Amelia

2025 marks my first year as a Salsa Cycles-sponsored rider. It’s also four years after I purchased my original Salsa Cutthroat and committed to the goal of racing competitively. Here’s the story of how my beloved Amelia came into my life—enjoy!

Pandemic Road Trip

“I’ll pay for coffee,” I say, handing the credit card to my father from the passenger seat as our Pleasure Way van inches toward the Tim Horton’s drive-thru pickup window in Golden, BC. Sadie, my parents’ one-year old Whoodle—a cross between a Wheaton Terrier and a Poodle, more giant teddy bear than legitimate canine—unleashes her slippery pink tongue, delightedly surfing my lap. Paws on my knees, hind legs balanced on each thigh.

“Sadie, sit,” I command. But Sadie ignores this meek human utterance.

My father rolls down the window to hand my card to the Timmy’s team member and Sadie’s nose twitches, sniffing the nipping, unfamiliar mountain air. I rub the white patch on her chest, the affection in my hands belying the annoyance in my voice.

She’s been lap surfing since we left Kelowna last night.

“Thank goodness you’re so cute,” I whisper in one floppy ear. “Otherwise, you’d be walking to Red Deer.”

Soon, the van is rumbling up Kicking Horse pass. A breath-catching bank drops down into the river valley on our right; snow-capped pinnacles poke holes in an impossibly blue sky. My parents’ older-model Pleasure Way is fully equipped for self-supported road trips. It’s retro-chic with emerald satin curtains and matching seat covers, but unfortunately, it rarely holds the speed limit—we slow to sixty (kilometres per hour) and put our hazards on for the climb. SUVs and work trucks sweep pass us. This is going to be a long drive over the Rockies. Perhaps we should have taken the Prius, with better gas mileage and the ability to keep up with traffic.

I reach around Sadie for my coffee, careful to avoid bumping her furry, shifting back side with the hot liquid in hand, and remind myself why we’re in the van. We have opted, against public health recommendations, to drive nearly 800 kilometres to pick up a used bicycle in another province during a global pandemic. I figured that travelling in a self-contained van would be a more responsible alternative to the car, where we’d have to stay in motels or hotels (March is too cold, in my books, for tenting in the mountains) and eat at restaurants. Instead, we exist in our own bubble of three: me, my father, and Sadie.

It was Love at First Sight

On my end, anyways. I discovered Amelia on Pink Bike in late February 2021. She wasn’t named Amelia then—that came later, after a friend suggested I christen her after the American aviation pioneer, Amelia Earhart—instead listed by her make and model: a 2018 Salsa Cutthroat Force, glimmering in her freshly scrubbed, barely used newness, sporting fresh handlebar tape in Tour de France yellow and a gorgeous fuchsia to silver fade. With 2.2-inch tubeless tires, disk brakes, a one-by drivetrain, and shock-compliant geometry, Amelia was everything my road bike was not. Aside from her carbon frame and drop handlebars, Amelia was an entirely different breed of bicycle, made for off-road adventures and handling the rigours of backcountry trails. I could not take my eyes off her.

You want me, she whispered over the ether sphere as I scrolled through photos. Together, we are going to explore places you have only dreamed about.

It’s true: I had been seeking an escape from road cycling. Weary of the Okanagan’s busy highways and less than thrilled to spend another summer breathing toxic exhaust in the wake of heavy transports. Through work as an in-home care giver, I’d had the opportunity to join a client on adaptive mountain bike excursions. The taste of the trail opened my eyes to the big, wide world of non-pavement possibilities—and left me wanting more.

I was also facing up to the fact that this whole pandemic thing was taking longer than expected to run its course. By February 2021, it was evident that, for the second year in a row, my European race date with The Transcontinental wasn’t going ahead as planned.

Yet with the promise of mass vaccinations around the corner, it looked as though local restrictions were set to ease up by the summer. While I couldn’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel, I figured I had something to work with. Even if international travel remained off the table for another year, nothing was stopping me from exploring the terrain right out my backdoor: all I needed was a mountain-ready rig. I was so sure of this new trajectory, I signed up for the 2021 BC Epic 1000: a 1,000-kilometre self-supported off-road race travelling from Merritt to Fernie, BC on TransCanada Trail. Though whether the race would actually happen or not was the race was still up in the air, I circled the June start date on my wall calendar and mentally committed. All I had to do now was find a race-worthy rig.

That’s how I landed on Pink Bike. I knew right away that Amelia was the one: the only small hitch was that she was in Red Deer, in another province on the other side of the Rockies—and I didn’t even own a car. Canada doesn’t have great public transit options (as BBC reality TV show contestants hilariously discovered) so I asked my retired father to join me for a road trip. He protested initially, questioning whether the Cutthroat’s MSRP of $4,299 USD and used price of nearly $4,000 CAD (but it came with packs and pedals!) wasn’t a tad expensive; reminding me that my few work excursions might not be sufficient to confirm that I actually enjoyed mountain biking; and calculating an even higher “true cost” of the bike after accounting for the out-of-province expedition to retrieve it.

“You can’t put a price on adventure!” I said brightly, referring both to our upcoming journey and the grand expeditions Amelia and I would soon embark upon.

Sadie hopped on board as a last-minute addition. Mostly, my mother didn’t want to be stuck with a mopey, downcast dog after my father and I split town.

“She’ll quit surfing once she gets bored,” she had said.

