It was fun trying to fall asleep because the geese, the peacock, and the dog were all squawking or barking off and on. Once we laughed for a while about all of them making noise, we were able to tune them out and fall asleep. We slept in a little this morning since we had such a great night's sleep. Both of us felt well rested and energized. When we went in the house, Bonnie was already busy making breakfast; the first thing that Joey said when he opened the door was that it smelled like Denny's. Eva and Paul had just finished eating. Bonnie was making some really tasty pancakes and also made us some scrambled eggs. It is always so wonderful to have something that we can't easily cook on the road. When we were all finished we had nice full happy bellies. Curt catches and tags hummingbirds every summer, so we got to see how that process worked a little this morning. Bonnie was telling us that a couple of the birds that he had tagged in other years were seen in Texas and Alabama! We got everything all packed up and said our goodbyes to Curt and Bonnie. By that time it was already a little after 11. Even though we had a late start to the day, we had a wonderful morning. The climb back to the main road that we were dreading didn't end up being as bad as we thought it was going to be. For the first morning in a while it was sunny and didn't rain. To our surprise, the wind was actually with us too! The only problem we had this morning was that the black flies liked to swarm around us as we rode. Luckily they weren't biting, but were definitely annoying that's for sure. After we had been riding for about 15 miles, we met Mikael who is originally from Denmark. He flew into Vancouver and is hoping to ride down to Mexico along the Continental Divide route (but he is skeptical that it might be too hard). Either way, we had a fun time talking with him and hearing about other tours that he had done. After a few more miles or so we made it to the town of McBride where we stopped at the IGA to pick up some groceries. We were both craving some fruit, so we got some grapes and a few apples (and some more cookies for the road). Although we hadn't done a ton of miles, we decided to have lunch in town. We bought some cereal and milk because that always fills us up and keeps us full for a pretty long time. There was a nice town park with a shelter and picnic tables where we enjoyed our cereal. Again, we ate the whole box and drank the full 2L of milk. We stopped at the visitor center real quick before heading out of town. Not too far out of town, we met Pat, from Aspen Colorado. He was riding from Alaska back to CO. The one good thing about Canada is that because there aren't may people or towns, there are only one or two roads. So, we get to see every touring cyclist because there isn't really an alternative route. There have been a few touring cyclists that we have met who either didn't know what Warm Shower's was or hadn't signed up yet. They don't know what their missing. It adds so much to a tour just because of the fact that you get to meet so many great people that you probably wouldn't have met otherwise. The ride today was a lot of ups and downs. The black fly problem seemed to dissipate and after a while I don't think there were any flying around us at all. We took a couple quick breaks to snack on some grapes once we got to the top of some of the bigger hills. Towards dinner time, we started to see bears along the side of the road. We saw 3 total (Joe saw 4), all black bears. Our goal was to make it as far as we could today since it was such a beautiful day and we were feeling energized. The cereal and grapes kept us full almost all day. We planned to camp at a rest area that was shown on our map, but just a few miles before that there was an old diner (near Dome Creek) that had been closed down. We thought that would work perfectly. Once we got our bikes parked for the night, the first thing we did was put on our bug nets because the mosquitoes were horrible again. It was definitely a good thing that we got those nets because I don't know what we would have done without them. The amount of mosquitoes reminded us of a night in NH on our first tour; we didn't eat dinner that night because at that time we were cooking over a campfire. Despite the amount of mosquitoes, Joe got the tent all put up while I made dinner. It was almost impossible to eat our dinner though because we had to open our mosquito nets to get the food in. Mosquitoes were everywhere so our solution was to walk around the huge parking lot in front of the old diner while we ate. It seemed to work well enough to only have a few mosquitoes near us at a time. When we sat still they would just swarm around us. Somehow we were able to eat all of our dinner, get our dishes washed, and get the food hung. We got into our tent as quickly as possible in hopes that they wouldn't follow us in. There are so many mosquitos that we could hear the all buzzing outside. The bugs and mosquitos are going to be bad the whole way to Alaska, so we may have to plan for some different, no cook, meals. I don't think we are going to want to stay outside to try to cook and clean every night if it is this bad. If it weren't for the bears, we could eat in our tent, but that is not even a realistic option. The tough part of the tour has definitely begun. Aside from the bugs, today was a wonderful day! We rode 74.47 miles today.
|
|