As I was easing into randonneur cycling in the early 1990s I was aware of Gerry but there wasn’t much contact. That changed in the early 2000s when the BC Randonneurs web site came on line with me as“webmaster”. In searching for information about Paris Brest Paris (PBP), I found Gerry’s personal web pages and suddenly we had lots to talk about. Mainly I was interested in linking to his own PBP info pages, and he encouraged this.
There was a celebration marking the 25th anniversary of BC Randonneurs at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) ride/brunch in September of 2003. At this event Gerry stood up and said a few words about the early days. He also held up a copy of Old Roads and New. With the “Brestward Ho!” chapter in mind Gerry suggested that: “this book probably had more to do with getting English-speaking cyclists to become interested in PBP than anything else written about it.” [Paragraph copied from intro to e edition.]
Brestward Ho! is JB (“Jock”) Wadley’s account of his own adventure riding PBP in 1971. Gerry was inspired by this story and felt strongly that others would similarly draw inspiration from it. Gerry lent me his copy of “Old Roads and New”, the book that contained “Brestward Ho!,” and he encouraged me to find a way to put it on our web site so that riders everywhere could access it. Today I probably would have just scanned it and turned it into a PDF. But then I had no idea what a pdf was, and posting a scan of any size was way too much memory for our site. Gerry suggested that it was worth transcribing. It was a big job but I did it.
The edition is still on line in our PBP stories section. If you haven’t read it, you absolutely must. Go to –> “Brestward Ho!” It doesn’t hurt that Wadley was professional writer and knew how to tell a story.
There’s another tidbit that sticks with me. It happened many years later. Gerry broke his silence again with a suggestion. The rules had changed for domain naming since our web site began, and Gerry thought that we should update our domain name from randonneurs.bc.ca to bcrandonneurs.ca . I agreed, but there was no other support for this, though I brought it up several times.
And then there’s Gerry’s personal web pages. His site included, among other things, PBP ride stories, results, various internet links, e mail addresses and general information for 1995 and especially 1999. Believe it or not Gerry’s site is still online. I remember Gerry saying at one point that he had lost access to the site and so couldn’t update it anymore. (A lost password?) The pages were, and are, hosted by “Vancouver Community Network”. Go to –> Gerry’s Pages.
