Most students just want to relax when the summer comes.
After a stressful school year, they’ll go on a trip or maybe take a summer job until the grind starts all over again. Lakehead University students Megan Clark and Adrian Arts decided to bike across the country instead, raising awareness and donations for Canada’s food banks along the way in a journey they’re calling Foodride.
“We have so much food in Canada and yet there are so many people who aren’t getting their three meals a day or having to choose between things like paying rent and for groceries,” Clark said Sunday on a stop at the Safeway on Dawson Road, 57 days into a trip that will take them from Victoria to St. John’s.
Arts, LUSU’s food bank coordinator, got the idea when someone else proposed it and asked him for help. While that person backed out, it was already in Arts’ head that he wanted to spend his summer on the trip. The pair have been meeting people and discussing the country’s food security issues, which they say isn’t as secure as most people think.
“People need to know about that,” Arts said.
As for the trip itself, the only bad part has been the three-week trek through the prairies.
“Battling into that wind all day every day was brutal but at the same time there’s so much good that balances that,” Clark said.
Clark and Arts are hoping to reach Newfoundland Sept. 8 before flying back to Thunder Bay in time for class Sept. 10.
