Burnaby: a flat green corridor pointing at the hospital

Burnaby describes itself as the third-largest city in the province, with more than 249,000 residents, located in the centre of Metro Vancouver. It is also unusually green for a city that size: a quarter of its land is designated parks and open space, which the city says gives it one of the highest open-space-to-resident ratios in North America. For someone on foot that is not a tourism statistic. It means shade, benches, water, and paths that are not the shoulder of a highway.

Much of Day 19 follows the Central Valley Greenway, a twenty-four-kilometre path the City of Burnaby describes as connecting Vancouver, Burnaby and downtown New Westminster along a shallow valley, relatively flat the whole way. On a forty-five-day walk, flat is worth a great deal. Days like this one are how the hard days get paid for.

Burnaby is also home to Simon Fraser University and the British Columbia Institute of Technology, which the city calls two of BC's largest post-secondary institutions. That is worth a line here for one reason only: Canada's stem cell registry accepts people aged 17 to 35, and Canadian Blood Services says the best outcomes for patients needing a transplant often come from stem cells donated by younger, healthy people. Neither institution has any involvement in this walk. The route simply crosses a city where a great many people happen to fall inside that age band.

West of Burnaby the greenway runs down toward False Creek. From there the route turns up to West 12th Avenue, where the programme that handles adult bone marrow transplants for all of British Columbia and the Yukon has its wards. Day 19 is the approach; Day 20 is the arrival.