Day 9 - Revelstoke to Golden

Distance: 150.3 km
Average speed: 16.3 km/h
Riding time: 9 hours 14 minutes
Campground: Ponderosa Motor Inn
Cumulative distance: 823.0 km

Today is a good news bad news situation. The good news is that we cracked 150 km. And only just. We didn't end up biking around a little more before arriving at the motel just to get it even though we would have done it if it hadn't happened so perfectly.

Rogers Pass was a lot harder than we imagined. It took us six hours to get the first seventy kilometres. We ended up biking from nine in the morning to eight in the evening. I haven't converted the second time to mountain time even though we crossed the time barrier.

What made that Pass fun was going through some of the snow tunnels. It was nowhere near as scary as we thought it would have been. There are slits on the side to allow natural light to enter and there are lights along the top as well.

As soon was we reached the top of the Pass it began to pound down rain. Remember this, we will come back to it later. So while we were soaked it was enjoyable to sneak past most of the line ups of cars waiting at construction areas. Though we have no doubt that they were whizzing by us a few minutes later.

We definitely believe that this day is the hardest we've done so far. While it might not have been as steep as Allison Pass, the length and the hills wore on us heavily. Josianne's left knee started to ache early on and she was able to continue after lathering her knee with Arnica which is a pain reliever. We're pretty sure that it's only from overuse but she will need to thoroughly rest it soon.

Now we will get to the really bad news. Once again Felix's back brakes aren't working. We had them fixed two days ago but they are already failing. There is no place in Golden to have it fixed. The next MEC is in Calgary. Now, we believe that the failing brakes are due to the heavy rainfalls we've experienced. So even if we were to fix them, what's to say they won't fail again once we've reached the prairies? The weather has been ridiculous this last week and there is no sign of it getting better.

As you can probably tell from the tone of this, we are officially calling it quits. Tomorrow we will start the long ride home and we will get to see just how much road we've traveled. This was meant as fun because we were never seriously into biking before this so we are happy with what we've managed to accomplish.

Before we finish there are two things we wanted to quickly mention. First, we finished our day during a sunset which is symbolic in literature as the end of something. Second, my favourite, requires some explanation. We compared this journey to the TV show Survivor. On the show when people are kicked off they get sent to Ponderosa which is a resort as they wait for the rest of the game. We are spending the night in Ponderosa Motor Inn. It's just ironic. It's like fate wanted this to happen.

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