http://www.rmoutlook.com/article/20110929/RMO0801/309299996/-1/rmo0801/retirement-full-of-adventure-for-rubens
Retirement full of adventure for Rubens
Sep 29, 2011 06:00 am | By Tanya Foubert | Rocky Mountain Outlook
Many think of retirement as a time to take it easy, but for two-time Olympic athlete Shona Rubens, it turns out an adventure was in order.
After five seasons with Canada’s alpine ski team, the then 23-year-old announced her retirement last year and promptly bought a 1984 Westfalia Volkswagen camper van with her boyfriend Andrew Sartisson, who was a ski coach with the Nakiska Alpine Ski Association.
The pair set out on the road in August 2010 and over the past year have travelled to the northernmost point in North America in Alaska and then turned around and drove to the southernmost tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego.
“It was unbelievable the places we have seen and the people we have met,” Rubens says. “I would recommend it to anyone… it was so cool to see how little we needed to live.”
With 55,000 kilometres on the speedometer they returned home triumphantly earlier this month, but only after getting their first and only flat tire while driving into the Bow Valley.
Rubens says she has wanted to make the drive south ever since in 2006 she attended an alpine skiing camp on the archipelago.
A rare five-event skier, Rubens won three consecutive national slalom championships between 2007 and 2009, and in 2007 captured downhill, super G and slalom titles and made 63 world cup starts.
The first part of the trip saw the camper van, which Rubens and Sartisson named Kumu, make it to Inuvik, N.W.T., up the Dempster Highway.
“We didn’t have anything planned, we just knew we wanted to go from the top to the bottom,” she says. “We went through Alaska and our plan was to stick to the pacific coast the whole way down.”
While in Haines, Alaska they had the experience of fishing with a grizzly bear sow and her two cubs.
Sartisson says it was an incredible experience and different than here in Alberta where food is harder to come by for the species.
“We caught one fish all day, but the bears were just picking them out of the water,” he said.
Surfboards were bought in California and waves ridden throughout South America.
Sartisson says the van was shipped to Colombia, but after seeing the Panama Canal they had to take a different route.
“We found a guy sailing the world and were able to catch a ride with him,” he says.
He adds one of the most unnerving experiences on the trip was sailing through 50-foot waves at night while harnessed into the boat.
Once in South America they also spent a lot of time travelling through the Andes and looking for adventure in the mountains. A wrong turn saw them travel 80 kilometres and 3,000 vertical feet over a mountain pass and through the jungle.
“We tried to see a lot, but we didn’t do all the touristy things,” Rubens says. “It is about the scenery and the culture so we tried to stay out of the big cities.
“It was a super cool way to travel, with your own wheels you can go to so many places you would never be able to get to if you were in a bus.”
In Ecuador, however, Kumu was having problems and Sartisson says the guy hired to fix the van also helped them by giving them a place to stay.
While the hospitality was well received, the repairs to the van didn’t last and by the time they reached Peru had to be redone.
In Colombia, a similar experience was had when the van overheated. On the side of the road Rubens and Sartisson, along with two German travellers, were invited home with a group of locals.
“They welcomed us all into their house, cooked us dinner and told us about Colombia,” he says.
In Costa Rica they found an amazing remote beach and at night watched turtles come up onto it and lay eggs.
But it was not all experiences of hospitality. Driving through Honduras, Rubens says they were stopped five times by police and every time they were propositioned to pay a bribe.
In Peru another stop by local cops saw the couple asked to pay money and follow the officers to a parking lot.
Sartisson says it all sounded a bit too sketchy and they took off through the back streets of the city, losing the police in the chase.
Bolivia, says the couple, was a lesson in how gasoline fuels the local economy. In need of a fill up they went to a gas station but it was sold out.
A local man showed them that just down the alley from the gas station 100 people were lined up with jerry cans. The gas had been bought out and was being resold at an inflated price.
In Tierra del Fuego, the couple stayed in Ushuaia while their van was shipped to Florida.
“You can ship anything anywhere really, but if you want to do it on a budget it takes effort,” Rubens says.
In the month it took to do that they stayed in the Argentinean city and coached that country’s ski team. The team set them up with ski gear and a place to stay.
From Florida, with Kumu, they headed home, coming into the valley through Kananaskis and seeing five bears, a pack of coyotes and bighorn sheep the closer they got.
“Coming home to Canmore was pretty amazing,” Rubens says. “After all the places we have been to you come home to one of the nicest places we have been on our trip.”
Now Rubens has started her first year at the University of Calgary in environmental science and Sartisson is coaching with the Lake Louse Ski Team.
For more about the pair’s Arctic to Argentina adventure, visit www.kumulife.blogspot.com
