Wednesday, June 14, 2017

64.4Kms
No time for banana peel photos. Or, a cucumber chunk photo, as would have been the case today. The driving rain and wind from the West on a gentle up-hill climb felt like a 4% grade (so, in other words, good preparation for the Rockies). Only, it is somehow easy to manage to climb a hill when it is visible. Not so much when it is the wind, which can not be seen. So, it takes a different kind of strategy.
For a while, Y kept herself distracted by imagining a pencil drawing of the silver grey clouds with a rubbed grass and canola blossom wedge of fields and foreground of slick grey highway shoulder marked in chalk with numbers from a race or something. But the best strategy was one we use when canoeing with all our might into a storm by looking directly down at the water whizzing past, in spite of dragging along. Or, in today's case, watching the exposed aggregate shoulder whizzing past as we pedaled along at about 12Kms per hour. We kept in pretty good spirits and had a good laugh at seeing the piece of cucumber. At one point Y asked B if he was considering taking off his orange parachute rain jacket, and he replied that he wasn't as he wouldn't want to get going too fast for concern of getting wind burn. We did the 64.4Kms without stopping. That was not a good strategy and we need to remember to stop frequently, even when the going gets tough.
We were welcomed in to our accommodation in Bow Island early, and spent some time considering some changes to the next few days of increasingly heavy winds from the West. We called home and spoke to house sitter Meredith about things there, which was particularly uplifting. We've decided to keep our plan as is until after Lethbridge, as we will be getting closer to the mountains, where we anticipate that wind is less of a factor. Tonight we learned about Pinto's importance to Bow Island (known for it's dry bean industry) and posted to our Blog.


1 comment :

  1. Did you learn why the boots are strung up on barbed wire? Here, in my hometown, laced up shoes are thrown over a telephone wire...- - - J.

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