While “So long 2015” is, on the one hand, a warm farewell to the year that was, it’s also an apt descriptor for my year on the bike. All told, I tallied 22,300 kilometres (13,857 miles) of cycling in 2015 (about a quarter of which I clocked just having fun drawing GPS doodles).

So how long is 22,300 km really? It’s 56% of the distance around the world at the equator. It’s 0.6% of the distance from Earth to the moon. It’s like riding in a straight line, straight across Canada and the Atlantic Ocean, from Victoria, BC, to London, England…then back to Victoria…then back over to London again.

It’s also “so long” in terms of time – 796 hours 36 minutes in the saddle, to be exact. That’s like getting on your bike when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve and not getting off until 4:36 am on February 3rd! (To anyone who’d say that’s excessive, I’d point out that it averages, over the year, to just over two hours a day…far less than many people squander watching Modern Family reruns or being spoon-fed reality TV pablum or replaying cat cuteness and news anchor fails on YouTube.)

Alright…that’s enough rationalization and justification for this year. Until 2016…so long!