Good evening everyone, you probably won't see this until tomorrow or even a day later because we are in Manning Park and have no service or wifi. Today was a hard day. I am exhausted 😩 and I'm sure tomorrow my legs will tell me they are too. To give you an idea: yesterday we biked 93 km in 4 h and today I did 72 km in 5 hrs. Sara and I started by ourselves today just before 7:30am. Almost right away we started climbing and with a few small downhills or flat sections it was straight climbing for 18km to the Hope slide. Sara has a cold so her energy wasn't there, which made this a tough day for her. It took close to 2 hrs to bike 18km!!!! We continued after the rest stop we had a beautiful downhill into a valley. The next 15km flew by in about half an hour, what a difference. Sara even seemed to get an energy boost. There was a little climbing yet but not too bad until after our 2nd rest stop at the 43 km mark. The climbing began again with some steeper hills, some switchbacks on uneven narrow shoulders. Again our speed decreased. We also began forming a group of riders, we were biking just in front of the oldest rider of the trip - 81 years old!!! He was really having a tough go of it but he kept pushing on; such an inspiration. Towards the end he fell more behind us, but he made it the whole way! We also were tag teaming it with a husband and wife who are riding recumbent bikes. Finally we reached the Alison's Pass summit (1342m) and had a rest stop right after. I actually didn't see the summit sign so excited was I to have made it to the summit, so after grabbing a bite to eat i biked the short distance to the sign to take a picture of it. From there to the turn off was basically all downhill!!!! Soon we realized our joy that we were done climbing was premature; we still had two very steep short climbs to our campsite 😩. We arrived at 3pm. That was a long time!!! The fastest cyclists arrrived around noon. We had sloppy joes with pasta and coleslaw on the side for dinner. Sara went swimming and I wanted to buy my team is on supper prep, so this time I passed. I did take a very hot shower which was nice because the shower in Hope was more of a trickle at mid upper arm height!!!! Now it's time for bed. Goodnight. 😴 Oh and a huge shout out to all the rest stop teams, and to Diane and Bill for checking up on us! Thanks so much!!!!
5 h
72.2km
Avg 14.6km/h
About 1800m of elevation climbing