pleasant extra that comes with the territory. I encourage anyone who wishes to pursue their personal development to adopt the dirtbag lifestyle until the money runs out, and discover that the means are more rewarding than the end.

Thank you to all those who shared their thoughts about my last blog post. I noticed the majority of these were from mothers; the world would cease to function without encouraging mothers, so thank you.