bikes & cake
Sweet Italian Jesus! Riding to Maple Ridge from Vancouver is hard on so many levels. The main one being, who wants to go to Maple Ridge? Well, obviously I did, or at least inasmuch as I wanted to accompany R. who was checking out a mineral and rock meet-up. (He’s into rocks).
The second being, I hate riding on highways and to get to Maple Ridge there’s a lot of bullshit highways. The cherry on top of the pavement pie is a thing called the Mary Hill By-Pass where shards of glass and debris litter the shoulder and to your immediate right suburban traffic screams by kicking up pebbles and dirt. You pedal as hard as you can, swallowing road dust, to be done with it before you’re plucked from your saddle by the hurricane-force gusts of passing cube vans.
The third reason rides like this suck is lately I’m extra lazy and this ride was a 90k round trip. Weird psychology: for some reason, I am OK riding long distances when I am not going to circuit back the same day. I can go 100+k in a day without a whimper as long as I’m getting the hell out of Dodge. But there’s something disheartening about pedaling your ass off to get somewhere and knowing you just have to come back more or less the same way. A peculiar sort of ennui sets in that is more disabling than physical weariness.
But what is awesome and random about miscellaneous riding excursions is you find things that you’d never come across in the course of your normal, small-scale perambulations. Bicycling in general is awesome because I’ve explored more of Vancouver in the past year of riding than I ever did since moving here in the mid-2000s.
Anyhow in the late afternoon, on our way back from the rock show, we passed a big sandwich board propped on the gravel shoulder of the Lougheed Highway. Balloons were tied to it. An arrow pointed down a side road.
WEDDING CAKE SHOW TODAY! it announced.
“Free samples!!” R and I screamed, immediately hanging a right and blasting down the indicated street.
We walked in and a woman was there to greet us. She was standing at a table with flowers. She was holding a clipboard and had her hair in a bun.
Women holding clipboards with their hair in a bun make me extremely nervous.
I thought at first she’d interrogate us to find out when we were getting married before letting us breech the gates. Fortunately I had a back-story all ready, formed the moment I saw the sign: we were getting married in December 2012 at our friend’s honeybee farm. I don’t know any honey farmers but this small detail seemed to be the special little touch that makes good lies believeable. And I chose December 2012 because if Clipboard Bun asked about it I’d segue from the talk of weddings to the talk of Mayan Apocalypse.
No need for such dissemblance. Despite our helmet hair and dusty clothes we were greeted warmly and encouraged to look at all the fancy cakes in their glass displays. They were all quite something. R and I enjoy baking and we especially enjoy baking weird cakes, and it was a treat to see professional cakes up close, all ganache this and fondant that. Some were glorious and some hilariously overwrought. It was a great show.
R and I ate slivers of sample cake and discussed what sort of cake we’d have at our wedding. It was an odd conversation as neither of us has yet proposed, but we talked about this theoretical wedding cake with a fiery interest. And then we rode side by side through most of New Westminster and Burnaby we talked about the rhetorical wedding. It was odd, yet enjoyable. And the ride home didn’t seem so long. The sugar helped.