On the outskirts of Canmore, Sadie is still riding the waves of the road on my knees, and I have long since given up hope that my mother’s prediction will ever come true.

Two Metres

Sadie leaps from my lap to the icy parking lot at the dog park in Canmore, Alberta.

“Don’t tell anyone where we’re from,” I caution my father, chatty by nature. He regularly misses dinner because he’s too engrossed in some conversation with another dog owner at the local off-leash park. But that can’t happen here—we are outsiders. Not to be trusted. Our BC licence plate marks us as foreigners, and the animosity between neighbouring provinces is high.

My father chuckles at my paranoia but maintains his distance from the other dog owners. With one eye on Sadie—unconstrained by the safety measures of physical distancing—we stomp a wide circle around the field.

Keep two metres apart: that’s the length of a black bear

a juvenile moose

a mountain lion

This is, however, the most incredible location for a dog park I have ever seen. I gaze up and around like a Small Meg at a carnival, but instead of the blinking, blinding lights of the Tilt-a-Whirl and Ferris Wheel, my eyes dart between jagged, rocky spires frosted with glistening white snow. I feel indisputably small and insignificant next to these bold, looming giants, all vying for attention. But still can’t quite shake the guilt I feel about our travel transgression.

One week after we return to Kelowna, the border between BC and neighbouring Alberta will officially close to non-essential travel, and movement between BC’s health regions will become formally restricted until summer.

Test Ride

I park the Pleasure Way in a quiet residential suburb of Red Deer populated with modest brick homes and barren shrubbery. The garage door opens as we approach and Chris (the seller) wheels out Amelia, handing her off to me with barely an introduction. Chris’s wife comes out to join us. We all wear medical masks, which Sadie does not like. But these strangers have treats, and so she will tolerate them.

I’ll add here that I did try and find a similar bike closer to home, however in the midst of supply chain disruptions and bike shortages, all the shops in the Okanagan were cleared out. To ensure I wasn’t being scammed—or inadvertently buying a stolen bike—I googled Chris before we left BC, and discovered he was a doctor. Meeting in person, I recognize him instantly from his professional headshot online.

“Why are you getting rid of her?” I ask, already committing to female pronouns.

“I have too many bikes,” he replies.

And indeed, this statement is backed up by the dozen frames hanging from the walls of his garage.

My father and Sadie stay to chat with Chris and his wife while I zip around the block for a test ride. It hits me, then, that this is by far the most high-end bicycle I’ve ridden. Not only that, but it will also be the most expensive item I’ve ever owned. I pull my mask down so that I can breathe freely as I pick up speed, then laugh, rolling my shoulders back to release a burst of air from my lungs. I don’t even know how to ride this thing! I bounce over the curb from the sidewalk to the road, then down a gravel path. I test the brakes, shift through the gears, and sprint over the grass, heaving my weight behind the pedals. Amelia feels—like a bicycle?

Without gloves, a chill creeps into my fingertips. I head back after only ten minutes, pedalling lackadaisically now, letting my legs ease into the pace of summertime ice cream rides.

Yes, I think to myself. We are going places together, you and me.

Still to Come

My dad and I trek down to Lake Revelstoke from the road, a six-pack of beer and a bag of kettle chips to share between us. Sadie hops through the snow, a scruffy brown Easter bunny in search of earthen scents below. After Red Deer we spent a night near Canmore so we could do some hiking, then decide to sleep near Revelstoke—at the boat launch on the reservoir—and drive the final leg of the journey into Kelowna the next morning. A heavy sky weighs over us; the is air bitingly crisp. Yet the glossy, dark beauty of the lake beckons, and so with an hour until sunset we leave our cozy hideaway to visit the lakeshore. Besides: cold beer tastes better outdoors.

Though my father still can’t fathom how I blew months of wages on a used bicycle—“Invested,” I correct him—he’s gotten past it. Now, on the sun-blanched logs beneath the towering Monashees, he is just as excited as I am, the two of us scheming about the early spring rides we’ll embark upon once the snowpack melts. So much to look forward to—despite this pandemic that never seems to end (Probably because selfish idiots like you can’t stay home to wait it out).

“I’ve signed up for a local bikepacking race,” I admit, detailing the route of the BC Epic 1000. My father responds with a laugh. Not a mean one—more of a knowing chortle. A laugh that says: “Of course you signed up for an off-road race before getting your hands on a bike—that’s such a Meaghan thing to do.”

“I want to compete,” I tell him. I’m sipping the dregs of my first beer and things have quickly turned confessional. “I know I have a massive learning curve when it comes to technical riding, and I still have to build my base after the winter. But what I want more than anything is to race at the pointy end.”

The silence floats on the misty exhalations in the air between us. Sadie is momentarily out of sight, likely tearing into some frozen, rotten treasure. Then he cracks open another can and hands it to me before reaching for his own.

“What can I do to help you succeed?” he asks.

Neither of us knew it then, but in three months to the day, Amelia and I would cross the finish line of the BC Epic 1000 to claim first place (while setting women’s fastest known time that stands to this day) in a record-breaking heatwave.

My father and Sadie—and the Pleasure Way van—would be there to greet me on the steps of Fernie City Hall when I arrived at three am, raw and delusional after nearly three days in the saddle. Sadie will lick salt crystals from my shins, her tail a happy metronome, as my father pops a bottle of bubbly. Beaming with the pride of knowing that he—our Alberta road trip, early-season training rides, and his unwavering support for my audacious goals—played an invaluable role in getting me here.

All this, still to come.