I wasn’t expecting much of Whitehorse, Yukon. I had been cycling to get there since Anchorage, Alaska, through over 700 miles of snowy wilderness, and all I really cared about was taking a few days off – and that Whitehorse had a bike shop, so would be my first chance to stock up on the inner tubes I’d forgotten to buy at the start of my journey.
The first thing I noticed, as I rolled my bike along the icy pavements of the state capital of Yukon and largest city in northern Canada, looking for the house where friends of friends were (I hoped) waiting to welcome me, was that, whenever I waited to cross the road, the passing cars would immediately stop to let me pass. I had never seen anything like that before.